<p>I am a prospective engineering major, but I am a little bit worried about my future success.</p>
<p>Basically, I ace all of my math classes. I do very well. </p>
<p>The problem is my math skills on the SAT. I only got a 670 on the SAT I and a 660 on the SAT Math Level II. Yes. I did study for these.</p>
<p>Obviously I can study and do well with some grades, but I stink at standardized tests; whereas my friends do not study at all and pull 800's on the math SAT.</p>
<p>Is this a bad omen, or can I make up for it with studying? Mostly it worries me about good grades as well as the GRE etc. In college are the classes black and white like in high school or are they hard like the SAT?</p>
<p>I know I am coming off as a nut job, but I am seriously worried about this. I want to do engineering, yet I feel so inferior to others.</p>
<p>it helps if you have simple calculations memorized eg 120/3=40 (seriously i know people who cant do this). it also helps to be able to algebraically manipulate huge equations to pull out a variable. the calculus comes with time. i dont think you have to be naturally skilled but it probably makes it easier for tests. I have friends who barely passed diffeq and calc 3 but are still great engineering students</p>
<p>out in the real world they have cad and matlab to do your calculations</p>
<p>There is more to engineering then being good at math. You are expected to perform and be work-ready when you graduate. Classes in engineering are much more dense and very technical you might find yourself spending majority your time trying to understand what is going on.</p>
<p>A 670 on the math SAT indicates that you are more naturally skilled at math than you seem to think since that is a well above average score. The question is are you naturally skilled enough in math to succeed as an engineering major? I think it will depend on the college you attend. Frankly, if you said your goal is MIT or Cal Tech I would have to tell you that you are very unlikely to get accepted at engineering schools at that level and if somehow you were accepted, you would probably really struggle since the average freshman at those schools all score well over 700 on the math SAT. At the engineering schools of most colleges and universities a math score of 670 will be fairly typical and with hard work you will almost certainly succeed.</p>
<p>Academia rewards those who can focus and study for long periods of time. People who think they will be able to “breeze” through university relying on “smarts” alone are delusional. Can you sit down for hours and understand a piece of math? Yes? Great! You are ahead of the pack!</p>
<p>The good news is that the math you will learn has already been worked out and polished by others before you, all you need to do is learn how to use it. The bad news is that you will be expected to learn it mostly on your own in a short amount of time.</p>
<p>Will Hunting is a myth, and a good movie, but mostly those two. Your don’t-need-to-study buddies? Most of them will hit a brick wall. Hard.</p>
<p>I’ve been a working engineer for twenty years. Don’t sweat the SAT… it’s a peculiar test the likes of which you will never see again. Far more important is whether you love doing what engineers do: Building stuff, figuring things out, making things work and work well. If you’ve got that, you’ve really got what it takes. For engineers, math is a means to an end…</p>
<p>The math is generally pretty easy and teachable. Some math classes might take a little time, but its nothing that requires you to prove mathematical conundrums.</p>
<p>Add to that, the first 3 Calculus courses can be boring but courses like Differential Equations and Linear Algebra (and advanced math courses that uses those two areas) can be quite practical and should keep you interested.</p>
<p>My school had no ap classes, so I started out with calc I first semester in college. It was a little discouraging in my engineering classes because most people were in calc III or diffeq. They seemed like they knew so much more about math than I did, but when it came to the engineering projects, those kids in the higher math classes didn’t seem to have any better ideas for how to maximize the energy output of a wind turbine than I did. In fact, I was the one in my group that realized you could use calculus to optimize the blade length, even though I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that at the time. </p>
<p>I think work ethic is much more important, as someone previously mentioned. That, along with an open mind to try new ideas and test them. Math is important for creating concepts behind your designs, but I still trust real-world data over a generic equation most days.</p>