Is it normal for a smart student to major in, graduate, and be sucessful in engineering without really anything related to engineering(EC’s, courses, little projects, etc.), or somewhere between moderate & minimal activity in such things.
This is excluding software engineering,and is from the perspective of a fairly smart person who is growing interested in fields such as chemical engineering and materials engineering, among others, but outside of a PLTW Intro to Eng in soph year and a few science andmath EC’s hasn’t really been exposed to this profession.
Thanks in advance and sorry for spelling & grammatical errors.
Yes.
As long as the high school student took and did well in the usual type of college-prep curriculum, including math through precalculus (calculus if available to the student), high school physics, and high school chemistry, s/he has the necessary preparation to study engineering in college.
Those engineering-type ECs could help the student determine interest in engineering, though.
I have 1 kid that is a current ChemE professional, and 1 is student in ChemE. Neither did anything pre-college in the engineering or chem field. They did take strongest math and physics classes available in HS, and both played varsity sports.
I graduated in May with an Agricultural/Environmental Engineering degree. I thought I wanted to do chemical engineering or biochem or something like that so I took ap chem but besides that I only took regular physics and ap calc. I also had debate as my EC that I was really into so not anything engineering at all. I’m also about to start work the Monday after next.
My D is a ChemE major and she did not do anything related to engineering in high school. She was even accepted by several top 10 engineering schools.
I’m a senior in Civil engineering at Purdue, top 5% of my class with a 3.93 gpa. I was admitted to U Pitt, RPI, Drexel, and Penn State as well (I only applied to 5 schools).
In high school I exclusively did Future Business Leaders of America (4 years of competition and 1 officer position), violin, art/writing, and Kick Off Mentoring. I decided on engineering late junior year, so no engineering exposure before college. I did take AP Physics C and AP Calc BC though.
In some schools where I was accepted as an engineering major (I varied my majors from school to school), I’m certain that any pre-college engineering ECs were not the main cause of acceptance.
That is because nearly ALL of my ECs had to do with music in HS.
So, no. I don’t believe that you need engineering background prior to college to get accepted or make it as an engineer. Just math and sciences (preferably physics, cause I like it).
Many engineering students are musicians.
Most of DS’s many hs EC involved music. He was accepted at several very competitive engineering programs. He was rejected from MIT, but during my research I was surprised to learn that MIT has a method to submit music supplement (and special instructions for students that have more than one type of music specialty).
D’s high school EC’s were in art, music, and some camp counselor stuff. Not a single engineering related EC at all, but we did do a lot of volunteering with a nonprofit that did construction stuff and she loved that. She’s an architectural engineering major and had no problem with college acceptances or in her major so far. She did do well in physics and Calc BC in high school.