my UChicago physics degree was a waste of time

Reflecting on my last four years in college

Tomorrow, I’m going to graduate with a physics degree from the University of Chicago. I’m very grateful for the experiences that I’ve had, the privilege of my education, and the opportunity to learn at one of the best schools in the country.

But. Now that I’m through it. I wish I hadn’t majored in physics.

Why physics?

See, going into college, it was my goal to become a physics professor. I liked physics (or so I thought), I liked teaching, and I figured that being a professor would be a good, low-stress career that still paid pretty well.

Many other posts have dissected why academia is screwed as a profession, and why PhDs are often not a great idea. That’s an important thing to talk about, but I’m not going to get into that here—because it didn’t really make a difference in my decisions. See, the thing is, I don’t really like physics that much.

I mean, I was decent enough at it. I was always good at math, and I’ve ended up being just sort of an average physics student here at UChicago (which is pretty good in my books!) but I don’t really love the subject.

When you’re good at math, a path for the future sort of unrolls itself at your feet, and you’re expected to follow it. It’s not like I didn’t like physics at all. I remember reading a History of Time by Stephen Hawking and loving it. But what I didn’t realize was that I didn’t care about the math part of physics. It was the philosophy stuff that really interested me. What was the universe like before the Big Bang? What is dark matter made out of? If quantum mechanics implies that the universe is fundamentally random, what does that mean for our perception of determinism versus free will? And so on and so forth.

But, STEM was all the rage those days, so I eventually pushed down my fascination with politics and philosophy and history and all that good stuff. I pigeonholed myself into physics, put my head down, and took the path that I thought would lead to “success”. I figured that if I just slogged through, it would eventually take me to where I wanted to be, and that would be that.

All I had to do was follow the path laid out for me, and then I’d be happy.

But it doesn’t work like that.

See, UChicago’s physics major has a weird problem with difficulty scaling. The first year of the physics major is split up into honors track physics and normal track physics. That makes sense—take the kids who already know multivariable calculus and put them into honors, and take the kids who don’t and teach them normal physics first. But the thing is, we’re all lumped together in our second year, and are already expected to know multi.

To be fair, everyone takes some amount of multi in their 1st year as a physics major, but it still makes the difficulty scaling impossible for professors: problems are either too easy for the honors kids, too hard for the normal kids, or both at the same time! Because of this, the first class in the second year of the physics major—intermediate mechanics—is infamous for being a true gatekeeper class. If you can pass that class, you can probably finish out the rest of the major. And if you can’t, well, you should probably switch while you still can—early second year is more than enough time to do a second major.

But I was determined. More accurately, I was a zombie robot following the path laid out for me, the path that I thought my parents wanted me to take and that everyone else thought I should take and honestly it would just be best if I stopped thinking about it so hard and did the stupid thing.

By the end of my third year, I had slogged through so much physics major nonsense that I was ready to throw in the towel. I swapped out my physics electives for computer science electives so that I wouldn’t have to take any more real physics classes, and I put in the minimum possible amount of effort into my lab classes. I was free from physics, and I was so indescribably happy about it.

This left me at an impasse. If not physics, what else was I supposed to do?

Thinking about careers

Last summer, I read 80,000 Hours’ career guide, and it really affected the way I thought about my future and my career.¹

80,000 is the average number of hours someone works in their career. That’s 40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours.

If you want to have a positive impact with your life, your choice of career is probably your best opportunity to do that.

And I don’t know about you, but I personally want to have a positive impact with my life. I care about the world, I care about people, and I generally think that doing good is a good thing.

Crazy, I know.

Physics is cool, but it can have pretty indirect impacts on the world. Maybe I could slave away in a lab somewhere and invent some technology that would change the world, but the odds of that seemed pretty low.

More importantly, I didn’t even like physics at this point! The chances of me doing anything cool in physics would be pretty low even if I liked the subject. And at this point, I was so sick of it. I was lucky enough to intern at a nanomaterials lab in the summer of my junior year, and that job was everything I could’ve asked for. Great bosses, great coworkers, relaxed hours, everything. I even left them a favorable review on Glassdoor.

The only problem was that I really did not like lab work. And because my workplace was so good, I had nothing else left to blame. I simply could not deal with working in a lab for the rest of my life.

So, that was off the table.

The next thing I considered was working some high-paying job, like trying to be a consultant or quant. I in theory liked the idea of earning to give as presented by 80,000 Hours. It’s not like they came up with the idea—getting rich so that you can give all your wealth away is an old concept.

And I mean, look. This sort of thing definitely works for some people. There’s nothing wrong with getting a job that you don’t really care about, working a 9-5 to make a living and support yourself or your family, and then pursuing your interests or passions or hobbies after work. But I don’t think I’d be able to do that—at least, as long as I didn’t have to. I can’t stomach the idea of wasting away 80,000 hours of my life in some cubicle working on something that I didn’t really care about just so that I could maximize some unintuitive metric of moral utilitarianism.

So that idea was off the table too.

The only option left for me

Was to follow my dreams.

In fourth year, I took two spectacular classes that changed the trajectory of my life.

The first was a class on religion, politics, and the American consciousness. It was called The Election Race of 2024. It would only be taught once ever, because the class followed the 2024 election very specifically. That class changed the way I thought about politics, civic duty, and public opinion. It changed me from a cynical observer to a very, very interested party.

For the first time, I got involved in a political campaign, doing phone banking for the Wisconsin Democrats. I remember talking to people, trying to gauge their political affiliations, and realizing that I didn’t really have a great argument for voting for Kamala Harris beyond “Trump bad”. I remember reading assigned readings, understanding some new facet of the news cycle or the practice of politics, and then seeing that facet play out in real-time in class and throughout the next few months. I remember watching the November 5th election past midnight, and the sinking feeling of despair rolling in as the votes got counted.

I remember being so mad at the Harris campaign for bungling it so badly, at the Democrats for not holding a primary, at Biden for not stepping down like he said he would. After that class, and that election, I knew that I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore. I had to get involved in politics somehow. I had to throw my hat into the ring. But I didn’t know how.

That’s where the second class comes in. Policy Implementation delved into the nitty gritty of public policy, not in policy analysis or design but in the actual workings of how policy gets implemented. See, as someone with an academic interest in policy and politics, I’d been viewing things from the top-down, looking at policy as written instead of policy as realized in material form and projected onto the physical world. I began to appreciate just how much work a government requires, and the hundreds of thousands of people across the country working tirelessly and thanklessly to keep the water running and the lights on. I even did a months-long case study on the Chicago Transit Agency, and wrote probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Honestly, it’s not even that good from a writing perspective. It’s just that the content is some of the most interesting, frustrating, and fascinating information that I’ve ever run into. I’m almost certainly going to talk about it in the future.

At the same time, DOGE sprang into existence, and took a wrecking ball to the federal government. At that point, I decided. I wanted to work in local government, either in Chicago or Illinois. I knew I’d be starting from the bottom with basically no experience in policy or politics, but it didn’t matter. I’d be making enough money to support myself, and I’d be doing something I really cared about. And that was good enough for me.

For the first time in a long time, I’m satisfied with where I’m going. I even like networking now—I just get to talk to people about their jobs and policy and politics, and it’s great. Way better than networking for quant or computer science, which I don’t really give a shit about. I’m now interning with the local government in Cook County. I’m hoping to convert it to a full-time offer. If I can’t, I’ll have to look for something else. But I know what I want, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get it.

So what did I get from my physics degree?

It’s nice to say that I got a physics degree from UChicago. At least it turns heads.

I have some pretty good quantitative skills. I can code, which is nice, although a lot of that came from extraneous classes and projects I worked on that had nothing to do with the physics major.

Physics didn’t help me with writing at all—that was a result of UChicago’s amazing core, which had me reading and writing for basically every year of my college career. What a lucky stroke on my part!

But the most important thing I got from my physics degree was the understanding that I don’t want to do physics.

See, I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had I switched my major to something else. I have this suspicion that if I’d done political science from the beginning, I might have been confronted by an overly academic and still-too-mathy perspective, and might’ve even lost interest in that. I could still be wondering whether physics would’ve been the right decision or not.

This way, I know I gave it my all. My decision not to pursue physics didn’t stem from a lack of ability, but a lack of desire.

Listen. I know this title was a little clickbaity. My bad.

But you really should’ve known this was a clickbait title just by looking at it. And to be fair, the skills I learned in physics, all that work I did, none of it is really that helpful to me anymore. If I never see a Lagrangian or Fourier Transform again, I’ll die a happy man.

So I guess the physics degree was a waste of time. But I’m happy that I did it. If you aim to live your life with no regrets, you’re probably going to avoid taking a lot of chances that are really worth taking. And if I’d never given it my all at physics, I might’ve stayed curious and regretful for the rest of my life. I had to know. And now I do!

Sometimes, the only way to know is to waste your time.

1. side note: 80,000 Hours has recently pivoted from general career advice to being mostly AI-safety-pilled, but their career advice is still excellent and I would recommend their career guide to anyone under the age of 22 and also everyone above the age of 22 seriously you should just read it.

If you want a less AI-focused guide, Probably Good is also, uh, pretty good.