Physics at university - what jobs after?

[camilamoran]

This is inspired by tharsheblows thread asking about maths. My son is deciding between maths and physics and that thread came up with some really useful, real world information.

So - if any of you did Physics at university, what jobs did you end up with?

I studied physics with medical physics (ie mostly general physics, with a third year lecture series on medical physics), and went on to be a medical physicist specialising in radiotherapy, working in hospital to create plans for cancer patients, check that they got the right dose and lots of other things. I now work for the company that makes the treatment machines, and initially I travelled the world training doctors and physicists to use them, and now I work with our engineers to develop new software and hardware to do better treatments.

I love, love, love it, and physics can lead to so many different careers - from the people I studied with there are astrophysicists, science educators, teachers, people in the nuclear industry, sound engineers, people working in financial modelling just to name a few

I know of one Physics graduate who runs a very successful Consultancy advising hedge funds and the like who recruits only Imperial Physic graduates.

I have a book by Trotman about choosing A levels and careers etc. The entry for Physics says the following jobs are particularly suitable
Electronics Engineer
Geoscientist
Medical Physicist
Materials Engineer
Meteorologist
Research Scientist
Scientific laboratory technician
Secondary school teacher
Forensic Scientist
Scientific journalist
Systems analyst
Technical author
Technical sales engineer

The list of what jobs a physics graduate can't do would be much shorter.