I'm not at all wedded to doing physics in my next job, I'd be happy to switch to something more engineering/computer based or even (slightly less so) financial.
Skills wise I try to stress that I have multiple first authored publications (so I'm decent at writing) and several presentations at conferences and to funding agencies (good at speaking). Outside of that though I am very proficient at Mathematica and have what I'd call 'hobbyist' knowledge of python (I can write small scripts and programs, use libraries like SciPy).
This leaves me in a spot where I'm almost qualified for data science positions but not quite what they're looking for because I don't have enough programming experience.
Thanks for the tips, I hadn't thought about approaching other professors besides my advisor for networking purposes.
Okay. Sounds like you should consider finance/quant positions (distinguish the ones that expect C++ knowledge from those that are looking for the math background), technical writing, data science, and maybe McKinsey style consulting/analyst positions (lots of companies have internal positions like this, as do VC firms).
You have a while, so you could easily give yourself a crash course in SQL and bolster your python, which would put you into the "good at programming for a non-programmer" field in most people's estimation.
I mention consulting, bec...
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