Having recently finished grad school, I've put together a guide for new and prospective graduate students on picking a prof and a project, as well as pitfalls to watch out for:
http://subversiveguidetoeng.blogspot.com/2009/05/guide-to-graduate-school.html"
I thought it would be useful...
In that case there's no substitute for going to school ... you'll need the courses to have a good background and get trained in thinking like a physicist. It might be quite fun :-)
Think about it like this: how many people in the world NEED astrophysics services and can make more money for themselves by hiring one?
This will give you an idea of how many astrophysics jobs there are ;)
subSquall
Subversive Guide to Engineering
http://subversiveguidetoeng.blogspot.com
Hey!
Day to day, civil engineering involves a lot of CAD design work, designing various subparts of a building/road/etc. There is also a lot of consulting the building code, meetings, going out on site etc.
ME is similar in that there will be a lot of CAD design, looking at drawings, etc. One...
Hey! What is your goal in attending science? Do you want to be a researcher or just work on science software?
If you're good with computers, look for jobs at universities. Research groups often hire programmers on contract to work on various interesting problems, often with parallel...
Hey e-o, no problem. Are you finding that the nanotech part is a lot of survey courses? That's what my program ended up being.
What happened with me is that I ended up finishing my nanotech degree, then I started a masters degree in electrical. It wasn't as difficult as you would think, the...
Hey, if you can do FPGA stuff, the job opportunities are pretty good in Canada. A lot of companies look for people that can do FPGA stuff or embedded software programming (like microcontrollers -- most embedded software developers are EEs, not software eng grads since you need to understand the...
Hey, I graduated from an engineering physics program ...
So the bad news is, unless you're going for a PhD and plan on doing research or working for one of the few places that have their own fabrication facilities, you probably won't be working in your field.
Most people ended up getting jobs...
Hey guys,
I thought this article might be helpful in getting a picture of what jobs engineering graduates have been getting. I graduated recently from an engineering program, and I wrote up my impressions of what myself and my classmates have been able to come up with. I tried to include all...
Hey, I have a masters in EE and I'm starting a job in image processing (my research was in computer vision / robotics)
So far its pretty good. Image processing tends to be a hodge-podge of methods so it takes a lot of reading to keep up. We mostly prototype algorithms in Matlab then implement...
You'll be surprised at electrical, there's a lot more math and physics in the courses than you'd think. Physics is awesome, but EE will give you a much bigger leg up in finding opportunities for yourself. If you love math and physics you'll really like controls engineering.
The Subversive Guide...
Unfortunately, you just have to practice practice practice. Keep doing problems until its second nature. Do the homework questions from your book, find old assignments and redo those, find old tests and practice on those, find other textbooks and do problems from those if you need to. It'll come...
Systems engineering is vague, but also you'll have an advantage with companies that are looking for it.
If you want to work in business, don't do a PhD, get an MBA instead. A PhD in business won't really help you.
Here's the thing, "physicist" isn't really a job title. Most physicists are professors or researchers at universities, government labs, and a few private research labs.
Its a difficult path: 4 years to do undergrad, 4-6 years to do your PhD, 2-4 years as a post-doctoral fellow, then 5-7 years...
I'm an electrical engineer. I don't think you'd like my job though. I design computer algorithms to enhance images, then I design custom computer hardware to make them run fast.
EE does have a lot of programming, pretty much every field. I'd say that EE is MORE hands on than other fields...