What can a physics degree do for me? A physics degree means more than a series of harmonic oscillator problems in different contexts; after all, nearly half of all physics bachelors degree holders go directly into the workforce. As you go through your undergraduate career, you might frequently hear that potential employers seek out physics students not necessarily for their technical prowess. Rather, they look for physics students' analytical mindset and problem-solving skills, developed through physics classes and research. But what does this actually mean? A few examples of transferable skills in various roles at Google from Catherine Moresco, a Google employee with bachelors degrees in computer science and physics, are provided below:
Machine learning research group: Linear algebra, mathematics of signal processing, reading academic literature
Product team: statistics,data analysis and manipulation, quantitative skills from lab classes to write reports analyzing user interaction data
Systems design: Comfort with order-of-magnitude/back-of-the-envelope calculations (spherical cow, anyone?)
Software engineering and coding: Pattern-matching--seeing a problem, and being able to recognize how it relates to similar, previously encountered problems
Software engineering and beyond: "I knew a professor once who said he loved to hire physics students because they 'develop the ability to just keep grinding at working on a problem beyond the point of reason', which I think is plenty transferable to a lot of fields"
As for where else physics skills might be applicable, see this (non-comprehensive) list of position titles (also at Google, though widely applicable to technology companies in general) that may be of interest.
So I have a degree - what's next? After you graduate, there are many options for paths to take, not the least of which include:
Graduate school: go here if you're interested in research (in any context, not just in academia; many industrial companies have separate research groups)! There are a billion amazing guides to grad school out there - this is a particularly candid one from a UChicago physics grad student: https://github.com/gwisk/gradguide
Workforce: the private or public sector, governmental work, non-profits, etc. We'll post an overview of opportunities available to physics degree holders here shortly, stay tuned!
Teaching certification: most K-12 schools require teachers to have a bachelors degree at minimum, plus a teaching certificate if that degree is in a field outside of education.
Gap year: travel, volunteer (e.g. Peace Corps, Fulbright, Teach for America), gain some work/research experience while figuring out what you want to do with your life, etc. This is your chance to do something you'll regret not doing later on when you get bogged down by Working Adult things! It's also a chance to prevent early burn-out after many strenuous years of studying.