Degree? How to choose!

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

Ok, so first and foremost I will be a senior in highschool this year. I have GPA of 3.3 ACT 26 SAT 1200 (620 Math, 580 READ/WRITE)

I have lower grades due to extraordinary circumstances which heavily impacted first 2 years of HS. I am pretty smart, and LOVE PHYSICS, (Chem not as much)

and would like to find a school in washington state, New york state, Massachusetts, or surrounding areas of such, but at the end of the day I just need a school anywhere will do. I’ve looked at Syracuse University, University of Washington, Florida institute of tech., SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego, Seattle University, and West Virginia(don’t like location though of this one), Ohio state, and Central florida.

I am very passionate about aviation, and would strongly prefer a related degree. I also love history, but I can’t find a degree where that would be employable unless I became a teacher. except for Archaeology and Geology, which, if you know anything about, please share with me!

From what I can gather there are a few options for me going forward.

Aerospace Engineering- hard to get into, but what I want, few colleges offer this.

Mechanical Engineering with specialty in Aero-not really what I want as I am more concerned with flight mechanics.

Engineering Physics - Don’t know much about this degree but Cornell offers it and it looks interesting (not saying I could get in there obviously)

Astronomy- Requires MA bare min. and means getting a PHD

Electrical - very difficult and abstract, I’d prefer more hands on. Any help you can offer will go a long way please give a little advice I am quite lost here!

2

What is your budget? What is your home state? Have you run the NPC on a few possible schools?

3

Budget is flexible, I’m in New York state

4

Have you looked at Clarkson?

5

If you’re REALLY passionate about aerospace, I’d suggest Embry-Riddle. They basically only do Aerospace/Aeronautics degrees. I have no idea if you fit the applicant profile or what their admissions statistics are, but I’ve heard good things about the school.
If you want to study both college level history and engineering, you’re going to be better off at a large public university. They have more flexibility in terms of the general education classes you’d have to take so you could major in engineering but take a history class or two towards your humanities requirement.

In terms of majors, I haven’t really heard great things about engineering physics majors. I always saw it as kind of an applied physics type degree that emphasizes the practical parts of physics as opposed to the theoretical ones.
EE is hard to people, it involves a lot of math; but there are some specializations within EE that are more hands on. But the hands on parts involved building circuitry not building an airplane engine.

6

Mechanical Engineering allows you into many fields and is more broad than aerospace.
Essentially alot of aerospace jobs can be done by mechanical engineers, but not always the other way around. Thus, there are more mechanical engineers in the aerospace industry than aerospace engineers. However, if you are dead set on aviation then I would go aerospace.

Best of Luck!

sincerely,
-Mechanical student working in aero industry.

7

What do you mean by “flight mechanics?”

Ditto what @r77r77 said. My son is an ME working in the aero industry. I don’t think a single engineer at his company is an AE.

8

Although Umich is not on your list of colleges, I can tell you that your prospective major is not always a factor used in admissions. All freshmen enter the College of Engineering undeclared, and you can only declare after you have completed at least one semester at Umich and satisfied certain requirements. Therefore, it is not necessarily the case that one engineering major is harder to get into than another.

In most engineering curricula, all first year engineering students generally take the same courses (general math, physics, chem, etc.). It would be good for you to know if you would like to go the engineering direction, but the decision about which type of engineering is not that urgent. Some schools offer opportunities for you to explore each engineering major, such as an elective which introduces you to each type of major, or a majors fair, thus allowing you to get an idea what you might be interested in. Also, each engineering major likely has a “gateway course”, which serves as the start of a prerequisite chain leading to the more advanced courses in that major. For example, it might be a statics or dynamics course for mechanical, or a circuits course for electrical. At the beginning of your sophomore year, you can take a few of such courses from different majors, and then decide what you like better from there.

9

This is very school dependent. At Cal Poly, you declare when applying and only compete against those applying to the same major. You need to look at how each school does it.