What does an applied physics course cover?

Varies a lot depending on the application. Sometimes you can do a sandwich corse which gives time at university and one term per year in industry.

First year may start with electrostaitcs and with vectors. grad, div, curl in connection with vector fields such as gravitational ones and electrostatic fields too.

Later on, maybe a course in acoustics, or medical physics or whatver the trend is in 2018.

Being apprenticed to a comaplny and being helped through university that way could be a good idea.