<p>Hey guys. I just recently transferred into the Cooper Union and am currently in their ChemE program. I've always wondered which of the two was more exciting - ChemE or Civil Eng.</p>
<p>If I'm going to switch majors, it's gotta be now. I love chemistry and physics I and don't mind physics II (electricity + magnetism = bleh).</p>
<p>Right now, the job market is a haven for civil engineers. However, the versatility of a chemical engineering is far more than a civil eng. can encompass. Correct me if I'm wrong. A chemE can do materials, pharmaceuticals, bioengineering. A civil is stuck w/ construction and design engineering.</p>
<p>Not true! Not true at all. Civil engineering covers sooo much in engineering that it's not even funny... Yes, there's the design and construction aspect of things. You can work in an architecture firm. You can do land development, which involves a lot of logistics. You can work in traffic engineering and transportation engineering, working with various organizations and agencies to figure out what signs need to go up and where roads need to go, and doing traffic studies to figure out which roads need to be widened and which ones need their speed limits raised. You could end up going into environmental engineering, doing research on past and current land usage to ensure that there aren't any environmental hazards in the area-- that involves a lot of fieldwork, digging around in various sites and tromping around in high grasses wearing hiking boots. =) There's petroleum engineering, designing pipelines and inspecting offshore rigs. You've also got railway engineering, working on designing high-speed rail systems and improving networks for shipping. You can work in hydrology, controlling rivers and water and figuring out how to deal with floodwaters. You can go into management later on, if you'd like. And that's all just if you get a bachelor's degree.</p>
<p>If you go beyond and get a masters degree and even a PhD, you can find yourself working at a national laboratory, working for the air force doing consulting work and trying to figure out what causes cracks in metals, you can end up designing software for use in industry, you can design wings and turbines and submarines, you can end up working for NASA doing design for space stations... After all, once you get beyond a certain point in structural engineering, you've got all the tools and training that high-level mechanical engineers and a lot of physicists end up with, so you can tap into those branches quite easily, as well.</p>
<p>Civil engineering is incredibly broad. Don't rule it out simply because you think you might be pigeonholed in construction and design engineering.</p>
<p>Civil Design for Waste Disposal is a hot field in the metropolitan and industrial. Hazardous clean up is very expensive and plants want their own systems designed to prevent problems....it is very exciting. If you know enough chem/bio to use digesters etc it can be very exciting.</p>
<p>aibarr just made civil engineering sound very exciting, and I assumed it was one of the more boring fields of engineering. Can you make mechanical engineering sound that exciting too please? lol</p>
<p>"Both of them can be extremely exciting, done wrong."
Funniest comment I've read all day. Thanks.
Sparks visions of explosions and collapsing buildings.</p>