Engineering Fields - Help

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

I’m wondering about how to learn about the different engineering fields. I always knew I wanted to do engineering, and leave what type of engineering, specifically, to be figured out later. I think it’s starting to get to that “later,” and I’m kind of freaking out about how little I know about engineering and how little I know about what I want to do in the future. I’m a high school junior right now, so I don’t really need to decide now, but I’m the kind of person who researches and compares prices and Amazon ratings and friends’ opinions for hours before finally deciding to purchase an item, and I’d really like to find a more specific direction ASAP.

I’ve looked online, but everything I’ve found contains more general things, along the lines of “electrical engineers design electronics” or “civil engineers design bridges,” but they tell me nothing about what exactly being an electrical engineer or a civil engineer entails: do you use CAD, or do you move wires around until something happens, or do you talk with people about specific mathematical calculations? (excuse me for my crude understanding – exactly why I’m writing this post)

It’s not like I don’t have any experience with engineering – I’ve been to my fair share of engineering outreach programs, so I’ve learned a great deal through those, and I also CAD for my FRC team (which I’m finding that I’m not enjoying very much) and am taking AP CS in school (which I’m enjoying a good amount, but don’t seem to be very good at). But I feel like if I base my decisions on my limited experience, I’ll miss out on something that I wasn’t able to experience in school yet is a perfect fit for my interests or skills.

So I was wondering about a few things to facilitate/speed up the process:

  1. Are there any summer programs/other outreach programs that introduce the fields of engineering to high school students? Something along the lines of University of Michigan’s SEE program or Cornell’s CURIE program.

  2. Any extremely helpful online and/or non-online resources that I’ve missed, that may coincidentally answer all of my questions?

  3. If anybody has experience with an engineering field or advice for my situation, please share! I would really like to see it :slight_smile:

Sorry for reading such a long post haha, but thank you for doing so! It’ll be a great help!!

Also, happy lunar new year :3

2

Fear not. In most engineering programs, the majority of freshman classes are mostly the same regardless of the field.

  1. i started at CIvil Engineering but switched to MechE for a more general major. DS started undecided, with idea to do MechE (like mom and dad) if he couldn’t decide. But after a while he gravitated to Elec/Comp Eng. There is room to evolve at college when you know more.
3

Have you really looked carefully at the many engineering school webpages for various universities? You’ll find lots of information.

Also google the many national engineering associations. They have pages devoted to describing their profession for want-to-be a …

4

My daughter took Gen Engineering her first semester. It was a class that introduced all the different options. She was pretty happy she did that and picked civil, even though she was originally headed toward chemical.

5

http://futurestudents.mst.edu/summercamps/

Do the Jackling intro for one week followed by explosives camp for one week. You may never do explosives again, but it’s a unique and cool program.

6

Operation Catapult at Rose-Hulman is a good summer program for rising HS seniors (summer after junior year). Several more are listed here: http://collegeapps.about.com/od/extracurricular/tp/summer-programs-engineering.htm

7

Thank you guys all for the comprehensive answers! I will definitely look into these programs.

8

Thank you guys all for the comprehensive answers! I will definitely look into these programs.