College of Science and Engineering Physics

Physics is the foundational science upon which all other natural sciences and most types of engineering are built. This makes physics the most diverse and applicable technical major you can have. Physicists work to deeply understand the smallest things, the biggest things, the oldest things, the newest things and everything in between. People with physics degrees or who worked as physicists invented such major innovations as electric power, the electric battery, the electric motor, radio, X-ray imaging, the mass spectrometer, the electronic digital computer, NMR and MRI, PET scanning, the nuclear reactor, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the laser, the first video game, wireless LAN, and the World-Wide Web. 

Our Physics Department graduates have been finding interesting technical jobs or have gone on for further graduate study in physics, astronomy, geophysics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and biomedical fields. We have graduates flying converted spy planes for NASA, working as engineers and physicists for private corporations, government labs and universities, and programming computers or managing computer networks.

In recent years, we have sent SU physics major graduates to PhD programs in physics, mechanical engineering, planetary sciences, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering and mathematics at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UC San Diego, Arizona, Ohio State, UC Santa Barbara, Michigan, Oregon, Vanderbilt, Penn State, Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Purdue and San Diego State.

See physicists employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Here