Electrical Engineering Masters with Mechanical Engineering Bachelors (5 year BS/MS joint program)?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>I plan on taking computer and electrical engineering courses to go along with my mechanical engineering degree as my technical electives. Essentially creating a sorta Mechatronics/Robotics oriented mechanical engineering degree (since University of Iowa does not offer a robotics course)</p>

<p>7 computer/electrical courses (3 of them being the most important to me) I wanted to take by junior/senior year are:</p>

<ol>
<li>Embedded system and system software. -prority</li>
<li>Control System. -prority</li>
<li>Graduate-level Control Theory. -prority</li>
<li>Graduate-level Computer-Based Control Systems.</li>
<li>Graduate-level Electric Drive System</li>
<li>Communication System (think WiFi or radio). -prority</li>
<li>Graduate-level Wireless Sensor Networks</li>
</ol>

<p>I intend on getting my bachelors in 5 years since I also wanted to do a co-op, which will delay my graduation by a full year since some of the engineering courses are only offered during the fall or spring, and I will be using that extra semester for the computer/electrical engineering courses.</p>

<p>The graduate-level courses count towards an electrical engineering masters degree, and that will only take one extra year to complete.</p>

<p>The companies I wish to work for are Rockwell Collins, Rockwell Automation, Eaton, Schneider Electric, Eaton, GE, or any other companies that use a combination of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering.</p>

<p>The question is, how much extra income would I earn to compensate for the additional year to get an MS degree? I know a few companies that consider an engineering masters degree equivalent to 1-4 years of extra work experience, but I'm not sure how much of a pay increase that would be.</p>

<p>My financial situation allows me to stay in school for a few years but if simply getting a BS and working a year earlier earns me more money in the long run, then I won't do an MS.</p>

<p>(Note: I will not have the coursework to design an integrated circuit myself, but I hope to be able to build an robotics system using existing off-the-shelf components.)</p>

<p>(Note 2: I am also in the university's honors program and my part-time programming job was registered as a paid honors internship/project experience, which is part of the requirement to graduate with a BS honors.)</p>

2

<p>There are issues with this path.
Number 1: Prerequisites for these courses that you plan to take that are not in your ME curriculum.

  1. Embedded system and system software. -You should be fine here (I hope you like Assembly language though)
  2. Control System - You need Linear Systems I for this
  3. Graduate-level Control Theory. - You need intro controls (which you have listed)
  4. Graduate-level Computer-Based Control Systems. - Just need intro controls course
  5. Graduate-level Electric Drive System - Should be fine here
  6. Communication System - You need Linear Systems II for this
  7. Graduate-level Wireless Sensor Networks - Need previous Communication Systems course</p>

<p>So you’ll need to take two more courses as well with these.</p>

<p>Number 2: Class scheduling. Some of these ECE courses ARE gonna overlap with your core ME course times. The departments don’t schedule around other majors times. Considering you have 9 ECE courses you’d want to take, this would probably put you back 1-1.5 years.</p>

<p>Number 3. I can’t imagine any half way decent EE graduate program letting anyone in without a course in Electronics, Electromagnetism and Digital Design. If someone had a Masters in EE and didn’t understand how a transistor worked I would lose faith in humanity. </p>

<p>I’ll try to summarize a little here. If you really want to get into Robotics/Mechatronics, this route may work (even though there would be easier ways to do so). However, with this EE/ME hybrid your not gonna be the best ME or the best EE you could of been if you had just chosen one path. This will give every other student an advantage over you decide you don’t want to get a job in Robotics/Mechatronics (which is sort of a narrow field). I was actually doing a similar Mechatronics EE program at my school. However, when I got into my EE classes I realized I’d much rather spend my time studying it as opposed to taking more ME/CompE courses (personally preference). Hopefully this post helps a little bit. I had to do a some researching about Iowa’s program in order to arrive to most of my answers. </p>

3

<p>I did make sure to take in account of all of the prerequisites. It would only set me back by a semester. I could reduce some of the courses to shorten my graduation time to 4 years, but I wouldn’t be able to do the joint BS/MS degree.</p>

<p>I will be taking Intro to Digital Design and Electronic Circuits. I might replace one EFA with the electromagnetism theory. It wasn’t a prerequisite for any other EE courses though.</p>

<p>Although… I realized that I need to take hydraulics courses if I want to go down the road of robotics engineering.</p>

<p>I’m a bit unsure about the salary and job outlook of robotics/mechatronics engineering due to smaller amount of data that I don’t fully trust.</p>

4

<p>Generally the Masters degree will give you a good boost in salary as you have noted in your original post. However, sometimes it is better to go for a Masters degree after a few years in the working world. The decision about the kind of degree which will best suit your career may be clearer and your employer could even pay for a significant fraction of the tuition. </p>

<p>if boils down to a very personal decision. If you can afford it without too much debt, you will have more flexibility and a higher salary but you might find yourself in a job where the specific combination of degree you have chosen is not optimal.</p>

5

<p>That’s also an option. Since I plan on getting a co-op in the future, my graduation with BS will be pushed to 5 years. I can take the graduate-level courses required to apply for EE MS, work in a company that pays for a portion of the MS tuition costs, and delay the MS for a little bit.</p>

6

<p>Do you know which part you have interests in most? If you get a job in Robotics you’ll probably be put into one of these groups; software, hardware, ME or Signals and communications. You’ll work with people from various disciplines that are experts at what they do. In my opinion, what your trying to do is equivalent to an athlete trying to be good at several sports (soccer, basketball, football, rugby, tennis, etc.). Instead of being a master of one sport, the person just becomes okay at every sport. That’s just my opinion though, take it with a grain of salt. </p>

7

<p>Mechanical engineering will be my main focus. I’ll be allotting 2-3 course spots to design-related courses (ex: Finite Element Analysis, optimization, etc).</p>

<p>I’m not trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. I want to tailor my courses to be “semi-master at mechanical and knows electrical, controls and software”.</p>

<p>The reason why I wanted to branch out into computer/electrical is because I also have some interest in those fields.</p>

8

<p>I have to interview a person in my field for one of my college classes and was wondering if anyone would be willing, im going for a bachelors in mechanical engineering</p>