<p>I'm a mechanical/aerospace engineering major at a well-ranked school. I'm trying to decide what minors I should get -- I feel that something like Applied Mathematics, Applied Computing, Engineering Physics, or Materials Science/Engineering would be ideal for getting my dream job at some space exploration company after graduation, but Philosophy or Linguistics or History really appeal to my more humanistic interests. I'm not implying that I would be miserable pursuing an Applied Math minor or anything, I really enjoy that stuff -- I just like the humanities a lot as well. Or should I officially minor in more technical subjects and just take lots of interesting humanities courses on the side?</p>
<p>Funny, philosophy, linguistics and history are my humanistic interests as well.</p>
<p>I agree with chuy. Just take whatever classes you’re interested in and forget the minor. Employers don’t care about minors anyway. Engineering is tough by itself; use your electives for fun, GPA boosting classes.</p>
<p>@JamesGold
I totally agree. Im doing a minor in Spanish and Econ just for the heck of it (I enjoy them both and they boost up my miserable gpa lol). But that is something Ive wondered about. If you graduate with a decent gpa (say 3.2) as an engineering major but your math/science/engineering classes are relatively low grades, how will employers view that? I heard that they only look at your major gpa and not necessarily the cumulative.</p>
<p>Some companies look at one, some the other.</p>
<p>And actually learning a foreign language (especially Spanish) is a GREAT thing to do, especially if you ever want to work in any sort of management role. You don’t need a full blown minor to accomplish that though.</p>
<p>but would a minor “look” better? does the same go for a minor like finance if i’m thinking of doing management sort of stuff in the engineering world? sorry if i seem sort of utilitarian and soul-less but i’m just trying to get things straight in my head.</p>
<p>Having a minor in a subject means nothing other than that you took whatever arbitrary courses your school chose in that subject; there’s no sort of standardized idea of what a minor in some subject encompasses. So you’ll probably not be any worse off just saying “I took some finance courses in college”.</p>