I am approaching the end of my freshman year of college and I am a declared engineering mechanics major but I am starting to wonder if I should switch my major to physics and try for a physics Ph.D. Since I was a freshman in high school I always thought getting a Ph.D. in physics would be wonderful but I went with engineering because I thought it would incorporate my love of science in math in a way that could be stable and sustainable professionally. I am concerned though that if I stick with engineering, my career will end up taking me to a position in management and remove me from the science and math and modeling and theories (the aspect that drew me to it). I am thinking if I receive a Ph.D. in physics, my life would be dedicated to research and I would never stop learning and be surrounded by science. I am very stuck.
There are PhD programs in engineering. There are folks out there with PhDs in physics who finished their undergrad degrees in engineering. You don’t have to decide this yet.
Yeah, agreed. You don’t have to decide this now. But here are some tidbits:
-Being a researcher and having a PhD is not the only way to never stop learning and be surrounded by science.
-Stopping with a BS in engineering doesn’t mean that you have to move into management and be removed from the modeling and science work. First of all, there are lots of roles for high-level individual contributors (ICs, or what we call folks who are not managers). Second of all, some managers still do a lot of scientific work. Third of all, it’s hard to predict what you’re going to want to do in 10-15 years - by then, maybe you find that you really like managing people and could use a break from being immersed in the day-to-day bench work. In technology people go back and forth from manager to IC pretty often.
What you get depends on your career goals. A PhD is a means to an end - it’s not having the PhD that’s wonderful, but the potential for what you can do with it. You’d only get a PhD if you want a career as a specific type of researcher. So dip in a toe - find out about being a research assistant in a physics lab and see if you like it!
There can be a lot of overlap between engineering and physics PhDs. For example, Michigan’s PhD program at its Plasmadynamics & Electric Propulsion Laboratory is part of the aerospace engineering department. But many of the PhDs graduate with applied physics degrees. My son is heading to Ann Arbor this fall for a PhD in aerospace engineering, studying in the Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. But he expects to take a lot of graduate physics courses (e.g. quantum mechanics) in addition to his required engineering courses.
All the answers are correct, however, if you are planning on a Ph.D. in physics after a B.S. in engineering (which is certainly possible), then make sure you are able to take some electives in physics that will prepare you for the graduate courses you will have to take. Typically Mechanical Engineers will not have a lot of upper division Electrodynamics, Statistical Mechanics or Quantum Mechanics, all of which are essential preparation for a Ph.D. in physics.
That being said, there is a lot of interesting research possible with a Ph.D. in engineering and at that level, there is less difference than you might think between physics and engineering. As a faculty member in physics, my research borders on chemistry, chemical engineering and materials engineering and I collaborate with researchers in all these disciplines.
The real question you need to ask yourself is whether you like engineering or physics better. Physics as a discipline covers a broader range of topics that touch on many areas of engineering while an engineering degree will be somewhat more circumscribed as far as courses go (there are a broad range of topics in Mechanical Engineering but they lie in the same general field). The good news is that you don’t have to make a decision right away, the first and many second year courses are more or less the same.
Most Physics graduate programs will require the Physics GRE, so if you want to have this option out of college you will need to take the Physics courses that are covered on the test. https://www.ets.org/gre/subject/about/content/physics
You still have quite a while to go. The first thing you should do is look into PhD programs in Engineering, seems like the best of both worlds.
I have a PhD in Engineering Physics, which is the best of both worlds in physics and engineering. The curriculum has the theoretical physics classwork, literature search, and research of traditional pure physics programs but also applies the theory to an engineering research problem (in my case, quantum optoelectronics for free-space laser communications). That might be a great option. The degree is seen as more applied than a theoretical physics PhD by employers, and gives you the choice of pursuing an academic research/teaching or an industrial applied research and development career. I did undergraduate work in electrical engineering and mathematics, then the engineering physics later on, employed in the aerospace industry doing R&D of spacecraft navigation systems.