If you’re not sure which of those fields you prefer, a physics undergraduate is a gateway to all of them. I did physics and then ended up getting really interested in biology, and am working on a PhD in bioengineering. Physics teaches you to tackle hard problems with mathematics- a skill that can be applied to any intellectual pursuit.
PhD students in science and engineering are generally paid, so it’s not a huge financial burden. It’s not a waste of time either, if you choose the right professor you’ll be free to work on whatever you think is interesting and important.
Publishing is not as time consuming as you think, and it’s much more helpful to the scientific community and your career than blog posts. Good peer reviewed publications will almost guarantee you support to keep working on whatever you think is worth working on.
If you do good work in science but put it just on blogs, it will likely get lost where other scientists will never learn from your work and build on it, and you will be seen as unproductive and will lose your academic career. This could change in the future, but that’s how it is now. Many scientists will assume that you didn’t publish it because it had glaring flaws preventing it from passing peer review, and therefore isn’t even worth reading.
The most important part of an undergraduate degree is doing research. If you don’t do any research as an undergrad, you will have a hard time getting into a PhD program, and you’ll also have no reason to believe you’d like it, or succeed in it.
While having a B.S. in physics will likely be sufficient to enter all those graduate fields, it doesn’t (as was stated above somewhere) qualify you for a whole lot outside of applying to graduate programs—or impressing people in fields of mostly liberal arts majors. So be absolutely sure you are comfortable with going directly into a gradate program after college. There are very few “cool” jobs you can get with just the bachelors. Out of my graduating physics class, all but one went on to graduate programs. That one individual took a job doing something for a patent office.
If you’re not sure which of those fields you prefer, a physics undergraduate is a gateway to all of them. I did physics and then ended up getting really interested in biology, and am working on a PhD in bioengineering. Physics teaches you to tackle hard problems with mathematics- a skill that can be applied to any intellectual pursuit.
PhD students in science and engineering are generally paid, so it’s not a huge financial burden. It’s not a waste of time either, if you choose the right professor you’ll be free to work on whatever you think is interesting and important.
Publishing is not as time consuming as you think, and it’s much more helpful to the scientific community and your career than blog posts. Good peer reviewed publications will almost guarantee you support to keep working on whatever you think is worth working on.
If you do good work in science but put it just on blogs, it will likely get lost where other scientists will never learn from your work and build on it, and you will be seen as unproductive and will lose your academic career. This could change in the future, but that’s how it is now. Many scientists will assume that you didn’t publish it because it had glaring flaws preventing it from passing peer review, and therefore isn’t even worth reading.
The most important part of an undergraduate degree is doing research. If you don’t do any research as an undergrad, you will have a hard time getting into a PhD program, and you’ll also have no reason to believe you’d like it, or succeed in it.
While having a B.S. in physics will likely be sufficient to enter all those graduate fields, it doesn’t (as was stated above somewhere) qualify you for a whole lot outside of applying to graduate programs—or impressing people in fields of mostly liberal arts majors. So be absolutely sure you are comfortable with going directly into a gradate program after college. There are very few “cool” jobs you can get with just the bachelors. Out of my graduating physics class, all but one went on to graduate programs. That one individual took a job doing something for a patent office.