You should read the biography on him. He was a student at LANL and then at Pratt & Whitney for a few years as a scientist.

It was before his full immersion into WN and he literally left that job to publish full time.

http://robertsgriffin.com/Fame%2718.pdf

p. 44 - After graduation from military school in 1951, Pierce entered Rice University in Houston, Texas on a full academic scholarship. He majored in physics at Rice and graduated with a bachelors degree in that field in 1955.

p. 46 - After graduation from Rice, Pierce spent a few months working at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, in New Mexico, where he was a member of a team attempting to develop controlled nuclear fusion. He then continued on to graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. After a year at Caltech, Pierce accepted a position at the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where much of America’s interplanetary exploration program was developed, and worked in the area of rocket instrumentation. After fifteen months at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he resumed his graduate studies at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, where he received first a master’s degree and then, in 1962, a doctorate in physics. All the way through his Colorado years he was awarded teaching and research assistantships, which covered his tuition and living expenses.

p. 47 - While at Caltech, Pierce met an undergraduate student by the name of Patricia Jones and fell in love. He and Patricia were married in California in 1957 when Pierce was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Patricia's field was mathematics. She received a master’s degree in mathematics at Oregon State after she and Pierce moved to Oregon when he joined the OSU faculty. When the Pierces moved to Connecticut in 1965, Patricia taught math to General Dynamics employees. Pierce had decided to leave the faculty at Oregon State to take a job as a senior research scientist at Pratt & Whitney Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory in North Haven, Connecticut. He told me that the money was better at Pratt & Whitney and that he wanted to finance the writing he planned to do—at this point he had a book in mind—in the areas of culture and politics, which had come to take a central place in his life. He said he realized that the direction his thinking was taking him would in all likelihood rule out conventional publishing outlets and that he needed to get himself into a position to be able to finance the publication and distribution of his writings himself. For that he would need more money than he was making at Oregon State. People with his science background could make two or three times more in private industry than what universities were paying at that time.

p. 117 - "On June 6th, 1966, I hauled all those magazines off in my station wagon to the post office. I said to myself, iacta alea est—the die is cast. I have to make it work now. For me it was like jumping into unknown waters; would I sink or swim? I just assumed that I wouldn't be able to continue working at Pratt & Whitney once the magazine was published. So I quit my job there. I also had all these fantasies about what might happen to me when I made that first public commitment, publishing the first issue of the magazine. I thought that maybe I would become the target of black militant organizations or Jewish gangsters, that I'd get attacked or shot or something, I didn't know. But I was inspired by the example of Rockwell's courage. And I wanted to use my own name. I didn't want to be anonymous because I wanted to be in contact with people. As it turned out, nothing really happened. My theory is that the printed word doesn't mean all that much to blacks. They will only react when you actually get right in their face and confront them. As for Jews, if they sense a threat they'll use one of their organizations, or they'll form a new one and jump on you that way.