I’m a senior in high school, and I’m pretty sure I want to go into engineering. (Unless something drastic changes in college) I’m between possibly 2-3 majors and I would like to know if what I think of these majors is accurate.
Majors:
-Mechanical (Designs mechanical systems)
-Chemical (Upscales chemical processes to use in plants)
-Materials (Designs new fabrics/ materials to meet specific guidelines)
Initially, I thought I wanted to become a chemical engineer because of my love for chemistry, but I learned that the job outlooks for chemical engineers are lower than average. After, I began thinking about mechanical engineering. I like being able to design items and see the actual results. I thought of materials engineering because the idea of designing materials seems interesting to me. Any other suggestions?
Mechanical engineering would be more like the jack of all trades. You could go into any field, but you might not be the expert in any field unless you specialize in it. You could go into roller coasters, aerospace, HVAC, biomedical, materials, etc.
Chemical will be more along the lines of mass and heat transfer, and of course chemicals. Lots of them may work in highly-industrial settings, plants, or even in paint applications.
Materials will be new materials and their applications. Its like the bridge between chemistry and useful real-world application materials. You can do anything from basic packaging material to developing metal micrograin structures for bullet-proof military vehicles.
This is no more true of mechanical engineering than it is of any other field of engineering. They all have their various focus areas, and, at the undergraduate level, they’re all going to basically just cover the basics of them all with some minimal room to specialize a bit. Mechanical engineering just has an unusually broad range of applications.
Given your interest in chemistry, but disinterest in the industry, materials seems like a good fit. There’s chemistry involved and lots of cool stuff with many applications happening in the field.
Get good grades, get involved in clubs and/or research and land an internship, and you’ll get a job, no matter the branch you choose, as long as you aren’t too geographically restrictive. Choosing a major based on predicting the future job market is very difficult as they all tend to be cyclical. Go into the one that interests you the most and realize that might change as you get into your studies.
There is a little room for specialization as an undergraduate. You generally have electives available that you can use to specialize a bit, though it seems like a lot of students I knew liked to just find the courses that were renowned for being the easiest and then take those to pad the GPA rather than out of any interest in learning something new. That’s a terrible way to go through life, though.
Graduate school definitely allows (and is designed for) much greater specialization.
Choose the major that interests you most. If you get an engineering degree and have performed well in your coursework, you will almost certainly get a job somewhere. Of course, employers would probably also like to see that you are doing things outside of school as well. Getting a job at a prestigious company (such as Apple) will be extremely competitive, but that is true even for majors with a high job outlook percentage.
The job outlook percentage doesn’t tell the full story. It disregards the number of new graduates in the field. For example, you may see a high job outlook percentage for computer science, but that number can be misleading if you fail to consider how the number of people graduating with a CS degree is increasing as well.