Engineering Major Advice

Hi,

I am a senior in high school, and have already sent out my college applications, and want to start seriously getting a head start on seeing what engineering majors/careers I might be inclined to like.

As for topics I like:

  • I really love physics (I’ve taken/am taking the advanced physics classes at my school, and love most, if not, all the topics we learn).
  • I am a big fan of chemistry (same deal as physics), though I didn’t really like biology.
  • I like most of the ideas of compsci (i.e. programming, algorithms, abstractions), but I don’t think I’d like just programming all day (I don’t want to fully say that I love it since I’ve only been in it for a little more than a quarter).
  • I am good at, and am a fan of math, though not enough to pursue a career in it.
  • I am a huge fan of video games, though I don’t like a couple of parts of the industry, those being that I believe that they like to hire people just for the progression of one project, and they tend to fire those people, resulting in extremely poor job security, and that I feel that it really isn’t as much of a booming industry as the media makes it out to be.
  • I am also, oddly enough, a fan of law/polisci, though would probably only pursue either as more of a fallback, as they very rarely tie to engineering.

For career outcomes:

  • I would prefer to end up in (or at least begin with) a larger sized company.
  • I would like to work on the research and/or development of products with the ability tinker in a lab-like setting, and/or the ability to travel, as opposed to sitting in a cubicle all day.

Thank you if you made it to the end of this, I appreciate it.

This will be hard for you to answer because you don’t yet know what you don’t know. Many engineers don’t even start developing a remote concept of what being an engineer even means until they are pretty deep in their curriculum.

If you don’t fancy sitting all day, then I’d think CS isn’t a great fit. You can get a taste, one that will have applicability no matter which field you chose, by learning Python over the summer. Code Academy has a reasonable, free course online. Alternatively, or in addition, you could do something like 3Ds Max. It might give you some insight into the video game world. There’s not much tinkering involved though and you’d have to learn to love the cubicle.

Interest in tinkering, small or large scale, leads me to think of ME. It’s a crazy broad field, the biggest in the world. It can have a tinkering and coding component, especially if you get involved in something like mechatronics or robotics. Engineering and tinkering are different, but can have useful overlap. Some jobs are more “hands on” than others. That’ll be your quest to vet should you decide in 4 years your interests are the same as they are now (they very well might not be).

Chem E, even though you dig Chemistry, doesn’t seem like a great fit, but I could be wrong. Materials on the other hand could parlay your interest in chemistry into something that suits your work environment and tinkering requirements.

Most any engineering major will train you to work for any sized company.

Lastly, law. You can carve out a pretty powerful niche with a JD and a technical degree, Patent law in particular. They are very different though. You’d probably want to spend some time with an attorney before you made that commitment.

Compared to something like CS and ME, where does CE fit on an ability to tinker?

If by CE you mean Chemical Engineering and not Civil Engineering, then you might work in the pharmaceutical industry, the chemicals/plastics industry, in the petroleum industry, the semiconductor industry, and of course most energy industries including solar, batteries, fuel cells and probably a lot of others. The difference is that you won’t be doing so much designing and fabricating physical objects as an ME might.

I want to recommend a book a lot of my students have enjoyed called “Is there an Engineering Inside You?”. It was suggested to my DD by the Clemson COE recruiter and both my DD and students have enjoyed it.

You didn’t mention your gender but if you are female then I suggest you look into the local chapter of the Society of Engineering. Our local chapter has great events for high school students with career and industry panels. Look for local engineering organizations besides SWE that may have events of a similar type. Our community in March has a month-long Science Festival and there are events that hit along many of the points raised in your post. If you have any colleges with engineering in your area, check their events page. I used to take my DD to some pretty interesting presentations.

Some colleges during the summer hold week-long “Introduction to Engineering” programs. Typically they are targeted at high school students, but you might want to check them out. My DD attended on at UVA which really helped her decide that ME was for her

@itsv I actually have had experience in engineering (I probably should have mentioned this), but over the summer, I worked at a large company in subsets of the R&D department, and got experience in a non-AutoCAD cad program, and kinda looked over engineers shoulders (granted, most, if not all, of the engineers in the department were plastics engineers, which I was not too interested in pursuing)