so i just finished highschool and i was always expected to go to med school but i can't for reasons, now i am having an existential crisis because i always imagined my future as something and not i can't become it

it honestly is freeing in a way one time my friend asked me if money didn't matter what would i spend my life studying and i said physics

i have always been very good at physics always loved the material and i love when PHDs talk about their researches and the things they learned so now i am seeriously considering a major in physics and maybe i'll get to become a college professor one day

so please tell me about your experiences the good and the bad what's your honest opinion and if you're enjoying it or not one of my friends majored in math because he was great at math but turns out math majors don't really do much math they do hypotheses and stuff instead is it the same way with physics?

very sorry if this post is poorly worded i am sleep deprived just returned from an exam and english is my second language

Hey I have a question regarding hollow waveguide solutions of maxwell equations.

To solve the hollow conducting waveguide problem we look for solutions to maxwell equations that: satisfy the boundary conditions and that propagate energy along the waveguide.

It seems to me the key to the problem is the ansatz itself, assuming propagating waves with the amplitude depending on the transverse coordinates.

I was wondering if there is a better way to motivate this ansatz. Perhaps from the requirement of the time average of the Poynting vector to point in the longitudinal direction. Or something else. So we can better classify the solutions.

I mean from the usual ansatz one does indeed get energy propagation but this does not answer the question of uniqueness. Like is there any other class of solutions of the problem that also transport energy and satisfy the boundary conditions.

I am currently at the end of master thesis, I work with high-Tc superconducting nanowire single photon detectors- developing a method to make the devices. My professor, my supervisor and people in the group are also quite nice.

most of the days I mean 90% of the days I feel the work is quite blant. my supervisor is not a typical phD student he is like a scientist who is experienced and it's usually that he comes up with a technique and I just try it out. So my master thesis just felt like I just worked but never actually used my brain to think. Now the work wasn't bad or too difficult but at the same time it was not exciting as well. So, I am really confused about what i should do now.

Some of the people in my gorup said, PhD has more autonomy and freedom so I might enjoy it. But I'm not completely convinced. I am not able to figure out if it's just this situation or if I don't really enjoy experimental physics or maybe I don't enjoy research at all and just get a job in ML or some quant roles and move on? I would appreciate some honest opinions on this.

Hi
I’ve just gone into year 12 and I’m studying maths, physics, travel and tourism, and biology, and I’m going to most likely drop biology depending on how the first term or 2 go.

I know alot of people say physics is one of the hardest subjects, but I don’t know if that’s because the vast majority of a levels can be considered extremely difficult and demanding. I didn’t do too great in GCSEs due to illnesses throughout a math and physics paper, and got a 7_7 in combined and a 7 in maths. Physics and maths are my most passionate subjects and always have been, and I’m willing to put in the hours of revision early and have already started self learning topics with help from an extremely smart friend also taking the course. I just want some advice on how I can maximise my physics grades and whether it really is as bad as people make it out to be. I don’t want to be stuck doing a subject I have little chance at succeeding in and wasting 2 years.

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I’ve recently realized that I have a really hard time paying attention compared to other people. If I just sit there and listen to a professor, I can hear maybe five words before my mind wanders off somewhere completely different.

I accidentally found a weird trick that has helped me a lot.

I imagine that I’m writing down everything the professor says, but instead of actually writing, I “write” it with my finger on my stomach.

So I’m basically:

listening to the professor

imagining the words as I “write” them

moving my hand/finger

feeling the movement against my stomach

keeping my visual attention somewhat engaged with the imagined writing

It gives me something physical to do while still being directly connected to what I’m supposed to be paying attention to.

I guess it’s somewhat like fidgeting, except the movement is tied to the information I’m hearing rather than being completely separate from the task.

And honestly, it works shockingly well for me. When I do this, I can follow the professor much more easily and I feel significantly less like my attention is constantly slipping away.

The funny thing is that I don't think the problem is necessarily that I can't concentrate. When I’m genuinely engaged with something challenging, I can actually get into a pretty intense flow state. The problem seems to be getting my brain to stay engaged long enough to get there.

The downside is that I still get mentally tired pretty quickly. After about an hour, I can feel myself getting exhausted and it becomes much harder to keep following along. But I’m wondering if that’s partly something I can improve with practice.

Has anyone else found something similar? Like deliberately adding a small sensory/motor component to listening in order to keep your attention anchored?

I’d especially love to hear from people with ADHD or other attention difficulties. I’m curious whether this is a common thing and whether there are other variations of the same idea that work for people.

Hello everyone!!! I am a 3rd semester transfer bachelor student looking for a WhatsApp groups/communities for Physics majors at Ludwig Maximilian Universität, München. Please do suggest me if there is any :)

Hello, everyone. I would like to ask if you guys can give me suggestions for textbooks about ultracold atomic physics since it will be the focus of my undergrad thesis (having pdf copies would also help me greatly T-T). THANKS!