1. Obtain physics degree, 2. ?????, 3. PROFIT, or Experimental and Theoretical Physics

I recently graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen's University. Four years of virtually unwavering keenness and four summers of challenging but rewarding research seemed to leave no other option than the PhD. And while many of my colleagues were meticulously self-dissecting and weighing their options, I was pleased with what appeared to be a painless process.

But choosing a PhD barely filters the career spectrum. If anything, it applies a phase delay of 5-7 years and rolls off the tails a bit. Recently or soon-to-be-recently minted physics graduates have already applied a filter to the spectrum. However, as was probably an oft-cited feature of the physics degree, it is a broadband filter (for engineering physics, the filter is broader still). The ultimate destination for a physics or engineering physics major may lie in a range of industries: electronics, communications, petroleum, acoustics, medical imaging, teaching, finance or medicine (to name just a handful). It may also lie in academic research, in a dedicated research lab, or in some fusion of them all. And with the possible exception of the tenured professor, it may not even be useful to consider any destination remotely ultimate.

The bandwidth, B, of a physics degree filter is very large

Immediately, one can observe that the many-parameter space I've described, with all its possible wiggly traversals (not to mention start and end points), is beyond the scope of a single blog post. So, following the great tradition of spherical cows, I will consider instead the simpler problem of a relatively research-oriented student intending on probably pursuing an academic-track career or at least pursuing a PhD.

Spherical cows in a vacuum. 

The first question that comes up is then, well, should I be an experimental or theoretical physicist? 

Before discussing the recommendations, here they are. These are not as scientific as they may seem!

1. If you are absolutely, without the slightest doubt, certain you can and only ever could be a theoretical/experimental physicist, ignore that unless you've been through the steps 3-4 times already. If you are very certain you don't care, be an experimentalist.

2. Decide if you want to work in academia or industry and gauge how certain you are. If you are very uncertain or you very much want to work in industry, consider being an experimentalist.

3. Think about the people who are at the schools you've applied to and/or about the people within the field you would like to research in. Ideally, you would make a decision beforehand, and would choose accordingly a school, but many schools have many choices. If the top groups and/or top papers/authors in your school/research field are almost exclusively experimental or theoretical, you should probably do mostly that. 

4. Talk to graduate students who are doing theoretical or experimental work in the field you want to be in, at the school you want to go to or wherever. If you have done research with graduate students doing either sort of work, also think hard about that. 

5. If you are not an experimental or theoretical physicist, go back to step 1. 

ZapperZ, in his blog Physics and Physicists, has been making a case against the theoretical route. His biggest argument: supply and demand. He has recently brought up some empirical evidence for this by counting the job ads in the latest issues of Physics Today.