Rileys Freaky Fridays

In the first few years, the physics and math requirements will be similar but once you hit junior year(or maybe even earlier), you branch off into different sections.

There’s actually a few courses listed under “Financial Math” and that’s more business oriented and totally useless for physics majors. I’m going to be declaring my major as an applied math soon. I just need to finish up calculus 3.

It won’t be hard to find jobs with those types of degrees. People are always looking for math, physics, and engineering majors. I suggest you go to those career fairs they hold on campus for more job information. Be sure to carry your resume with you. You never know if your life time career is waiting for you.

Give yourself a full year before you determine whether you want to be a physics or math major. Once you start focusing on a single major, it’ll be really hard to switch over. By hard I mean, you would have taken classes that you didn’t need.

In applied mathematics you’re generally looking for special case solutions for canonical problems which have been around forever. A friend of mine from grad school spent almost a year figuring out ballistic correction formula for a fire control computer in a ‘look down-shoot down” gunnery system (it had to include such things as correction for Coriolis force, etc.)
I, myself, have been involved with applications of things such as coding theory, linear (and non-linear) adaptive correcting and predicting systems, and a lot of applications of difference equations to digital signal processing, tracking systems, and scientific instrumentation.
Just remember that mathematics is the whore of the sciences. Wherever there is research money, there’s where you’ll find mathematicians (applied or otherwise) ?
And understand…. I have graduate degrees in math -and- physics ?

HTH,
Doug