<p>I’d like to pitch in here too. (I’m almost 3/4ths of my way through a undergrad engineering program) </p>
<p>There are other options after engineering school if you finish engineering and you don’t want to have a career in engineering. At my school, finance firms/IBs have hired engineering majors on the premise that they think engineers can handle their kind of work. I once sat through a top IB firm’s recruiting session where the rep said, “We’ll hire any engineer, even ChemE’s, if we think you can do our work!” (IOEs and CS majors are more common though) Some engineers - I’ve known one - have applied to and enrolled in top law schools, because law schools seem to like our so-called ability to apply skills and problem solve. There are some who join the Armed Forces, but that’s rare at my school. Biomedical engineers also have an inclination to apply to med school.</p>
<p>If he is that ambivalent about enrolling in engineering, he should consider a school that is strong in many fields. That is one of the reasons I chose Michigan instead of U Chicago because Michigan is so versatile and at the time I really did not know what I would end up doing - I kept swinging from econ to math, math to computer science, CS to aerospace, aerospace to biomed, etc… For me, I didn’t want to do a gap year and Michigan, though not #1 in any of those fields, is strong in all of those fields (and many more) and wasn’t very expensive for me as an in-state student. UChicago is #1 in Math and Econ, but it doesn’t have an engineering school and the computer science program there is very weak, and the school’s tuition costs twice as much as Michigan’s.</p>