High-energy physics as a career springboard

As well as being crucibles of research, today's big physics experiments are also factories for students-in more than a decade almost 700 have graduated from the Delphi experiment at CERN's LEP electron-positron collider. Personal skills are a valuable form of technology transfer. The expertise acquired in the large international collaborations running today's major physics experiments is diverse-computing, electronics, project management and so on. In addition are the interpersonal skills acquired by being a member of a large international team working on a complex problem. Today's physics students are much in demand. To see how this happens we have analysed the careers of the students involved in the experiment since its beginnings in 1982. The education systems are very diverse in the various countries. It has been tried to broadly group the degrees into two main types: doctoral studies and lower- ranking degrees (diploma like and master like). Some countries do not have a master programme, some like France have essentially only doctoral programmes for physics studies and possibly lower level education for engineers. Other countries like Italy or Germany have degrees such as the `Laurea' or `Diploma' that can comprise thesis work of widely different levels and depth. The reach of this study is limited given that, typically, it is possible to follow up people employment only for the first job after the completion of a university degree. In particular, it gives only a lower limit estimate on the number of people who end up having a career in the private sector as in many cases a doctoral student gets a temporary (typically for two years) post-doctoral grant as first employment. For a subset of students it has been possible to follow up past the first temporary research employment: this limited statistic will be used to estimate the number of people who will eventually end up in the private sector after their research post-doctoral experience. We have examined the general trends for all the students independent of the type of degree obtained and we have also looked in detail into the careers of doctoral students. We have analysed separately the trends for women. (0 refs).