Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college 2

[Jmax8910]

I'm a sophomore physics major at a state liberal arts college in Colorado. I went here to save money -- it's walking distance from my parent's house. And though I'm learning a lot, I'm worried about job placement, from being qualified and having a competitive degree, to vital networking availability: we're a few hundred miles from Denver, the closest bigger city. There's no high-tech industry here either. On another level, Colorado doesn't offer great scholarships, even for in-state students. It scares me to take on a hundred thousand dollars of debt to go to CSU or CU Boulder. Furthermore, I'm having trouble deciding which branch of engineering I want to specialize -- it's a tie between electrical engineering, computer engineering (not computer science), aerospace engineering, and optical engineering. Right now I'm leaning towards electrical engineering after taking an intro to electronics course.

Would it be professionally and, in the long-term, financially advantageous to transfer to one of the bigger schools to study electrical engineering? Am I too late in the process? Also, for those of you who majored in electrical engineering, how competitive are jobs? Can I find a job designing processors for Intel with a physics degree from a relatively unknown school?

Also, how would job placement be if I finished my physics degree here and got a masters in a specialized engineering field?

Thanks so much for taking your time to read this post.

 

[IRstuff]

I don't think that's a completely fair assessment. Engineers rarely design something that isn't based partly on something else. This is one of the reasons that Horowitz's Art of Electronics is still valid. The building blocks are not really changed, it's how they are assembled together to create a new ensemble that the innovation. Some engineers are in the same boat; they can't think outside of the "box" of known problems either. I've seen practicing engineers struggling in a master's level class with that exact same problem. If physics majors weren't able to solve new problems, there would be any new physics, and yet, there is.

My two sons are on opposite sides of that same paradigm; one excels at dealing with unknowns, while the other is most comfortable with problems that are only slightly different than problems he's already done.

That said, not having the engineering background is a hindrance, at times, even for systems engineering. Most engineering jobs requires a combination of analysis and synthesis, so while the analysis part fits well within the physics purview, synthesis does require at least the basic background courses.

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