<p>I just wanted to see if anyone had any comments regarding the difficulty of BE as compared to ChE. I am debating between BE or ChE / biomolecular track (3/2 applicant) and just wanted to see some opinions. I originally planned to do ChE but found that most of my options in the ChE biomolecular track would be BE anyway, so maybe by taking strictly BE I would avoid some of the killer ChE classes I have heard about. </p>
<p>Note: I am a potential 3/2 applicant. I am more so interested so that I could put the correct options down on the 3/2 application when it comes up.</p>
<p>I was a ChE major who did biomolecular track. I do think ChE is as a major is quite a bit more difficult than BE in terms of workload and number of tough required courses (though it depends somewhat on what courses you actually take), but I wouldn’t make your decision because of this. I promise you that Caltech will find a way to kick your butt no matter what you choose.</p>
<p>I would recommend looking at the course requirements for the 2 majors and seeing which you’re more interested in doing. If you’re interested in learning ChE topics, such as transport phenomena, thermodynamics, and reactors, then you should do ChE. If you just want to learn about the bioengineering topics, then you should do BE. Either major will prepare you very well for grad school in BE.</p>
<p>The first 2 terms of sophomore year were the toughest because you take core math and physics, organic chemistry, ACM95, and a ChE course (separations and then thermodynamics) each term. The one 3/2 guy I knew had it about as rough because he started off as a junior, taking thermo, transport, acm95, and the other junior level stuff at the same time. </p>
<p>For the record, I would only consider the only real “killer” ChE courses to be 103a and 103b, which are transport phenomena (heat transfer and fluid mechanics), and ChE 130 (biomoelcular engineering lab) while you’ll take as either ChE or BE. ChE 103ab is the infamous sequence requiring a pretty solid understanding of PDES and with the weekly 15-30 hour problem sets. They’ve reduced the difficulty of ChE 130 significantly since I took it though. The rest of the ChE courses were “reasonably difficult”, while ChE 103c (mass transfer) was actually somewhat easy.</p>