<p>Engineering physics programs vary widely from school to school. But as a broad generalization EP can be seen as a bridge between physics and a traditional engineering program. Whether your son should study EP in college is really up to him to decide whether he likes it or not--who knows, he may wind up falling in love with civil engineering or pure mathematics or political science. </p>
<p>The exact words on the diploma aren't as important as the material learned as evidenced to employers and grad schools by high grades in college coursework, research with professors, and/or industry experience (not surprisingly, research is more important for grad school, while industry experience is more important for going into industry). This is because grad schools and most good employers (your Intels and the like) will look at transcripts from students in who have done well in technical majors. For this reason it might be best for your son to choose a major that gives him a lot of choice for technical electives if he is unsure what he wants to study. To the extent that EP allows technical elective breadth and freedom it is a good program. However, if your son does find that he likes one particular field much more than the others, he might be better off switching majors into that one field. </p>
<p>Luckily, EP, physics and most traditional engineering programs (except chemical and bio engineering, which are very different and have heavy enough requirements to have to be planned out from day 1 in college) have very similar lower division course requirements so changing between majors shouldn't be much of a problem, unless your son's college has problems with course oversubscription and thus has impacted majors. For example, at Berkeley, Illinois and other big public engineering schools, it is often very difficult to transfer into the EE department from other engineering majors because EE is a high-demand major. Impaction tends to be less of an issue at private schools. It can also be difficult to transfer from the arts and sciences college to engineering in public schools. It is usually pretty easy to transfer from engineering to arts and sciences, however. (This is an issue because physics departments tend to be in arts and sciences, while engineering departments are in the engineering college). So from a purely logistical perspective it may be a good idea to start out in a heavily impacted major, such as EE, in the engineering college if you're not really sure what you want to study.</p>
<p>(Note that if your son wants to work in certain fields in which professional engineer [PE] certification is important, then the words on diploma do matter a lot, as the Civil Engineering graduate can fairly easily get PE certificiation while the physics graduate who took a lot of civil engineering technical electives will have a much harder time getting certified, if s/he does get certified at all).</p>
<p>I am not personally familiar with Pitt's EP program, but looking at their web site it looks like their EP program is a hybrid electrical-materials-physics major. Their program looks like it would be good preparation for grad school in EE, materials, or physics, or for work in the semiconductor industry. However, it does not seem to offer much choice at all in terms of technical electives. Here's a link: <a href="http://www.engr.pitt.edu/materials/physics/curriculum.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.engr.pitt.edu/materials/physics/curriculum.html</a>.</p>