About half of our majors go on to graduate school in physics or related areas, and the rest take jobs in business, industry, or government laboratories immediately upon graduation from Lafayette. To our knowledge, every physics major who has wished to pursue graduate work in physics in the last 25 years has been accepted into a graduate degree program.
Lafayette College alumni/ae who graduated in the past dozen or so years with majors in physics have gone on to graduate work in a number of fields at a wide variety of institutions and now hold quite an assortment of positions. Students have enrolled in graduate programs in physics at University of Chicago, Clemson University, Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Delaware, University of Iowa, Lehigh University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University, University of Texas at Austin, and Washington State University; in Earth and space science at SUNY Stony Brook; in oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in applied mathematics at Brown University and Northwestern University; in science and pulic policy at MIT; in English at the University of Washington; in physical chemistry at the University of Chicago; and in medicine at the University of Cincinnati, University of Pittsburgh, Case University, and University of California at San Diego. One of our alumni has just completed his Ph.D. thesis research under the direction of Dr. Jerome Friedman, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics. Another was awarded the Gregor Wentzel prize in recognition of his excellence as a Graduate Student Tutor at the University of Chicago.
Physics alumni/ae now hold, or have recently held, positions at the Naval Air Development Center, in small software companies, in the Peace Corps, in the U.S. Air Force, at ATT Research Laboratories, at Teledyne C.A.E., at IBM, at Alpha Industries, at Dow Chemical, at Gulfstream Aerospace, at Lucas Aerospace, at Fairchild Industries, at Science Applications International Corp., at Sherwin Williams, at the University of Hartford, at Physical Sciences, Inc., at United Technologies Research, at GTE, at Kearfott Guidance & Navigation Corp., in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and at Westinghouse Electric Corp., among others. Job titles include Engineer, Manager of Innovative Technology, Professor, Technical Writer, Systems Analyst, Patent Examiner, Senior Scientist, President & CEO, Engineering Manager, District Manager, and Trustee of Lafayette College.
There is a wide variety of interdisciplinary graduate programs open to physics majors. The large bulletin board in the basement hallway in Hugel Science Center displays flyers from graduate schools who have contacted us in search of physics majors. At your leisure, browse through them to see how a foundation in physics can prepare you for graduate work not only in all branches of pure and applied physics, but also in materials science, engineering (all fields), meteorology and atmospheric sciences, medicine and bioscience, business, oceanography, geology and planetary sciences, astronomy, education, and communication. In virtually all of these fields, students can be supported during their graduate study by teaching or research assistantships, or other employment which usually provide free tuition and stipends for basic living expenses.
An annual survey by the American Institute of Physics shows that of more than 5000 students receiving bachelor's degrees in physics each year, about 30% pursue graduate study in physics, 20% go into graduate study in other fields, and the rest seek employment immediately after graduation.