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| Brian Chiang '97, is now Vice President for Marketing at DiCon Fiberoptics |
Before presenting the transcript of his presentation, and the key points we identified from it, allow me to digress briefly. Months after his 2018 presentation, Brian let me know his firm was looking for a process engineer. I connected him with a 2017 UC Davis bachelor’s degree recipient, who I thought might be interested. Not only was he interested, as it turned out, he also got the job! I am very pleased about this fruitful connection resulting from our seminar series.
Below we present the transcript of Brian’s presentation, after first listing the key points we identified:
Not many companies recruit specifically for physics majors but the skillset you take away from a physics degree is widely applicable
Marketable skills a physics degree can give you:
Solving long, complex problems without getting discouraged
Keeping lots of details organized
Putting together a big picture out of small details
Learning complex systems quickly
Coming up with unique solutions to problems
Listening and asking the right questions
Recognizing patterns
Advice for physics majors seeking jobs in industry:
Be ready to adapt to new problems with the problem solving skills you have
Teaching assistant experience can develop very valuable skills
When looking for your first job, consider:
Which industries are projected to grow and which may be growing outdated
The size of company you want to work for
What kind of team you’re joining
Opportunities to find a mentor who can help you advance your career
Try to take initiative in your work rather than just following directions
Finding my First Job
I was a graduate physics student here for 3 years, from ‘94 to ‘97, and then I made one of the biggest career decisions of my life: the decision not to continue with graduate school. I found out when I went out in the real world that it’s very difficult to find your first job with a physics degree. You have to look really hard to find people who are looking for a physicist. But if you do find a job, in my experience, you will thrive in that environment because of the training and the skills you received in graduate school.
I went to Berkeley for undergrad, and then, even though I had gone to a good undergrad school, I couldn't find a job, so I decided to go to grad school. I went through a lot of the same struggles that some of you are facing while figuring out what to do with your career path. Some of you are probably very set: you’re smart, you’re moving on to become professors and researchers. I didn’t think I was that good, so I made a decision not to continue with that program: I got my Master’s degree and walked out. I had nothing planned at that point and it was very devastating. For a few months, I was teaching in American River College in Sacramento, a couple hours a day, for around 39 bucks an hour. I think part of the training I got from being in graduate school was that I learned how to live while being paid very little. That helped me survive for a few months. Part of the reason I quit was because I was dating the woman who would become my wife, so there was a lot more motivation not to study, to spend time with her. She worked really hard, trying to find a job for me somewhere, going to all the career fairs. At that time, I had pretty much already given up on finding a job, because, you know, there are no jobs out there, nobody wants to hire physics people. I’m sure many of you are facing the same job shortage today. She went to the Berkeley career fair, and then called me to say, ‘I found a company who’s recruiting for a physics major!’ And that was the only one, she was so excited. And the funny thing was that the recruiter was also very excited, because no physics students go to the career fair to look for jobs. So it was a match! No matter what it is: your relationship, your work, your family, your career; it’s all about how you find a match that’s right for you. And it’s not easy, but I happened to be lucky. We found a match, I started working there, and I’ve been working at the same company for over 20 years now.
I went in at an early stage of what was called the optical communication boom. Many of you take it for granted now, but back then, it was the early stages of communication and fiber optic deployment, so we were just starting to put long-haul fiber through cities, and from major cities to other cities. There was a big boom in the late 90s, and the company I worked for happened to be a dominating player in a special part of that industry. It was a very small company, but a major player in fiber optic switching, splitting, and laying web lanes.
From Details to the Big Picture
I started as a process engineer. You go on the production line, and you work with the production line upgraders. You help them to make their job better, increase the output, make things better, make the process more efficient. You have to put everything into details. Training in physics will help you to do that, because we look at very complex equations, we do very complex problems. That kind of training really helped me to become a good processing engineer.
Physics people are also very innovative, we like to try different things. That experience helped me to deploy those skills onto a production line. I connected the network from one stage to another stage, and I built databases. When you calculate a problem, you find out the first order perturbation, the second order perturbation, you solve it to the smallest scale. That’s a tendency that we receive in our training: we have that kind of mentality. So I was a very good process engineer. I was able to run the line very efficiently, and I was able to help increase the capacity, and I created a lot of new processes.
I was later promoted to become more like an operational manager, where I did things outside of just the production line. I would go into purchasing, I would negotiate with vendors, I would go do planning to build a factory. Part of the training I received was looking at things at a very detailed level, but very often, in negotiation, you need to zoom out to look at the big picture. Like engineers, we can do very detailed calculations, but in physics we can also look at a bigger scale: conservation of energy, kinetic or potential, should always be the same. Some things need to be constant, some things will never change. It’s similar to understanding the market: whatever goes down must come back up, whatever goes up must come back down. We have a greater insight of situations like that. You may not know you have that skill until one day, you’ve been challenged, and that basic instinct that you acquired throughout that training will come out. That’s how I discovered that I could be a great negotiator. I was as good as our best purchasing person in the company: I was able to cut costs, negotiate contracts, look at the big picture. In a very complex negotiation situation, it doesn't matter what’s being thrown at me, I’m able to come out on top, because I am able to see a more complex, complete picture.
Sales as Technical Problem Solving
The next phase of my career was more of a business operation. In about 2002, I moved to a more sales and marketing role. Just to clarify, when you work in a high tech industry, the way we do sales is a completely different skill than, say selling cars. It’s a more technical concept of: ‘Can I solve a problem for you?’ When we want to design a very small, very unique product for a customer’s system, we need to first understand the complexity of that system: how the optical network is constructed, how it’s linked, the different modulation formats, the different waves and how their wavelengths are split, and what applications there will be. Whether at the enterprise level, city level, or long haul level, there are a lot of things you need to understand. A degree in physics will help you to not have to worry about that. You can face all these technical challenges, because you can go in and understand things at a very technical level. And you may not always understand completely, but if you work hard enough, you should be able to understand it to a level where you can do the job well. The other thing is that once you understand the problem, you need to be able to propose a solution. You have the knowledge to understand, but you also have the skill to listen. This is especially true for people who are in graduate school: I acquired that skill as a teaching assistant here. At that time we were implementing a new program where we didn’t just repeat whatever the teacher says- instead, we started asking questions and trying to derive the answers from the students. That was such good training for me, because later, when we go to the customer’s side, the first thing we need is to understand where the problem is. Like with that new teaching method, you have to learn how to ask the right questions to get the right answers. Working as a TA was such fantastic training for me because later on, when I went into the field, I was very good at 1) listening and trying to find out what the problem is, and 2) coming up with a good question to clarify what is not clear. And on top of that, if you’re smart enough to understand the whole thing in detail, then you can propose a solution for them. That’s very fun and very challenging for me. The product is the solution, and if it’s the best, you win. You still compete in the marketplace- you’ve got to have the best technology, but the technological platform alone may not win the deal; you’ve got to match it to the customer’s requirement.
Physicists: Fun and Unafraid!
You have to have a good personality to go into sales and marketing. And over my 20 year career, I’ve often thought that as physicists we have the best personalities in all of technical/hard science majors, because all the fun people study physics.
So for example, the company I work for is diversifying into solid state lighting. Everybody understands LED lighting, so I always tell people that I work for an LED Lighting company to get a conversation going. If I see somebody I really don’t want to talk with, I’ll tell them I work for a fiber optic company, doing optical communication, and that conversation usually ends right there. LED lighting tech is a very challenging field. We don’t do individual lights, one chip at a time we do high cluster, high power, point source, LEDs that can mix colors. These things are very important for film and video productions so you can match the lighting of different environments. Our CEO is a very technical person. He understands that lighting can be controlled easily when you have a small source: you can shade, you can blend, you can mix light. Full size ones are like a jack in the box: once it comes out it’s hard to put back in. That’s an insight that he had. And he gave me the task of figuring out how to make a product and sell it, so I’ve taken it to different fields to market it.
We have a brand in the image capture industry called Fiilex, we have a brand in the horticulture market called Kessil, and we’re also going to develop another brand name to manufacture lighting inside theater and broadcasts. I always go back to my training in physics when I go into a very complex environment. We’re not afraid of problems: that’s probably the biggest strength you have from your training in physics: you’ve seen very difficult problems. I remember the days that we’d do a calculation that was 10-20 pages. Who else would do that? Only crazy people like physicists would find joy in that. You have the patience to look at things one clue at a time, work everything out and go in there and figure out where the solution is. If that’s wrong, you’re willing to throw that 20 pages away and start it again from line 1, right? I believe many of you can do that, have done that. That’s training for not giving up, being willing to look at detail, and willing to solve problems. That’s a very special and unique skill that, later on in your career, will be extremely useful. Today I’m working at a top level, looking at market direction for the company, and that's not a very easy task. There’s a lot of challenge and a lot of pressure. But I’m able to do that because of the experience I had at a program like Davis.
Advice for the Job Seeker
What kind of advice can I tell you? Number one is be ready. In your career, are you ready to be challenged? Believe that your training in physics is one of the best assets you will have in your life. So be ready, you have that capability. There are three things that people look for: 1) Are you technical enough? 2) Are you organized enough? 3) Your people skills. A physics major will bring you all three. We may not be specialized to the point where we can do a circuit board layout, or do a mechanical drawing of a very complex structure, but we have a very general understanding of the big picture, of very technical subjects at a very broad level. We’ve been trained to think, and that's a very unique technical skill. And we’re organized. In the real world, you’ve got to be very organized to get things done. And if you’re not organized, you won’t be able to study physics, because you won't be able to do that 20 page problem. You have no idea how important that is. I have trained a lot of people over the years how to do a good spreadsheet. And it’s very simple: you just align on the right, font size consistent, etcetera. Some people could not do it: right, left, font size 9, 8, 10, 7, all over the place, and they couldn’t see that. I always wondered why when I go look at spreadsheets I can pick that out right away. Why were these people not able to? And I realized: we just have these kinds of eyes and skills because of the kinds of problems we do in physics.
As for people skills: I think physics people are all pretty chill. We have a way of looking at life: like, whatever comes will be okay. We have that mindset, we’re fun to hang out with, we’re interesting, and that’s a very great, unique people skill.
Number 2, and this is the hard one, you’ve got to have luck. That’s true for anybody. In my career path, I later found out that you need to have a little bit of luck. One of my mentors told me that in a successful career it’s about 80% luck and 20% hard work. You can steer this factor a little bit by looking at several things. You need to look at 1) the industry, 2) the company, 3) the team, and 4) the mentor.
You want to look for an industry that's not a dying industry. I work for a photonics company: lights, lasers, lighting. That industry is on the front end of lighting and communication: today’s LED revolution. It will continue to grow. Every industry has its ups and downs, so you have to find the right moment to go into the industry.
Within the industry, companies will have different levels. Very small ‘mom and pop shops’ with 20 people are very limited on what they can do. There are companies like Intel, Facebook, and Google that have tens of thousands of people, but when you go in, you are like a little screwdriver. You do only one thing and have no big picture whatsoever. It will take you years to climb up to the top level. So you need to look at what kind of company you’re going into.
Within the company, what kind of team do you want to work with? There are teams that are about to be cut, and there are teams that will continue to have funding: are you working in a team that has a forward looking opportunity?
I think the fourth one is the most important, especially for your first job: do you have a mentor that can help you grow, can teach you? I think I was very fortunate to have somebody, a very senior person with 20 years of industry experience, sit next to me every day. He would challenge me, and grind me, and grill me, and push me, and teach me everything inside out. And the reason was luck: we were in an early growth phase, I was the first process engineer to be hired. I was the only one he’d got because no other physics people were coming into the company. If I was the second one, I probably wouldn’t be as successful as I am today.
Number 3 is also very important. You have to be very committed. As a senior person in industry, we see a lot of people come into the workplace and say, ‘Show me the path, where is it? You tell me what to do to get there, and then I will start working.’ We often talk about what’s causing this problem, and I think it’s a generational thing. There are some different factors. I think the challenge we see in industry is that we see a lot of people coming to the workplace who don’t work as hard or aren’t as committed as our generation, people that went to work 20 years ago. I went in without knowing much about industry, just thinking, ‘Whatever challenge you give me, I will do the best I can, I’ll continue to work hard, to move forward.’ If you want to have a career, don’t just ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’ You have to commit. You should be able to turn away, I’m not saying you have to be committed for life, but if you do step into something, you’ve got to go in with the intention that this can go for a lifetime. That’s my personal philosophy.
[applause]
Question and Answer
Q: So you mentioned your mentor when you first joined DiCon in process engineering, did you have an equivalent mentor in the business operations side?
A: Yes, I was promoted to become a special assistant to the CEO. All my management responsibility on the production line was all gone: the CEO says, ‘You do this,’ and I do that. ‘Go negotiate that contract,’ I go negotiate that contract. Even as somebody just graduated from college, I was going in there to negotiate 2-3 million dollar contracts. Some people will say, ‘What kind of role is that? You’re just like a puppy, being told what to do.’ A lot of people don’t realize this, but you’re doing that right next to the CEO of the company, who is the smartest guy in the company. You see how he makes decisions, because you constantly see people coming in and saying, ‘I want this,’ and sometimes he will say yes, and sometimes he will say no. And if you pay attention, you start thinking, when does he say yes, when does he say no? That’s a physics skill: we look for patterns. Then you can start having conversations with him. I learned a great deal. It’s what we call duck theory. You see the duck on the pond, you see the duck moving a lot, but how come the duck moves like that? Its two feet are propelling it under the water. As the special assistant, I was those two feet. Nobody saw me moving, but I had great influence on company policy. I would not be joking if I told you that you have to have a 30 second pitch ready, because you do that in the elevator, you do that at the entrance to a lobby, and you do that in the bathroom. I’m not kidding: I’ve had a lot of policies set with our CEO when we run into each other going to the bathroom, standing next to each other, or in the elevator. As a special assistant, you’ve got to have to have a lot of questions, because the CEO is very busy. Your question has got to be precise, to the point, and phrased in a way so he can easily say yes or no. That’s an organizational skill.
Q: How important do you think your graduate degree was specifically for getting into DiCon as a new company?
A: If I had to do it all again, I definitely would come back for at least the first year of graduate school. I think that the first year of graduate school prepared me a lot for work. Some of you here are preparing to take the prelim, that’s difficult. I didn’t pass it the first time, you know.
I also came in with a very strong class. I remember a time when every single day, it would be 4 in the morning, and we’d all still be there drinking a big pot of coffee. I really cherish that time, because they pushed me so hard. Because I experienced that, I was able to go into this industry during the boom time with no fear. I worked 24/7 for a period of time, pretty much on call. I could jump right in and solve problems because of that training I had, so the first year definitely was very valuable.
There are very subtle things that you do, you don’t know that they are valuable, but they really are. I think a lot of things that we learn are so abstract that they’re hard to quantify. It’s easy for an engineer: ‘I know how to lay a circuit board, I know how to draw in SolidWorks, etcetera.’ Those are very specific skills. I think a physics degree is a training, it trains you to think differently. At least in my company and the people that I mentored, these are the kinds of things that will carry you very far into your career and will elevate you to the top level.
I have met so many engineers at big companies, and some people hate their jobs so much, but they’re paid such insane amounts of money that it’s hard for them to leave. I don’t get paid insane amounts of money, but I do love my job. You may feel like somebody else in a different degree gets jobs so much better than ours. That is sometimes true: engineers at large tech companies, many of them with the PhD electrical engineering majors, have very specific skills and very good jobs. But 10 years later, they are still down in the server room. Because when your training is very specific, you may get tied into a job that’s very specific. So your career eventually ends up in a situation where they need to keep paying you to keep you happy until one day they say it’s way too much, and they will cut you and find someone younger that’s cheaper to replace your work. However, if you have flexibility, you have skills, you’re able to jump from place to place.
Q: There was that time after you left the PhD program, a few months where you were teaching. When you got the new job after teaching, what motivated you to commit?
A: I didn’t commit. I went in there when they wanted to hire me, and I said, ‘Well, my girlfriend is going to graduate school in Berkeley so I’ll be here two years.’ That’s what I told them, and they still hired me anyway, because nobody else was applying. They really needed someone with an optics and physics background. The recruiter was having a really hard time. They called my girlfriend to say, ‘Please, please ask him to apply.’ She was like, ‘Wow, they were so nice to me, they really want you.’ Again, it’s luck, you just don’t know.