Good morning, Dr. Zoomie, I’m hoping you might be able to help me with some sage career advice. Specifically, I’m working in nuclear power (six years now) and I know how to put together a career path in this field; the problem is that I don’t really find this prospect very attractive. I’ve got an education and experience in health physics and would like to apply those elsewhere in the profession – being a medical RSO appeals to me, but I know there are a lot of different directions I might explore. I would appreciate any advice you can share – thank you!
Well, for starters I’ll note that you’re ahead of where I was when I first made the change from Naval Nuclear Power to the broader field of non-power reactor radiation safety – your advantage over me is that you’ve actually studied health physics at university (giving you a more formal and more in-depth education than I received) and then you put that to use for about the same length of time I spent operating reactors. And, for what it’s worth, I got my first RSO gig at a mid-sized university (with a hospital) a little less than 10 years after I left the Navy and three years after I earned my certification (CHP). And in the years before I started my RSO job and after I left that position, I’ve also worked in environmental health physics, at a uranium enrichment plant, did some consulting, worked for government at the local, state, and federal levels, set up and managed a calibration laboratory, and a few other odds and ends. Aside from my personal experience, I also know health physicists who have worked for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for a variety of high-energy particle accelerators, at nuclear weapons production facilities, who have been on missions to recover uranium that had formerly been part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and so much more. What I’m getting at is that Health Physics has a lot of variety and if you find that being an RSO isn’t quite your cup of tea, there are a lot of alternatives for you to explore.
If nothing else, this goes to show you that your career can be a straight line – moving through a number of RSO positions for increasingly more complex licenses, for example – or it can follow a more circuitous route as you follow your whims or as your career goals evolve. Either path can be engrossing and rewarding – I’ve found satisfaction in many of the jobs I’ve had and every single one of them has taught me a ton I wouldn’t otherwise have known. What’s important is for you to decide what you’re looking for in a job and in a career, and to revise that as necessary as you go through the years.
OK – enough of the grand overview – now for some details!
First is that, while you’re qualified to be RSO for many smaller licensees (well, you’ll need to take a 40-hour RSO course), you’re not likely to land a job as RSO at a large research university or hospital as your first non-power plant job. This is not a bad thing – the main reason I took almost a decade to land my first RSO position is because I wouldn’t have been a good university and hospital RSO fresh out of the Navy – I needed that decade of experience working at various jobs in the civilian world. Not only that, but I also needed to develop a better temperament to be an RSO in the academic and medical world.
In the Navy, and from what I’ve heard, in the civilian power reactor world, it’s pretty much black-and-white; something is either in compliance or it’s not, and people who aren’t in compliance are either brought into compliance or they’re shut down. And – most importantly – it’s not hard to think of situations at a power reactor in which a mistake can hurt or kill someone. In the civilian world, by comparison (and especially at a university), it’s very, very difficult to come up with a plausible scenario in which a seemingly minor mistake leads to death. Simply put, falsifying a radiation survey that misses a 100 R/hr hot spot can put people at risk; the stakes are far lower in a research laboratory. Not only that, but much of the research and work – especially at a large research university hospital – saves lives. This doesn’t mean that you look the other way if people won’t follow the rules (or the regulations), but it does mean that you need to have a bit of flexibility in how you respond to those who transgress. That’s the sort of thing I learned – and that you will learn – from spending a few to several years working in your new professional world. I’ll say, too, that there are many ex-Navy nukes (and ex-power plant health physicists) who can’t make the transition easily, or at all. But most can – and do.
Having said that, let me back up a little and sketch out a few possible career paths out of the many that exist.
One path to being RSO at a large research and/or medical institution is to find a job as a health physicist at such a licensee and work your way up. Learn how they run their dosimetry programs, how they inspect laboratories, help give the radiation worker training, receive and deliver packages of isotope, manage the radioactive waste program, work with a Radiation Safety Committee, and everything else. As you become more familiar with the needs of that type of program, look for opportunities to be promoted – maybe to senior health physicist, assistant RSO, fill in when the RSO is on vacation, and then to RSO. This is more or less the path I took and, by the time I’d earned my certification and found an RSO job to apply for I was both qualified and ready to take the position.
A different path can also work – take any non-power plant health physicist job, learn a different aspect of the profession, and then move on to something else after three or four years. This will give you a broader set of tools to bring to bear on various problems, it’ll force you to learn to work in a wider variety of circumstances, and you’ll build some professional agility. Spending time working as a field tech for an environmental restoration firm, providing coverage for medical procedures, attending public meetings as a regulator, managing your radiation dosimetry program, escorting regulators during an inspection – all of these give you first-hand experience in many different areas of the profession, making you more versatile and better able to deal with unusual situations as they arise. I’ve done this as well to some extent, and the non-academic experiences I gained were useful when, for example, I needed to do environmental sampling to look for signs of radioactivity escaping from a WWII-vintage building that had been used for Manhattan Project-related research.
Whichever path you take – and feel free to carve out your own! – the important thing is to learn every chance you get…and keep an open mind. You’ll be a better health physicist for it. And when you get to the point of thinking of applying for an RSO position, take a look at NUREG 1556 – find the volume that corresponds with the type of license you hope to manage and see what it recommends for qualifications to be the RSO. If you meet or exceed these qualifications, apply for the job; if you don’t meet them, see what you need to do – maybe it’s something you can do on the job, maybe it’s something you can address quickly and still apply for the position, maybe it’s something the regulators will waive. But you need to be able to address everything they ask for, to have documentation supporting the experience and education you list in your qualifications, and/or to explain why you’re suited to be the RSO.
Finally(!) – before you apply for an RSO spot, you’ll need to do some thinking. Why do you want to be an RSO, for example, is something you need to be able to articulate. What will be your priorities as RSO? If it’s a large radiation safety program, what sort of boss do you want to be? How do you picture interacting with the radiation workers, the authorized users, the Safety Committee, your regulators, and Management? If you’re going to have staff (secretary, techs, maybe a health physicist or two), what sort of work will you delegate to them and what will you have to do yourself? And if it’s just going to be you, how are your time management and prioritization skills? Until you have an answer for these – and other – questions, you need to start thinking.
And good luck!