Check out the new blog by the noted cosmologist Lloyd Knox. Once per month, he’ll interview someone with a degree in physics about their career choices and experiences. The first interview, with a medical device physicist, is up.
I think this is a great idea. People don’t have a clear sense of the variety of things that you can do with a physics education. I frequently have parents of prospective students ask me, in a worried tone, whether their children will be able to get jobs after majoring in physics. The answer, of course, is yes: people with physics degrees do very well in the job market. The American Institute of Physics has lots of statistics on this, such as these:
(both from this document). But the statistics don’t give a good sense of the variety of things people do with their physics degrees, so Lloyd’s plan to let people tell their stories sounds great.