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<p>Some kids are just born engineers. My brother is like that. From the time he was a young kid, he enjoyed nothing more than taking things apart to see how they worked, then putting them back together–or fixing them when they weren’t working. By the time he was a teenager he was doing that with cars. He knew there were only two careers that would satisfy him, auto mechanic or mechanical engineer. The latter pays better and is somewhat more intellectually challenging, and he had the academic chops to get there, so that’s the path he chose, and he made a successful career of it. There was never the least doubt when he was applying to college what he wanted to study, and he never wavered from it.</p>
<p>I do think some others get stampeded into it. It’s a tough job market out there for liberal arts majors, which is pushing a lot of people toward “safer” career trajectories like engineering or business. This has made CoE and Ross the most selective undergraduate units within the University of Michigan. It wasn’t always like that. Back in my day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), Michigan engineering was very good but no more selective than LSA, and business (it wasn’t Ross back then) was seen as a lighter and less academically rigorous track, a refuge for those who couldn’t cut it in the more rigorous LSA econ classes. But liberal arts majors had pretty good job prospects with just a BA back then, or if all else failed could usually get into a pretty good law school and have a more-or-less guaranteed well paying job waiting at the end of the pipeline. Times have changed. Lots of HS students and their parents now convince themselves early on that Sonny should be an engineer because Sonny has math/science aptitude and that’s where the jobs are.</p>