Find your happiness
As the owner of a staffing company, I talk to a lot of my fellow physicists and I hear a lot of stories about how people got into this field. The common refrain is that we all kind of got here by accident. Medical physics is not a popular or well-known profession. You probably never said “I want to be a medical physicist when I grow up.” In fact, I would posit that a majority of hospital employees don’t even know we exist. But whatever happenstance brought us here, I know that most of us feel lucky to have wound up in such a rewarding profession. As I’ve traveled the country and gotten to know many facilities and physicists, I’ve discovered that the field of medical physics offers a variety work structures. As all of us understand from our clinical work, life is short. Maybe you’ve reached a point in your career that it’s time to try something new. Maybe you want to find your happiness.
Time
Remote or hybrid work (mostly remote work with some on-site time for QA) can have a significant positive impact on your time. Being home saves you commute time and allows you easier access to run out and pick the kids up from school or shuttle them to soccer. As we learned during the pandemic, remote work has its drawbacks, but does seem to add a lot of efficiency to your day. Chart checks and other work of this type seem to go faster without interruption.
Taking a longer view of time, locum work really can improve the quality of your life by allowing you to take off several months a year and still make the same amount of money as a regular clinical job. There are some physicists who take the summer months to live elsewhere – in their homeland or vacation areas. Or you can take as many weeks as you want in between assignments to vacation or care for a loved one. Locum work can really give you a lot of power over your time.
Money
Let’s acknowledge the gorilla in the room – money. We work in a lucrative profession, and money can lead you to happiness by giving you freedom and security. The AAPM publishes our salary survey each year, and I know almost everyone reads it, and uses it for negotiation and comparisons. While most positions pay based off the salary survey, there is one big change you could make to your career that will drastically affect the amount of money you bring home. Locum work. Locums make about double the pay of what a permanent clinical physicist makes. It’s true that there are more expenses (travel, car rental, hotels, professional liability insurance) and it is not for everyone, but for someone who wants to purposefully maximize their earnings, the locum world is an easy way to do that.
Family
Being around the people you love can bring a lot of happiness. Physicists fresh out of graduate school may want to get back to their hometown or state. Young couples with little children may want to be closer to grandma and grandpa. Empty nesters may need to be closer to their parents to help take care of them. And physicists at the end of their careers may want to be near the grandkids. Wherever you are in life, there is usually a place in the world that you want to be and someone you want to be close to.
When I interview physicists, one of the very important notes I take is where that person wants to be. Sometimes, there is a very strong desire for a specific location, and that is important. Recently, I had a call with a physicist who was only interested in a specific (large) city because she needed to move across the country to take care of an elderly parent. Three days later, I just happened to get a locum staffing call from a major hospital in that city. It was an amazing feeling to match the two of them up.
Professor Einstein’s secretary was so burdened with inquiries as to the meaning of “relativity” that the professor decided to help her out. He told her to answer these inquiries as follows: “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
It is important to be somewhere you like doing something you love. I get a lot of satisfaction working with physicists and helping them make changes to their lives by finding a job in a different area or reorganizing their time by switching to remote or hybrid work. Making changes to our lives can help us find our happiness.