Why study physics and not engineering?

Nowadays, more and more people seem to be asking the question "Should I study physics or engineering?" 

From my experience in the United States, engineering majors such as electrical and computer engineering (ECE), mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and aerospace engineering are extremely popular with young people. As an engineering student, your future career options are relatively straightforward, since you become an expert in a specific field with a great selection of potential employers in industry. In other words, as an aerospace engineer you will most likely end up in industries in which you design and build aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, missiles or related applications. No big surprise. Certainly, this is also true for the German system as well as for the rest of the world.  

Now, you may even ask the following questions: Why would companies want to hire physicists if there are specialists from engineering disciplines who have been trained for several years to work in this field? For example, why would Intel, TSMC, or ASML need to hire a PhD in physics instead of an electrical engineer or materials scientist? One reason is given by the fact that physicists develop unique problem solving skills during their time at a university. They have obtained a broad overview of their field and are typically very open-minded to be confronted with problems they have never faced before, which they can approach in many creative ways. 

There are a lot more good reasons to choose studying physics instead of an engineering major! In the following, we are going to list further arguments for picking physics over engineering. 

• Physicists are smart (no offense, dear engineering friends -- you are, too) and curious to understand the details of processes in nature. In contrast to engineers, they learn, on a very fundamental level, how things really work and not just how to apply certain skills and laws of nature. Furthermore, they might be able to handle math on a level that engineers are not accustomed to.
• As a physics student, you have the choice. After a couple of semesters where you learn about about classical physics, you can dive into completely different subfields such as atomic physics, high energy physics, condensed matter physics or astrophysics. You can even switch to another subfield at a later time. This gives you great flexibility and opens up the possibility to explore different disciplines.
• Sometimes, especially as an experimental physicist you end up being something like a multi-engineer: solving grounding issues in electrical circuits, analyzing gigabytes of new data, turning screws, and coding a new measurement software for the laboratory. All of these tasks may have to be tackled by a physicist on the very same day. 
• Physics is a good choice for people who like breadth. Engineers become experts in their respective subfields, but they enjoy a rather narrow education.
• Physicists learn how to solve problems. Really hard problems. That's why they are also great candidates for challenging jobs in banks, insurances or consulting firms. 
• Applied physics and engineering are closer than one might think. Therefore, there is a considerable overlap between physics and engineering -- you don't need to be too worried that you can't switch between different fields. There even exist majors like "engineering physics" and "applied physics" if you want to have the best of both worlds.

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons to study physics. A last piece of advice that I would like to give at this point is to do something that I, unfortunately, have not done myself. Namely, especially as a physicist you should take the chance to do internships and gain insights into companies that may be of interest for your future career. Try to understand where you can apply your skills and become valuable as a physicist after graduating.