IS PHYSICS FOR YOU?

Students most attracted to physics and to engineering are generally those who do better at math and science. In this note I will delineate some of the differences between physics and engineering, as they might effect your choice of a field of study.

The first task is to identify your basic motivation. If you want to understand the natural world, driven by curiosity, then science could well be your reasonable choice for a major. On the other hand, those wishing to build, to apply science and technology to better our world, might better choose engineering for their field of study.

A frequent question that high school students, their guidance counsellors, and parents ask, concerns the availability of jobs for physics graduates, and the types of jobs. Of course, a physics undergraduate program prepares students for graduate school in physics, but there are many other areas that our graduates work in. With the experience they get in quantitative problem solving and logical thinking, our graduates can probably enter as wide an array of fields as any: few doors are closed. This is another difference relative to the engineering disciplines. Study in engineering prepares one for a profession; a career focussed intensely on one subject. Physics, in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences, covers basic phenomena in mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermal physics, and quantum mechanics. While new phenomena are constantly being discovered, the basic physical laws remain the same. This provides a very servicable knowledge base for a lifetime in which an individual might have to prepare for a number of careers, as speculated by some futurists. The base is very broad, and students get the opportunity to apply this array of subjects to complicated, real-world systems such as condensed matter physics and nuclear physics. The view that a physics education fits one for a broad array of tasks is supported in the following pages:

1. A list of job titles of graduates from Haverford College from 1953 to 1990, as published in "Physics Today",

2. The view of a Ph.D. physicist working in industry, and

3. "Physics in industry", a web page from the American Institute of Physics.

4. "What do I want to do when I grow up", which summarizes factors to think about when choosing a future.

5. Fun Physics Stuff

To get a feel for physics at UConn visit http://www.phys.uconn/Undaff/PHYSICS.htm