One thing, if you have your heart set on grad school, you should call the Associate Dean of Recruiting at CREOL and somewhere in the University of California System, Like the college that hosts Shugi Nakamura's lab and ask if he/rarely she wants physics or engineering types.
Grad schools can be funny that way, because I will agree that ENG pays the bills and gets the work, but sometimes the brain trust sees it in a different way... Its the same math, about the same courses, and most quantum mechanics types can do any branch of ENG if they set their mind to it, but they get peanuts unless they score a breakthrough or a really, really, good dozen patents..
ENG really pays, physics pays big time the few times it does pay.. But unless you are at a national/military lab, the pay is very much fixed plus small COLA unless you are a very, very, lucky physicist..
ENG profs usually get 200-250K lab startup money at a decent research II school. Physics profs have to beg for 40-50K.
For example, at my old place,big public university with beaucoup research, long term physics prof with tenure was fixing his own late 80s rust heaps in 2005, while the chem guys and engineers were driving Lexus or new minivans.....
Signed, former Graduate School Technical Employee......
Steve
Qui habet Christos, habet Vitam!
I should have rented the space under my name for advertising.
When I still could have...