Chemical Engineering vs. Materials Science and Engineering

<p>Hello all</p>

<p>most of you know me already so i wont waste too much time on the whole "academic profile" thing. </p>

<p>Right now Im a Super Sophomore with a 2.9 gpa and im essentially at a cross roads again. Now Im a chemical engineering major who has yet to start on the Chem E courses and now im considering switching to MSE. I essentially want to go into Pharmacy (thats another issue for another day)</p>

<p>Pros of Staying:
cant think of any</p>

<p>Cons of staying:
not getting a chance to explore other engineering opportunities that may be waiting
having to put up with my a hole advisor who basically wants nothing to do with me
havint to take classes that may/may not be difficult (the unknown is why its a con)</p>

<p>Pros to switching:
smaller department
more personal attention from advisor/other department people
more of an ability to get to know the people in that department
more opportunities (appears to be at least)</p>

<p>Cons to switching:
One class that is going to be super tough due to the teacher
the regret of it maybe being better to stay where im at and continue on in chem e</p>

<p>what should I do? any insight?</p>

<p>When you say you want to go into Phamacy are you thinking of being behind the counter counting pills, are you interested in drug manufactoring, or are you interested in drug development. Chem E deals with the later plus many of the body’s processes can be modeled using many of the methodology used in Chem E. I know there is some research in Materials on using nanomaterials for drug delivery.</p>

<p>Don’t let 1 professor, your advisor, drive you away from a major. If I were you I would find some one in both departments that can tell you more about what you will study and what you can do with the major.</p>

<p>Being a materials major that absolutely loves materials and has championed it many times on this board, I don’t think it’s the right way to go if you want to get into the pharma industry. Sure, there’s a few people doing experimental research on it, but by and large I think it’s mostly a ChemE field.</p>

<p>Choose whichever major has more interesting sounding courses. Read through course descriptions, try to find professors’ pages online with outlines, and go through what they talk about. For materials, I’d recommend looking up Materials Science and Engineering an Introduction by William Callister Jr. on Amazon and using their “look inside this book” feature to see if what’s covered seems interesting. I had an entire class dedicated to almost every chapter in that book.</p>

<p>If you want to go to pharmacy school, I honestly wouldn’t even bother getting the engineering degree. No matter what GPA you get as a engineering, you could have gotten a better one in science/some other major. Even if you get a 4.0, you could have gotten a 4.0 in the other and had a whole lot of extra time for other activities.</p>

<p>A 2.9 isn’t really going to cut it.</p>