I’m currently enrolled at Santa Fe to finish up my AA-Engineering. To transfer to the Mechanical engineering program at UF. The problem is, I’ve started to gain a huge interest in Product/industrial design and want a job as one but industrial design is not offered in my state of Florida. I want to invent new ideas for products of all kinds but I don’t want to be limited to just building someone else’s ideas.
You might take a look at the forum for University of Cincinnati. My S is applying to Engineering there. But the forum has a lot of discussion about the school’s “DAAP” program. It apparently has a very good reputation. Posters there might know if any schools in FL offer a similar program. Good luck!!
To be clear, do you want to be a design engineer (use engineering principles and engineering tools to design things, to develop the functionality for these designs, to analyze the performance of these designs) or do you want to be a designer (work with the aesthetics, the form, and the looks of new designs)? Inventing products and coming up with new ideas is something that mechanical engineers do. Validating, analyzing, and optimizing those new ideas and potential designs, whether their own or someone else’s, are things that mechanical engineers do. So it’s unclear exactly what your goal is and what you like about product design (which is a job function for many mechanical engineers) and industrial design (which is a job function for industrial designers and some industrial engineers).