My D applied to UA as Engineering - Undecided. Does UA have any program or other mechanism to help students decide which Engineering major to choose? Is this part of the “Freshman Experience”? Thanks!
yes, there is a class that frosh eng’g majors take that expose the students to each discipline.
Statistically, more female students choose ChemE than any other eng’g discipline. I would do some research before college, if you can…some eng’g majors you hit the ground running. Also, meant to add, if your D has any incoming AP credits, this can help give some flexibility to her schedule.
Right now, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, are hot fields. Lots more internships/jobs available for those majors. But who knows, in two years, when you’re ready to apply for internships, that may not be the case. A couple of years ago, I would have said chemical engineering, because of the oil boom, but now there’s an oil bust, so don’t know if I’d recommend that one now. But there are lots of things you can do with chemical engineering besides oil field, so if that’s your interest, go for it! Oh, and did you say female? Wow, the world is your oyster. Good luck!
When we were touring some colleges and stopped in for the engineering presentation, it was often stated that females tended to gravitate to civil and environmental engineering.
I read an article recently where Civil Engineering is expected to be in great demand over the next several years.
DS is in the ECE w/ CS minor, but he has been saying ECE since 9th grade. I did want him to look into some of the other programs, but he is committed, at least for now.
What’s hard to anticipate is how the opportunities in each discipline 4-5 years before graduation. ChE was big with oil jobs, that have dropped a bit with the oil slow down. When we went to Duke, my son was more interested in ECE with a nanotechnology focus (pretty cool stuff), but the senior student who toured us around Duke engineering told us that 80% of the current Duke students want to be in ECE, largely because last year’s overwhelming recruiters were from Google, Facebook, Uber, looking for coders? No one is hiring for CE hardware design these days…
I inquired with him whether a Duke engineering degree was worth the cost, in that light. Wouldn’t one think that a Duke engineer would only want to be a software engineer? Didn’t seem right. What about Dartmouth or Brown? Not seem like Duke represents itself as a Microsoft feeder school for software engineers. Why the $65k liberal arts education? Wouldn’t they want to go to recruit at Rose-Hulman, Illinois, Purdue, Arizona State to look for the most nerdy of coders?
Will that be the case in 4 years? Hard to tell. There is time to learn and explore proclivity in ny engineering discipline or school?
^ I stand corrected about what I said in Post #2: yes, nationally, females represent most in Environmental Engineering. At UA, 33/88 (37.5%) of ChemE grads in 2014 were female, and that was what I was looking at originally, apologies. There are no Enviro Eng’g stats at UA yet because this degree started accepting students in Fall 2014. If you look at Civil/Construction/Enviro collectively at UA, 17/97 grads (17.5%) in 2014 were female. When those first graduates roll out of Enviro Eng’g in 2018, I’m sure UA’s female eng’g students will be following national trends.
Of course, my advice would be for students to follow their passions and interests in order to be successful and happy with their profession…not try to ride trends or second guess what job markets will be in the future.
I would recommend the Engineering by Numbers report put out by the ASEE to see the national trends. You can tell which majors are most popular by sex (the top three for women are Environmental, Biomedical and Chemical), and the number of degrees award by discipline.
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/14_11-47.pdf
Toured UA last week with my undecided engineering daughter. HC set up a visit for us for with an engineering professor. He recommended Mechanical for the undecided student because there are more job opportunities and because they learn it all and work on everything. UA wasn’t for D but this session was still very helpful.