well, having a good career nowadays is critical for women.
especially for young women after their graduation.

we should be given the chance to enter the field that we like.
hope that women nowadays feel great full in what they achieve.

For the rest of your career you will be studying physics. The more you study physics the more physics you will learn. The more physics you will learn the more further away from nature you will get.

The career path of a physics professional is very similar to a student studying law. Only a privileged few, say Supreme Court Justices, and Nobel Laureates, are allowed to study and influence fundamental stuff, the rest serve the hierarchy and then retire.

In any case, for long, long time you will be serving the hierarchy and spending your time doing someone else’s research and that if you are lucky.

I also believe that physics is not suitable for studying fundamental questions. This may sound strange. But physics education will teach you to believe in the Newtonian dogma and never to question it.

Thanks for your comment:-Having been in this field for a very long time, and seen the wonderful dialogue with Nature that Physics engages in at all levels, and having trained numerous young people and seen them go off into the world and use their training in physics and other fields in a way that serves society, I profoundly disagree with your central thesis with pretty much every fibre of my being as a physicist, but you are entitled to your opinion.

Sounds like you had some bad experiences on your own path, but to extrapolate as greatly as you have and characterise the endeavour in the way that you have is a gross error.

Best,

-cvj

I too went through physics education at an older age. I had an MFA and I thought science was the thing to study not art because unlike art which I thought was part of entertainment industry science was science. I gave up my painting career and I enrolled at Columbia to study math, astronomy and physics at a professional level.

I truly believed that physics was science and I needed to learn math and physics in order to find answers about the world I lived in. Years later I got disillusioned and now I believe this is not the case.

If you want a career in physics, then, yes, you must study physics. But please don’t be fooled that a career in physics will necessarily mean that the hierarchy will let you study the big problems you want to study when you are done studying physics in a decade from now. For the rest of your career you will be studying physics. The more you study physics the more physics you will learn. The more physics you will learn the more further away from nature you will get.

The career path of a physics professional is very similar to a student studying law. Only a privileged few, say Supreme Court Justices, and Nobel Laureates, are allowed to study and influence fundamental stuff, the rest serve the hierarchy and then retire.

In any case, for long, long time you will be serving the hierarchy and spending your time doing someone else’s research and that if you are lucky.

I also believe that physics is not suitable for studying fundamental questions. This may sound strange. But physics education will teach you to believe in the Newtonian dogma and never to question it. I just posted a long post about this. http://globalpioneering.com/wp02/scholastic-doctors-of-philosophy/

Once you realize that physics education is preparation for a Newtonist priesthood it may be too late for you to move to another career. Physics will never let you see the world in any way except as a Newtonian.

Furthermore, as I wrote in that post, mathematics as used in physics is a proprietary language used by physicists to move up in the hierarchy and to communicate among themselves. Newton did not know this language. Nature does not recognize the language of physics which is full of cultural and folkloric elements.

Nature understands only simple proportionalities. That’s all you need to know to study nature! If you want to study nature save yourself a lot of tuition and pick up Euclid and study proportions. That’s what Newton used. That’s what Archimedes and Galileo used.

Physics education will waste the most creative period of your life to teach you stuff that you will never use in your research.

Once again, I am sorry, for this rant. Also I believe that women are much much more intelligent than men. This is not a speculation. I’ve written about this here. http://1women1.blogspot.com/

Good luck in your research.

Glad to hear that the conference was an encouragement. I think you’ll find that although you face more challenges than your male and younger female counterparts who have taken a more traditional route, you have developed other skills that will be invaluable in the future. (I worked for several years between undergrad and grad school). Good luck with your studies!

As a fellow conference participant, I, too, came away from that weekend with a needed dose of encouragement. And it is well-timed articles such as this that keep the momentum going. Our little things we do truly make a difference.
Now, I feel like I’m tooting my own horn, but I’m proud of an editorial that I wrote for my school’s paper soon after returning from the conference myself:
http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2007/01/24/Opinion/Where.Are.All.The.Girls-2671390.shtml

Congrats again, and good luck.

(*) There is of course, a major issue with women’s clocks for combining family and career. May I recommend this path, to help offset the ticking clock problem? Too late for me, but I urge 20/30s women to seriously consider this option.