What Are Practical Career Paths for Physics Majors Disenchanted with Academia?

[Wishbone]

I soon will be graduating with a bachelor's in physics and entering the "job market". I absolutley despise a good portion, especially the higher level, physics courses I have taken. I found the teachers awful, and the content mundane. Basically any interest I once had in physics, except for the case of classical mechanics, is destroyed. I attribute this mostly to the countless number of math problems I have encountered in physics classes, with no refrence to physics at all. I have no problem teachers strengthening my math skills for future applications in physics, however, those answers have never come. This has basically stomped on that wonderment of physics that consumed me at the beginning of my studies.

I have no interest whatsover being stuck behind a desk, or in a classroom, or labratory, and want to be as far away from the "academia physics" as physically possible. I wondering what other "real world" possibilities there are for physics majors, that shy away from these parts I have found to be mundane. Thank you in advance.

 

[Nothing000]

Maybee you should check out some type of engineering job that you could use your physics knowledge towards. I don't really know how physics degrees work, but did you specialize a specific area? As long as the specialization wasn't some type of theoretical physics, I would assume that there would be a corresponding field of engineering you could go into.

 

[Nothing000]

What parts of the physics you learned would you say are worthwhile to learn for practical applications, and which parts would you say are just a waste of time? Was it like once you reached a certain point you started taking classes that were to abstract and had no real application, or was you whole time in college full of some usefull stuff and some non-useful stuff?

 

[Wishbone]

Really, the problem was not the subject matter, but the homeworks and tests. He would give some pure math problems like "using a this series, prove that this integral equals this" and I hate that. That is the least inteesting thing to me, and I found it more and more common within my higher level physics courses than the lower ones. I am worried that if I look into a job ,for example, in something like polymer physics, or something like that I will re-experience these mundane feelings I am having in Quantum Mechanics, Modern Physics II, and ESPECIALLY Theoretical and computational physics. I am not sure whether I am coherently expressing the aspect of my college physics career I hate.

As far as the courses I found interesting, it was really the classical, some modern physics, etc.