OK, so this is where the ogre in me comes in and deflates the ambition of a young, impressionable person.
The purpose of this is not to discourage you in pursuing what you wish to do. The purpose here is to inject some reality into your decision (or plan) to already want to do something specific, all in the hope that you WILL be open to considering other options that you may not know of.
There are several factors to consider here.
1. You have not been exposed to other, more exciting field of studies.
I've written about it here.
2. The reality here is that, what you wish to do when you decide at your age, will probably be
NOT what you will end up in.
3. It will be quite a long time before you will be done with school (undergraduate, graduate, postdoc) and will go into the job market. Hopefully, the environment you will encounter will be significantly different than what it is now. However, the scenario right now for high energy physics in the US is bleak at best! Funding for this field of physics has steadily declined for the past several years. It means that there's less funds to do stuff, less funds to hire, and the number of available positions will shrink in the new coming years.
These are the realities that one has to face when choosing this area of physics. It is OK if you know all this, and you still choose to pursue it. At least you'll be going in with your eyes wide open. The problem here is if you go in blindly, oblivious to all the issues surrounding it, and then suddenly find yourself with no clearly employment at the end of it simply because you were expecting the situation to be that bad.
I've always felt that one of my missions here on this forum is not just to introduce to people what physics is and what physicists actually do, but also to remove many of the myths surrounding this field. And one of the most popular myths here is that physics only deals with esoteric subject areas. Physics isn't just the LHC! Physics is also your iPhone, your MRI, your GPS, your microprocessor, etc. The esoteric physics that you see popularized on TV and print media is only a SMALL part of what physics is! Don't be fooled by the sexiness of the story, because the beauty is only skin deep.
Zz.
