Why I Left Physics

I was a UROP scholar in chemical physics as a freshman at BU. I loved the lab — the ultrafast 2DIR setup was the prettiest piece of equipment I'd ever touched. I got my name on a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics on supercritical-fluid dynamics in 2022. By every measure I was on track to apply to physics PhDs.

I didn't.

The honest reason

Physics has a 30-year feedback loop and a 30-person job market. The dynamics inside ML research and inside startups have feedback loops measured in weeks. I'm wired for the faster loop.

That's not a value judgment about physics. The world needs people who can sit with a problem for a decade. I'm not that person, and pretending otherwise would have made me a mediocre physicist and a frustrated one.

What I kept

The instrumentation discipline. Knowing how an FTIR works, what an oscilloscope is doing, why a delay stage matters — those instincts transfer directly to debugging distributed training runs. Knowing how to write a paper transfers to writing a clear PRD. The math transfers everywhere.

What I'd tell my younger self

Don't apologize for changing fields. The compounding from cross-pollination is larger than the cost of starting over.