I’m a current HS Junior and I’m really torn up about whether I want to major in EE or pure physics. I love physics and mathematics, as well as electronics, but I’m really not too into digital electronics - I focus on the pure analog. With the assumption that of all engineering majors, EE with be the closest to physics (most ideal, most theoretical, etc), as well as the fact that I just don’t really care about career prospects, which is a better fit for me?
You are wrong about EE being the closest to physics and being more theoretical than other engineering disciplines. Any engineering field is similarly close to physics, which is a foundation for all of them. There are plenty of physicists who are experimentalists and there is theory in all engineering fields, as well as more hands-on work. The question that you need to figure out the answer to is what is it that you want to do after graduation. If it is working in industry, then engineering might be the best choice for you. You can certainly get jobs in industry with a physics degree though and if you choose Engineering Physics you can have them both, sort of.
In any case, you will find that the first year courses for physics and EE are more or less the same so you can be undecided and make a choice a bit later on, once you get a better idea of which major suits you best.
The first things that come to mind are the major inherent differences between engineering and science; namely, the type of jobs that the grads end up working. Where do you see yourself after you graduate? Are you interested in product design, going into industry, or entrepreneurial work, or are you content in academia? Although you “don’t really care” about job prospects, EE is definitely the more practical choice in that regard. Purely based off of your stated interests, though, I’d lean more towards EE because it already has a strong base in physics, and there are plenty of engineering jobs out there that draw from both EE and classical physics. Instrumentation technology, for instance, is a fairly broad category that often intersects both of these fields.
Not sure if you’re interested but I know some schools that have an engineering physics major