Graduate school is not only a good idea but almost a necessity based on your interest and what you intend to do. Save the money and go to one of the UCs. Your chances to be admitted to a top graduate school is at least as good as a graduate from one of these UCs as from any other schools on your list.
CS isn’t really about learning a few languages (or MatLab). What would be useful for your chosen career is learning about autonomous systems and related techonologies. You may want to take CS courses in computer vision, machine learning, etc. that can help advance that goal. A typical CS minor doesn’t include any of them.
Yep. We know this… Families need to have the opportunities to say their kid went to X school and look at them now. Yes, there are opportunities that are known to some but not other schools. My international job BTW recruits at Michigan and GT… Lol but also at Penn State and University of South Carolina and many European colleges we never heard of. They have plants in all these locales and want to support their communites. But non at Michigan yet. They are buying Midwestern companies in their area though…
That would be highly dependent on the desired focus of the individual and the job they get. My son took a graduate level machine learning course and enjoyed it. He did his MS in boundary layer aerodynamics. Now, he never uses the stuff he learned in the AI course, but he uses Matlab and C++ routinely, plus Python occasionally. That’s why I recommend taking things as they roll your way in the curriculum (or that really interest you) rather than taking courses willy nilly.
Your goal is to do what you like and then hope that all the skills you amassed through courses, projects, clubs and research, align with the things a company is looking for. You will continue to learn on the fly. If you need a specific skill, you’ll learn it. That’s the magic of engineering, not that it packs your head with all the knowledge you’ll need, but that it teaches you how to solve problems and acquire the new knowledge as you go.
The reality is that most working in the Aerospace industry do not have graduate degrees. A graduate degree will unlock different opportunities, but it is not necessary to landing a good job and having a long a prosperous career in aerospace.
I’m not saying everyone in the aerospace industry needs an advanced degree, but OP has indicated that s/he intend to pursue a graduate degree and her/his interest is in astronautical engineering. A lot more is demanded of someone who designs spacecrafts, satellites, planetary probes, and develops other space technologies. A BS is simply inadequate.
On the question of what CS background is useful. I’m not saying computer languages (MatLab is just another very high level language) aren’t useful, but that all these languages, whether Python or C++ or another language yet to be invented, are trivial to learn once a student has learned the fundamentals. Computer vision and other AI-related technologies are useful for the OP because all spacecrafts, even those manned by humans, are designed to be able to operate mostly, if not entirely, autonomously.
Time based positional measurements and processing are very important to anything that operates autonomously, including automobiles. The reality though is that engineers doing that be it in spacecraft or automobiles are tiny parts of the whole. If the OP wants to do propulsion, aerodynamics, etc (what they want to do will very likely change over time) the background needed will be very different. Aerospace is very broad. It employs AEs, MEs, CS, even Civil (NASA says it employs 20 different types of engineers). Saying a person needs a very niche type of programming background presumes that the person will do a very specific thing, in this case, autonomous navigation. By the law of averages, it’s likely they will not need that. That’s why I advocate waiting.
First, note that the new director of the ISS has a BChE only. She has no graduate level education. Low and behold, she is directing a very high level program.
Next, this is the type of anecdotal information is used all the time, well meaning, but out of context, to sway opinion on this forum. Let’s put it into context. Below are the NASA locations and where their respective Directors went to undergrad.
Ames Cal Berkeley
Armstrong Univ. of New Mexico
Glenn Univ. of Puerto Rico
Goddard Univ. of Maryland
JPL Univ. of Texas
Johnson Space Center Purdue
Kennedy Space Center Naval Academy
Langley RIT
Marshall Univ. of Alabama
Stennis Mississippi State
Wallops North Carolina State
Haven’t added to the thread in a while but just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted here. All of this information has been more than helpful with my decision. I’ll be sure to come back here and add a reply if I have any other questions that come to mind, but for now, thank you all again!!
I’ve worked at several aerospace companies, including Boeing. (No rocket ship stuff, though.) It’s easier to get a job in aerospace if you have a CS or ME degree than an aero degree. That’s why I’m thinking the ME degrees with an aerospace emphasis might be better.
If engineering rocket ships is anything like engineering airplanes, you don’t need that many aerospace engineers, but you do need lots of people to engineer the subsystems, which is where the other types of engineers come in.
