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.
Noted German politicians Angela Merkel and Oskar Lafontaine are physicists.