Physics What Are the Weaknesses of a Physicist?

[Choppy]

Feel free to add to that, but as a Physics undergrad, I'd like to know how to improve on these. How does one get experience in practical problem solving or teamwork without getting an engineering degree?

1. Summer jobs. You don't have to exclusively confine yourself to lab positions. While those may have advantages for graduate school applications, broadening your horizons has its own advantages. I know one previous student who spent a summer in a machine shop in a hospital and learned enough about the field that he was later able to start his own company and now seems to be doing quite well for himself. Or what about sales? People tend to look down on retail sales, but having a summer's worth of experience in this can help you to develop a lot of people skills that can't be learned in school.

2. Volunteer work. University campuses are saturated with volunteer opportunities. Sometimes these come with very specific training. Say you volunteer with your school's student distress centre. You will get quantifyable training in crisis intervention, experience dealing with people in extrement stressful situations, and develop crucial communication skills. If that's not your thing, what about an executive position with a school club that will demonstrate leadership and organizational skills?

3. Simply joining and participating in student clubs. There are all sorts of engineering competitions out there and universities will often form clubs for students interested in competing in them and these clubs aren't exclusive to engineers. For example, you might want to join your school's solar car racing team, or robotics team.

 

[ThinkToday]

Do an internship. I had friends that did them at NASA, NASA-Goddard, Raytheon, Bechtel, Westinghouse, etc. Your physics department should have the contacts that you need to see what they have. Summer internships are great. They give you a good look at various fields. You get to work next to people doing the real deal. You can see if you are interested in certain types of work.

An often overlooked asset is alumni. Talk to your professors about who is where, and see if they'd make a call on your behalf for an internship. We all started somewhere, and it can be hard to turn down the professor that got us on our way.

 

[Desh627]

Physicists can't demand as much money as engineers can. There's one weakness.

I think there is a fallacy here. In a standard physics education, you're likely taught ever harder, simpler and deeper principles, the first principles. And then you're hinted that when you know Newtonian physics you know how to do mechanical engineering, and when you know Maxwell equations you know how to do electrical engineering. But in fact, there are a lot of things that when you try to derive from first principles, you'll either a) fail, or b) re-invent the wheel. I would urge you, if you think the "principles" are all mighty, to read "More Is Different" from P. W. Anderson
(http://www.andersonlocalization.com/pdf/more_is_different.pdf")

No car maker will allow you to derive the chassis stiffness from inter-atomic stiffness using electromagnetism.

Not true at all. Yes, Maxwell's equations are at the core of electrical engineering, but I'll be damned if Maxwell's equations will give you the theory behind filter design (e.g. Butterworth, Chebyschev, etc), control loops, or digital logic. True, you can just keep abstracting it with math, but in the end an electrical engineer has WAY more intuition into what's happening in electronics or power than a physicist cares to look at. Same applies for mechanical, chemical, biomedical, aero... pretty much all of 'em (except for civil, that one's a joke ).

Key distinction here, too, as someone who's done both (albeit not as far in-depth as many here, but more than enough to pass a proper judgement): an engineer stops caring when he figures out the solution. He doesn't question why the solution is right, he just wants it to work. A physicist will keep deriving into insanity.

Granted, I do respect the physics side of things because physicists and mathematicians tend to look at problems from the top down (taking a generalized case and specifying it) whereas engineers tend to only look from the bottom up (taking a specific case and trying to generalize it). The former gives a MUCH better understanding and feel for what's actually happening, the latter usually struggles and grasps at concepts it can't comprehend.