I'm Laura (Xin) Zhang, class of 2016. I'm still a graduate student at Princeton Plasma Physics, grinding away towards my PhD.

After 3 years in grad school I decided I needed a pallet cleanser, so now I'm doing a summer internship at Siemens Corporate Technology. I'm working on the intersection of artificial intelligence and physics, mainly on using AI to help us predict the future of physical systems, while making sure that the prediction still obeys the laws of physics that we know and love. It's been pretty interesting. But most importantly, I'm being reminded of the reasons that I ended up in physics, that physics is still the only thing that I love too much to live without. (For those who remember my days at Mudd, it took quit a few twists and turns for me to end up there :p)  I'm looking forward to getting back to my PhD program after this summer, with some renewed energy!

On the other hand, as a woman in physics, it was quite a shock to go from Mudd (where my class of physics graduate was majority women) to a graduate program where I was the only one in my cohort, and second in the entire program. Sometime early last year, me and Sierra Jubin, a Williams grad, officially started a Women in Plasma Physics chapter at Princeton. Over the past year we have managed to get the student group off the ground. We have organized and participated in a lot of science education (K-12) and undergraduate outreach and mentoring programs. 

And this week we finally made an official webpage! Check this out - 

        https://plasma.princeton.edu/education/women-plasma-physics

I'm really proud of our organization. We're starting to get attention throughout the PPPL national lab. We got a shout out from the director on the international women's day, and recently we've been getting requests from the other women scientists (postdocs, staff, engineers) to join our crew. We're in the process of "going public", aiming to serve a broader population than the graduate students alone! I attached a photo of me at one of our outreach events at a local elementary school - we were not prepare for the baby tables! But we made it work and it was super cute!

Anyways, this is my very verbose answer to your request for update. Feel free to share/edit the story in any way you like, and share my contact with current students. I'm always down to talk to fellow Mudders!

So what do I think about a physics education some 30+ years after graduation? Would I do it all over again? There's absolutely no question in my mind. For anyone entering virtually any of the engineering or science disciplines, with maybe the exception of organic chemistry, an undergraduate physics education is invaluable. I went on to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Stanford School of Engineering for my Ph.D., and my HMC physics degree was a major advantage in practically every class I took and in my thesis research. In addition, in my years as a technical contributor, having the breadth and depth that a physics degree provides made me much more versatile than my colleagues who studied some branch of engineering. I was able to apply basic concepts from E and M, dynamics, optics, and even basic nuclear physics / relativity theory / quantum mechanics to solving problems and inventing new techniques. The ability to understand physical phenomena and apply basic principals to analysis and problem solving is directly related to the solid foundation that I got as a physics major. The colleague with whom I had my most successful collaboration, by the way, has a Ph.D. in physics (with engineering subjects, from the Sorbonne) and my former boss has a degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell---just indications of how a physics degree is a key building block to a successful technical career.

I use my physics knowledge to allow me to quickly grasp the underlying principles of whatever problem I am dealing with, allowing me to gain a working knowledge without getting bogged down in the details. It is this ability to be something of a jack-of-all trades (or a technical general practitioner as I prefer to think of it) that makes me valuable to the employer. Physics is the ideal background for this. In fact, as one goes up the management chain of this company, one finds that it is physics-heavy, as these are the people who have the ability to grasp the underlying concepts of a problem- which is what I think physics is all about. Hold the line when it comes to those things that traditionally make HMC great. That I was taught in small classes entirely by English-speaking PhD's who actually had office hours and didn't treat us an annoyance stands in stark contrast to the undergraduate experience of most of my peers.

I would say, using myself as an example, having a Physics background is a tremendous asset no matter what field one decides to go into. I really think that the problem solving skills I learned as a Physics major have helped me in my Engineering work. Also, since Physics is so fundamental to everything else (perhaps my view here is a little jaded?) there is no way to go wrong by learning Physics first and then moving up to other disciplines. ('Up' in the sense that 'C' is a higher level language than 'assembly'.) And now seems to be a great time for well-skilled scientists here in the Silicon Valley. The group I am in at IBM is concerned with magnetic disk media and most of the PhD's are from Physics/Material Science backgrounds.