<p>Hi everyone</p>
<p>I'm a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering, although I wish it were aerospace eng but my school doesn't offer that. I'm interested in researching propulsion. Could I do this with a major in mechanical engineering?</p>
<p>Also if I went to grad school for a phd in aero, is it possible to be a researcher in industry? I've heard that industry would rather hire people with an undergrad degree or ms. Is this true?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
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<p>Yes and no. If you go straight from an undergrad to a masters this may put you in ‘no mans land’.
For jobs intended for new college grads you are educationally overqualified, or demanding a higher salary than an undergrad. There is the distinct possibility you will jump ship for a position better suited to someone with a masters. Think of the college grad that can’t get a job at Starbucks. They know he’ll leave as soon as he’s offered something where he can use that degree.
You have no job experience, other than a possible internships, which makes you educated, but unqualified for positions traditionally intended for someone with a masters.</p>
<p>In my experience, a masters in engineering is never a drawback - most places that will hire a BS will hire an MS, and almost always at a higher position and/or pay grade. Of course, they will expect more than they would of a BS engineer, and they will presume a certain level of expertise in some certain area, but none of that is unreasonable.</p>
<p>Industry hires lots of PhD’s, but it can be chancier. Getting your PhD makes you the world expert in some specialty, and in engineering there are usually several companies interested in exploiting that specialty. The downside is that at this level the increased degree of specialization makes you undesirable to most other companies - while an MS will get hired away from their thesis specialty, a PhD often won’t.</p>
<p>Oh, and MechE for spacecraft propulsion should not be a problem - most propulsion systems are designed by MechE’s, or at least heavily involve them. You have to remember that Aerospace is a multi-disciplinary field that really aggregates specialties of several other disciplines and them adds a few specialized bits of its own. There are very very few jobs or research areas in Aerospace that cannot be done by another field. If you feel your school does not offer enough in this area you can certainly do a masters somewhere else that does.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if I really agree with that, even on the undergraduate level. While ME’s curriculum closely mirrors that of AeroE’s, there are many topics and applications in Aerospace that undergrad ME’s do not learn about or barely touch upon… without taking Aero electives that is.</p>
<p>And yet, there are certain areas, like propulsion, fluids, materials, dynamics… where the only think keeping an ME from doing the job is nomenclature. I think that covers all of the bases for Aero’s major branches. Really, the difference between the two is nomenclature and examples. Given a bright student, it doesn’t take long to go from one to the other.</p>
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I started out in aerospace, and my experience was that the majority of aerospace topics were simply specific applications of other disciplines of engineering, generally mechanical. For example, aerospace control systems are an amalgam of electrical and mechanical engineering. Propulsion is almost always mechanical engineering. Aerospace structures is either structural or mechanical engineering. Fluid dynamics is usually a mechanical subject, although aerodynamics is studied in depth only in aerospace. Orbital mechanics is a fundamental physics subject, but in engineering is only really studied by aerospace.</p>
<p>The only reason mechanical engineers never study most of this is simply because they do not need to - it is a specialized area that most of them never need. Graduate aerospace departments routinely accept undergrad ME’s, and many graduate aerospace projects are performed in conjunction with other departments. For that matter, I work for an aerospace company and I have yet to see any aerospace program that really involved even a plurality of aerospace engineers.</p>
<p>Thanks for the tips guys</p>