<p>I was accepted to Rutgers University. I want to do Aerospace Engineering. They technically have it. They have an Aerospace Concentration instead. Would it be a good idea to take this offer? (Here is their curriculum and details: Mechanical</a> and Aerospace Engineering)</p>
<p>They also have a BS-MS 5 year option too. Lastly, if I wanted to go to grad school, it's the GPA that counts, not always the school, correct?</p>
<p>You should look at the ABET web site for accredited programs in AE. Incidentally, I suspect that with the appropriate coursework, it may not necessarily matter to employers if your B.S. is Aerospace, or B.S Mechanical with Aerospace concentration. Just guessing.</p>
<p>You really don’t have to worry about whether that degree is an ABET accredited aerospace degree because it isn’t, it is an ABET accredited mechanical degree. You can get into aerospace positions just fine with a mechanical engineering degree, especially if you take the aerospace related electives.</p>
<p>I majored in mechanical engineering in undergrad and took my electives in compressible fluids and viscous flow and a few others and came out with internship experience and full time job offers at major aerospace companies. I ended up going to grad school for aerospace instead.</p>
<p>Long story short, if you like Rutgers, this program is perfectly capable of getting you into an aerospace company of graduate school.</p>
<p>Thank you and besides, if my grades are well, I can always transfer. :)</p>
<p>go mech-eng. aerospace engineering will pigeonhole you into making bombs all day, as it is primarily a euphemism for defense contracting. of course if that’s your dream, by all means :P</p>
<p>That is a bit of a ridiculous overgeneralization, don’t you think?</p>
<p>dont do Aero E, or analogously Bio Med, Arch E, Petrol, etc. for undergrad. get the ME undergrad degree and go straight into either of those industries or go to grad school for them. Delegate tech elective appropriately too don’t wast them.</p>
<p>Trust me, there are times where AeroE is worth it. For example, if he wants to do aerodynamics, it would be beneficial to have that AeroE background instead of ME. ME programs essentially spend about 1 week covering potential flow and don’t strictly require vcompressible flow. Usually, compressible works as a tech elective buy potential doesn’t because it is a 300-level (or whatever system a particular school uses) class and they only allow 400-level classes to count. You can go from MechE into aerodynamics but there is a learning curve, as I found out first hand. Still, if he is unsure, MechE is the way to go.</p>
<p>I cannot answer this from a MechE/Aero perspective but from a curriculum perspective, there is nothing wrong with majoring in the broad program and specializing in something else.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>A Math major with a concentration in Computer Science will be considered for the positions as the Computer Science major.</p></li>
<li><p>A Math major with a concentration in Operations Research will be considered for the same positions as the Operations Research major.</p></li>
<li><p>The EE major with a CompE concentration will be considered for the same positions as the CompE major.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>First of all, you gotta do what you have passion in. Engineering is hard, and unless you really love it, you won’t make it through your program.</p>
<p>But if you are weighing the two equally (I have no idea if you are), I’d go with Mechanical Engineering over Aerospace Engineering. Mechanical engineers can work everywhere, including at aerospace companies. But an aerospace engineer would have a hard time convicing John Deere that they should get hired to design tractors. And they might be the only company hiring.</p>
<p>Aerospace is a cyclical industry and if you graduate during a down cycle, it’s nearly impossible to get a job. But with an aerospace engineering degree, it’d be nearly impossible to get a job at a non-aerospace company.</p>
<p>Just some musing on the above… if you know what you want to do, you’d likely be best majoring in the appropriate subject(s). That a MechEng can be considered for an AeroEng job does not necessarily mean that the MechEng will be as attractive as the AeroEng for the same job. I would agree that MechEng is the “safer” degree in the sense that I perceive it to have a more diverse set of applications and career options, but if you want to do the AeroEng bread-and-butter, there’s no better preparation for that than AeroEng. Ditto for any other field…</p>
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<p>you are right; there are a few non-weapon jobs at NASA, and sometimes you design airplanes with a completely civilian bent. but the vast majority of money (and hence work) is in the weapons/defense/military field. it can be a fun field but some people might not make the connection that an aerospace engineering major will likely put you in there, and some don’t find the industry morally acceptable.</p>
<p>Bombs != weapons/defense/military</p>
<p>AeroE’s work on a lot of weapon SYSTEMS, which means that most of the jobs don’t have anything to do with the actual weapon part. People work on the aerodynamics of planes, the propulsion, structures, weights and balances, dynamics and controls and everything in between, which covers a lot more than just bombs. In fact, most bomb work would actually be done by mechanical engineers outside of the aerodynamic design.</p>
<p>Saying they get stuck working on bombs is like saying that a mechanical engineer gets stuck working on car seats or an electrical engineer gets stuck working on transistors or a civil engineer gets stuck working on I-beams.</p>
<p>i was speaking from a philosophical viewpoint; your job is to help kill people, whether you designed the actual bomb, the fuel injector module, or the stealthy airfoil.</p>
<p>Philosophy is a funny thing. You could also argue that if you are working on weapons, you are, in fact, preventing the deaths of people. Often in history, the threat of major armed conflict and loss of life has deterred different nations/organizations/groups from starting a conflict in the first place. This is obviously not always true, as we still have wars, but if you look at the Cold War just as an example, the threat of destruction kept both sides at bay and prevented a catastrophic war. Really, it would be just as easy to argue that as a “weapon designer” you are actually tasked with preventing deaths as it is to argue that you are tasked with killing people.</p>
<p>For me personally, I tend to see it as two sides of the same coin. People will always fight. People will always want power. People will always be greedy. On the one hand, having no weapons would mean that no one could get shot or stabbed or bombed or anything, but on the other hand, if no one has weapons, you know there is someone out there who will go out of their way to get weapons because of that greed. It is kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, unfortunately.</p>
<p>Still, I don’t know a single aerospace engineer who does it because he/she thinks “hey lets design things to kill people!” Everyone I know does it because “hey planes are cool, and all the most cutting edge, push-the-envelope stuff goes onto military hardware.”</p>
<p>And this is all assuming that you buy into the assertion that “the vast majority of money (and hence work) is in the weapons/defense/military field” as you claim, which is simply not true. Over half of Boeing’s income comes from commercial airlines. Another sizable chunk comes from satellite and space systems. In fact, out of the roughly 157,000 people that work at Boeing, only about 68,000 of them work in what they call “defense, space and security”. If you remove the space portion of that (since no one is killed from space) you end up with far fewer than that. Just as a benchmark, Boeing Commercial Airplanes employs somewhere around 60,000 people. Northrop makes less than half of their income off of warplanes as well, and has a sizable presence in satellite and space systems and in information and communications systems. Lockheed is the only big one that gets far and away most of their income from military-oriented projects as far as I know. That doesn’t even include all the people who work places like Ball Aerospace, Cessna, Sikorsky, Bell, or any smaller, completely peaceful aircraft company.</p>
<p>Aside from the satellite and space systems going on at Boeing/Lockheed/Northrop, this hasn’t even touched on the rest of space-related careers. NASA is 100% not in the business of killing people. Their mission is to 1) run the space program and 2) develop and demonstrate technologies that other companies or groups can then use on concrete products. SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are space companies and that don’t have anything to do with killing people.</p>
<p>There are many, many jobs in aerospace where your job isn’t “to help kill people.” Even the ones that you would classify as falling into that category are being done a complete disservice by your description. People do aerospace because they love planes and/or space. They do it because the idea of designing and working on a machine that can gracefully soar through the sky is exciting to them. They don’t do it because a small subset of airplanes are used militarily.</p>
<p>Using your line of logic, an electrical engineer would get stuck in a job polluting the atmosphere all day since they design things that use electricity and electricity is generated “dirtily.” Get a grip and stop crapping on peoples’ dreams just because you apparently think the whole aerospace industry is immoral.</p>
<p>If you really wanna get crazy, you could say being an automotive engineer helps America’s economy to thrive, driving up income levels and therefore tax levels, increasing military budgets, helping to kill people.</p>
<p>[shrug]</p>
<p>^^ So basically, in the end it is everyone’s fault.</p>
<p>^^ I blame Canada.</p>
<p>i am actually an industry veteran boneh3ad. i actually don’t think its immoral, and was quite content in the field. i just think it is somewhat misleading to call it “aerospace engineering” when it is in fact defense engineering. it seems like the same reason he is the “secretary of defense” rather than the “secretary of war” (the old title). </p>
<p>the defense industry is actually what made MIT and Stanford particularly famous, because the weapons funding really built up their labs. the internet was also a defense (DARPA) project. if you believe in the benefits of tech, you believe in defense, period, at least in this country.</p>
<p>while any tech can hypothetically aid military tech (for example, a weapon that runs linux OS), being in the defense industry takes it a step further where YOU are the one doing it directly. it is a very quirky industry to say the least, where nerds team up with ex-military etc.</p>
<p>Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact that there are MANY aerospace jobs outside of defense.</p>