I don't know how it was in Heinlein's day, but I just compared the coursework I took for my undergrad degree (Electrical Engineering) with that necessary to have gotten a degree in Physics (which, at my school, would have been a BS in Liberal Arts with a Physics major).

I had sufficient coursework to have gotten a minor in Physics; I would only have had to apply to be a student in the college of Liberal Arts in parallel with being a student in the college of Engineering.

I took all the classes necessary to get a major in Physics except for a senior sequence in Quantum Mechanics (and I think I could make a pretty good argument that the solid state physics and optical electronics classes I took in EE would be a good substitute -- they covered much of the same ground).

You'd have to compare Heinlein's transcript with the contemporary degree requirements for a school that offered a Physics major, but I bet doing so would come up with a similar conclusion. Training as an engineer requires a broad foundation in physics. (When I applied for grad school in Physics, my undergrad degree in EE was just as acceptable a prerequisite as would have been an undergrad degree in Physics).

While it may be accurate to say that Heinlein wasn't trained as a physicist, he most certainly was trained in physics.

And the description of Heinlein's run at a grad degree in physics is on pp 171-172 in the bio, and those pages are available on Google Books:

Has a curriculum for USNA in that era ever been published?

I agree that most forms of engineering necessarily involve training in physics, and it's common today for physics majors to go into an engineering field (our oldest, for example, did so). I am not sure that your curriculum of a much later era compares to the specialized education at USNA in the 1920s; the biography snip you cite specifically mentions that they had to make changes to get in step with the rest of the college world by the 1930s. I would not be surprised to find their curriculum to be heavy on tradition and naval necessities and selective on general fields - that is, cadets were taught as much engineering and physics as they would need in their careers, not to make them employable (or even competitive) in the general job market.

I'm not trying to be an especial PITA, but I don't concede that "some training in physics" = "physicist"... or, frankly, I'd be one, too.

As for the UCLA stint... it looks like my assessment is correct. Much time convincing the school to even take him on, only part of a semester as a sit-in student before it fell apart. He probably "read to the physiks" more in his lifetime than he acquired much of worth in that short stint.

I feel quite certain that Heinlein never claimed to be a physicist. He claimed only formal training in and knowledge of engineering - but not a degree, since Annapolis did not offer such in his era, and was self-taught in higher mathematics, astronomics, ballistics, principles of physics, etc. He was of course widely read and doubtless knew more about some subjects than many folks with formal degrees.