Hi. If you didn’t already know, I am currently in my fifth year studying engineering physics at UBC. Now the most common question that I get asked when people hear this is:
“what is engineering physics?”
This is fair. I didn’t know about the program until halfway through my first year at UBC. The name itself isn’t as standardized as mechanical engineering or mining engineering – it’s pretty obvious what those guys do. But what does an engineering physicist do?
Well, it’s a bit hard to explain. I know some people in my program would just say a more common discipline such as computer engineering when prompted just so they don’t have to explain their major. It’s not technically a lie since we do a bit of computer engineering… In fact the blunt definition that I hear quite often is:
“It’s like mechanical engineering combined with electrical engineering and computer engineering and, just for fun, they squeeze in honours physics too.”
This has its upsides and its downsides. You get to experience many different disciplines and decide which you enjoy the most. However, it is a lot of work. I’ve had semesters with 7 classes and two labs, yet this is considered normal. Because of this, to succeed in the program, you need to be able to pick up a lot of information very quickly. This brings me to one of the best ways that we advertise ourselves to employers:
“I’m really good at learning.”
This is an extremely powerful skill especially as new technology is being released at unprecedented rates. It is incredibly empowering to be able to say “I don’t know how to do that right now but if you give me a day I’ll be able to get the job done, and if you give me a week I’ll be an expert on it.”
This is the reason that our grads can go into literally any field. There are engineering physics grads who work typical engineering jobs at Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. But there are also a large amount of graduates who further their education in physics… or law school, medical school, neuroscience, you name it. Then there are the graduates who start their own companies.
“It gives you the ability to work on a project from every possible dimension. You know how to draft the design in CAD, you know how to design the electronic circuits, you know how to slap a neural net on that bad boy…”
It’s no surprise that a group of students with a very diverse skill set and camaraderie from going through a grueling 5 (or 6) years of school end up creating a start up business. There is usually one or two every year. With the amount of support that we get from our instructors and program director, it is no surprise that some of them actually succeed.
That’s the great thing about engineering physics. You never think of any career path as insurmountable or unreachable. Everything is an option, the only thing you have to do is choose. With that, I will end this with my favorite quote that I heard at a high school recruitment event presentation for engineering physics:
“Science is research and discovery. Engineering is invention and ingenuity. Engineering physics is both.”
joey gaffney 