<p>Hello! I'm in the process of picking a major for my undergrad degree and plan on going for my masters afterword, life permitting. I'm torn because I was thinking of getting a bachelors in PetroleumE and then a masters in AeroE, but would the other way around be better? I'm trying to set myself up to have a backup career if one suddenly stops hiring/the oil industry is magically taken over by solar overnight/flying purple people eaters box us off from space forever. So which field is it best to have a masters degree in? Thanks!</p>
<p>That’s by a good way to choose a degree. Choose the one that interests you the most and go with it. For one, the two disciplines only slightly overlap and the amount of work to go from one as an undergraduate to the other as a graduate student would be obnoxious but doable. More importantly, the most important degree to job prospects is your highest degree, so, for example, if you have a BS in aerospace and an MS in petroleum, it’s going to hurt you in trying to get into an aerospace job.</p>
<p>I like them both. I was originally going to try to double major but my university isn’t going to let me (both are under enrolment control). I am a little concerned about being over-qualified or ah, multi-qualified or whatever the term is, but last I heard some people will simply leave out their higher degrees when they write their resumes. No idea how that works but at least I wouldn’t have to go back to school after being out for a year or two. I guess what I was wondering was if one field basically won’t hire you without a masters or the masters in the other is currently useless or something, is all.</p>
<p>You don’t need a master’s degree in either of those fields, and to my knowledge a master’s degree offers esentially no benefit over a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering. I’d still advise against this approach, however. You can work in petroleum with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering anyway, so why waste your time and money getting two degrees?</p>
<p>This may be a dumb question, but you can work in one with a degree in the other? How? The classes for Aero that are on the curriculum at my school seem extremely specialized.</p>
<p>The classes for petroleum are very specialized, too. Fortunately, it is all based on F = ma and other rather “universal” laws of physics. If yo have the basic concepts down, the rest is just a host of applications examples. Clearly having a degree in the area of specialty for the job you want usually helps, but in industries like petroleum where all they want is a lot of good engineers, they tend to cast a wide net. I have multiple mechanical and aerospace engineering friends working for the likes of Exxon, Chevron, Halliburton and Baker Hughes.</p>
<p>I’ve never really understood this hedging by engineering students. If you work in the aerospace industry for 15 years and the industry goes belly up, you are going to have an extremely difficult time just switching over to oil and gas (and vice versa). Nobody is going to care that you got a degree 15 years ago.</p>
<p>On the petroleum side, there are certain companies that value a masters degree (mostly all revolving around reservoir engineering), but for the most part a BS degree is more than enough.</p>
<p>You have to figure out which field YOU would like to work in best. Try to see what kind of work day/work environment/ etc either field will have you in. If you don’t like the job, you won’t perform well, and that means your career will not be optimum.
It’s my impression that PetEng vs AeroEng are actually quite different work environments.</p>
<p>Thank you all for your input! I’m definitely going to look more into both fields to get an idea what the work environment will be like when I get the chance. I had the impression that Petroleum Engineering really didn’t require a masters but I wanted to make sure. As for the hedging, I’d be surprised if it was a trend only in engineering. A lot of this generation’s college students have watched their parents and grandparents who worked in extremely specialized fields end up working at Walmart or as cleaning staff when their jobs went away. It’s probably not the best of plans to get two separate degrees, but it makes me feel better and probably others too.</p>
<p>I am a petroleum engineering student. we share a lot of the same classes with the mechanical engineering students and like others said, you can work in petroleum with an aerospace degree but it might be a bit harder to get your first job. one thing to consider too is that for petroleum, you have to work where the oil is, so if you aren’t interested in moving you might want to reconsider. Also, a lot of students are having a hard time finding an internship, even though they majored in petroleum, and i know a few students who graduated last year and haven’t found a job in the oil industry. however, I don’t know the full story about that… are they not will to move? not putting out enough resumes? </p>
<p>if you think you are going to enjoy calculating how fluid flows underground pick petroleum. another option is to see if your school will let you take a minor in petroleum. </p>
<p>If you are really concerned about the future, I have to suggest you take a look at chemical engineering.</p>
<p>ChemE can work in oil and aerospace designing new types of furls and mass producing them. Even if you cant break into these fields there are a million other jobs that would want you from investment banking to agriculture just because of your major choice.</p>
<p>There are very few chemical engineers working in aerospace. There just isn’t a huge need for most skills chemical engineers provide.</p>