Ask HN: Jobs for Science Majors Without Graduate Degrees?

Physics or biology or chemistry? You're cutting a pretty broad swath there.

OK, one thing you can do is to work in positions directly related to your field of study. I have friends with biology degrees who work either as lab assistants in universities, or else somewhere in the bowels of a Big Pharma company doing... I don't know what. Most of these sorts of jobs don't tend to be that great though -- in a scientific organization anyone without a PhD is probably not going to be able to rise very high.

A second thing you can do is... pretty much anything else! If you're not going to be specifically putting your brain to work on hard-science problems then you can go write software or work for a bank or be a management consultant or... I dunno, fly aeroplanes or join the military or do whatever. For a job not requiring any specific knowledge I'd always prioritise a science major over an arts major, simply because I'm more confident that the science major will be numerate and understand how to solve problems.

I have friends from high school who got bio degrees and wound up being travelling sales reps for pharma companies. It seems like a terrible spot to be in, because you're stuck between the experts who created the drug and the experts who will be prescribing the drug, both of whom know far more about the drug and its interaction with the human body than you probably do. I'm not sure that having a bio degree really helps all that much in the field, except to add some sense of legitimacy to the pitch. '

I hear it pays well though.

Research? Fundamental research? Not much of that done these days, and probably not by people with an undergraduate degree only. Even PhD's have a difficult time finding research jobs. Research is mostly done in universities. The great far horizon industrial research labs (Bell Labs, IBM Research, and so forth) either do not exist any more or have been redirected to short-term development support.

Graduate school is a good next step. Either continuing study of a hard science or moving to computer science with an eye of working at the boundary of computer science and real science.

Business analyst/product manager. Also, all the big consulting companies hire science majors as consultants.

My rhetorical question would be how is possible for someone to complete a university degree before asking a question like this.

Programming skills can be combined with a science Bachelor's to qualify for some pretty cool jobs. There are some opportunities in bioinformatics, software development at a research company, etc. for Bachelor's holders, although some will want at least a Master's or will require at least a little CS coursework.

Honestly, a lot of degrees are really largely meant to prepare you for grad school, and you just named three of them. In a perfect world, college advisors would let you know this before you signed up for the major.

You'll probably have to look outside of science, but actually you are qualified for lots of policy and business jobs. The trick is to look for jobs that sound more social science/humanities, and then your science degree (despite being only a bachelor's) will be viewed as "hardcore."