My self-study plan for electrical engineering

I'm a physicist too, and learned electronics on my own. I don't have an engineering job title, but have done fairly extensive design work. In my workplace, I'm the go-to person for anything analog and quantitative, such as figuring out a noise budget for a measurement system, as well as for figuring out how to prove that it actually works. Horowitz and Hill had a chapter entitled "digital meets analog," and there should be another chapter, "analog meets physics."

Like others have said, there's a lot of overlap, especially for experimental physicists, which is what I studied. The stuff that makes studying engineering hard for a lot of students is the math and physics.

There are subjects that we don't learn in physics, such as control theory. Yes, that's worth learning. I defer to engineers for really hard feedback control problems. My approach is instead, to design the hardware so its physical characteristics make the control problem easy. That's not always possible.

One reason why we can find a way to fit in, is the huge diversity within engineering itself, leaving some niches that look a lot like what physicists do. When I taught in an engineering department for one semester, the professors always had their latest papers posted outside their office doors, and I noticed that one prof seemed to publish everything in Physical Review.

Out in the work world, a lot of people with engineering job titles don't really do engineering: They can be quite busy and productive, and rewarded, for basically arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, dealing with vendors, and so forth. In fact, they can get so busy at that stuff that they forget their math and theory, leaving the physicist as the go-to "math person" when a quantitative problem needs to be solved.

Then there are what I call the real engineers, for whom the engineering skill is accompanied by an attitude and discipline about making things safe, reliable, maintainable, and traceable to documented and published information. These are the ones who won't accept a measured value, but need to see it guaranteed on a data sheet. I'm not that kind of engineer, and I admit it. And we definitely need that kind of engineer for systems that potentially involve public safety or massive economic liability.

How much time does this person have to devote to this?

I’m kind of self-trained in EE. It is important to have basic courses in Signals & Systems and logic design. The former, in particular, is not something that you are likely to acquire on your own. You and I share a love for Purcell. However it has little to do with EE. It is a physics book, and EE is not physics. You will never use or need to even know that the magnetic field arises from a relativistic transformation of the linear charge density of a current. I have a recommendation. Become an expert in LTSpice. Also, for about $2k, you can assemble a nice lab of Chinese scope, power supply, multimeter, soldering station, selection of ICs, resistors, caps, and a power supply. And if you are going digital, you need to learn VHDL.