<p>I’m an international student from Hong Kong, China who is currently in UCLA. I recently did a summer program in CERN along with some Physics students from all around Europe, some of which are in Imperial.</p>
<p>First of all, in GENERAL (i cannot stress this enough) in that in the science related field, Imperial trumps UCLA, while it is true UCLA has more funding and all that, but OP is doing Physics with THEORETICAL PHYSICS. So lab work is probably non-existent or at least done in much lower levels than normal physics students. In this case, funding doesn’t matter by that much in terms of quality of education. Imperial is also a world renowned (i know it is not known in the states) specialist science university and its rank</p>
<p>To the OP, if you want to work in the US-UCLA Europe-Imperial if you want to work in asia you say, neither would be really well known in the sense of HYP, oxbridge etc.</p>
<p>If you are serious about a career in science/tech choose Imperial, it has a bigger brand name in that field, much bigger than that of UCLA</p>