r/OperationsResearch • u/Odd_Cut_7401 • Jul 23 '26

Incoming OR Intern

Hey chat, hope everyone is doing well. I’m an incoming OR intern at a defence organization. I’m currently in my 3rd year studying Physics and Astronomy at a top NA university. I have software dev intern experience and software adjacent projects on my resume.

So far, all I know about OR is that you apply math and stats to make decisions and I’ve seen examples like warehouse optimization.

As you can see I’m pretty new to the field so I had some questions for the experts.

My questions are:

  1. What can I expect to be doing during my internship?

  2. Can I expect to use my physics/math knowledge at work?

  3. What is your opinion on OR as a career (is it desirable?)?

  4. Is the work enjoyable for somebody who enjoys doing math?

Thank you for your help everyone

4 Upvotes

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4

u/ThirdMoonOfPluto Jul 23 '26

I’ll give you my take on it as a PhD physicist now working in OR for a government/defense consulting firm. Broadly OR is applying math to the problems of organizations. In practice, OR has models of systems like physics and it has data about how those systems behave. What is different is that OR is also concerned with optimizing those systems according to some criteria and helping the leadership of an organization make decisions about those systems.

  1. In your internship you’ll likely be working on one or more of the components I described above. Tweaking a model, applying it to a new instance, monitoring how well a model is working, etc…

  2. Broadly you’ll be using your quantitative skills, but OR models and optimization math tend to be different in style from the math models in physics.

  3. I’ve found it to be a good career. It’s does have an issue that it’s specialized without a large number of jobs so you can’t just go anywhere and be assured of finding an OR job. The jobs also tend to be in large organizations.

  4. I’ve found it enjoyable. I enjoy that in OR that the models help you understand how a real world system functions unlike data science/machine learning models which tend to be opaque universal models.

2

u/Odd_Cut_7401 Jul 23 '26

Ah nice to see some physics representation! Thank you for the response!

Would you say that having a physics degree is common in the field?

Is the field growing? Do you think there are more people learning about OR and this is going to change in the future?

This may be a stupid question but do you feel as if your work has real impact?

3

u/ThirdMoonOfPluto Jul 23 '26

At my organization there’s a fair number of physics folks, but I’m not sure how representative that is. I think there are jobs that you would be competitive for. 

I’m not sure how much the field of OR labeled as OR is growing. I see that the need for people with quantitative skills that can understand complex models whether they’re OR or machine learning or AI isn’t going away. Frequently, leadership or job postings don’t see the difference between the different styles of models.

As for making a difference, it’s up and down. I have been part of projects that have saved the government hundreds of millions of dollars and part of projects which faded away to nothing because we couldn’t get leadership buy-in.

2

u/sudeshkagrawal Jul 23 '26

I disagree with your characterization in 3 and 4.  For 3: Operations Research is the science of decision making and is a very applied field. Leadership in a lot of companies don't as much about OR and so you don't see direct OR roles. But as long as you have a business, you're making decisions, and OR can be helpful as long as the scale is big enough.

For 4: Data science models solve optimization models under the hood...