General vs Honours degree in the workforce

  • #1
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Hello, I am currently in my third year of study in the honors bachelor of applied physics program at my university. At the beginning of this semester I was placed on academic warming. I need to get my GPA up in a few key physics courses to solve this problem. I have a few question however. I plan on attaining a job in industry when I finish my degree, so as of now I have two choices.

A: re-take a few core physics classes to boost my GPA and finish my honors applied physics degree
B: switch into a 4 year non-honors physics degree with a business minor and graduate at a lower GPA

I am wondering if anyone has any experience or knowledge on this topic and can give me some advice. My passion lies with finishing my honors degree and continuing to a masters in some kind of applied engineering and creating new gadgets. However, time and money also dictate I finish soon enough as I already changed my major from biochem to physics second year.

Basically I'm asking what the difference is between having a honors physics degree or a regular physics degree in the real world? Also I am wondering what my limitations in job outlook will be in either circumstance.

Thank you!
 
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  • #2
A lot can depend on the details here. In my experience "honours" can mean different things at different schools. In some cases the honours stream is the only one that would really qualify one for graduate study. In other cases, it merely seems like a distinction attached to the degree.

The relevance of any of that to the working world depends a great deal on what you end up doing in the working world. If you really want to get involved in some kind of engineering work, you might want to orient your education towards engineering to the extent that you can. In my experience, outside of academia, people tend not to care too much about the details of your education. The items of first order importance are whether your education qualifies you certain positions and then what skills you have developed through your education that are relevant to the position. The particular courses you took, whether your received honours or not, and even your grades tend to be of higher order relevance.
 

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