I started off as a Physics major in the 80s before switching to Mechanical Engineering. I was pretty far along in the Physics curriculum before making the switc

I started off as a Physics major in the 80s before switching to Mechanical Engineering. I was pretty far along in the Physics curriculum before making the switch and one of the most interesting things to me was the different approaches to the respective upper division Mechanics courses. The Physics version was the hardest course I experienced, spending hours coming up with closed form solutions. Rarely were any actual numbers used when solving these problems. On the M.E. side, once a sufficient set of equations were derived to model the problem we would use a computer to come up with a numerical solution that was close enough. The Physics course had no tests and consisted of roughly 30 problems we had our whole college career to complete. The M.E. course had tests where we were under time constraints to present a numerical answer. While the M.E. course was more "practical", the the I remember about the topic in general are retained from the Physics course. All that to say that I think there is a ton of value to a classic Physics curriculum but most of that value is indirect.