I don't consider myself particularly interesting, but I would say my interests are vastly different from the average guy on dating apps
I don't know how to say this without sounding pretentious, but I prefer intellectual conversation over nights at the bar or whatever. I just want to be able to share the thoughts I have floating around my head with someone, ya know? When I'm not on hexbear.net, I play guitar, draw, write and enjoy analyzing different types of media and digging into the meaning of stuff
Stream of consciousness slop, I know, but I'm super high and my thoughts are firing off. Can anyone relate or see where I'm coming from?
That does sound like a pretty neat job, how did you get into it? And do you have a degree in something like physics or engineering, if you don't mind me asking?
Yeah, physics. I was mostly interested broadly in electromagnetism, optics, and engineering. And a professor at the school I am at, that is now my thesis advisor, works on developing instrumentation for niche astronomy applications. Which also required a lot of custom device work, which seemed fun. It seemed like a good fit, and not what I initially thought I would do going into grad school.
Yeah that sounds really neat. I'm in an engineering program atm and while the professional opportunities make me feel generally optimistic, the material in the physics major just seems a lot cooler, you know?
I'm going for a physics minor as well but also I think about changing my major at least once every two weeks, lol. Open to any thoughts you might have about that.
Well, it depends what you want to do. You can do more with a Bachelors/Masters with engineering and you should have some freedom to take some interesting physics classes. If you do well enough in undergrad and get some contacts and practical skills you can still get some STEM/office job that will at least pay the bills with the physics degree, but probably not be that related to your physics degree and making less than with an engineering degree. If you are thinking about grad school/Ph.D. then I would say you would be better off going physics, because then you want to be doing something you find interesting and if you are not going into academia, most of the Ph.D. jobs will be more focused on your research skills and ability to "investigate" than the exact thing you studied in your thesis, though there is still a wage gap between engineering and physics Ph.D.s
Something else I would recommend looking into is an applied physics or "engineering physics" major/program depending on what your university offers. That seems to align with your interests and at least from anecdotes of my friends that did that, it seems to have a lot of the job opportunities of engineering while still taking the core physics classes. And applied physics can be pretty broad, from mostly electrical engineering (e.g. making lower noise electronics, with some insight from solid state physics) to building devices for quantum computing, or stuff like my work making detectors for astronomy.