<p>Ok so im going to be a senior this year (HS) and know I want to be an engineer. but just what kind?</p>
<p>A little bout myself: I like math, and I'm good at it (i know so is every other engineer) I already know I want to stay away from chemistry, and I like computers (programming) but my dad said he doesn't know how much credit a computer science engineer has compared to the other fields</p>
<p>I was thinking about EE, Mechanical, Computer Science, Aerospace</p>
<p>First and foremost, there is no "rush" to really choose your discipline--your degree does not dictate your career path. Not to mention, plenty of people switch majors in college and as long as you switch in the earlier semesters, you won't be behind.</p>
<p>You should ask yourself what type of sciences do you enjoy. Are you interested in circuits, signals, computer or programming? Have you always been a hands on person and liked machines? Have you always wanted to build spaceships or air planes?</p>
<p>EE and ME are pretty versatile majors--you could even be an ASE with an ME degree or handles the controls with an EE degree. My advice is to first research and look around first to see what you'd find yourself happily doing.</p>
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...but my dad said he doesn't know how much credit a computer science engineer has compared to the other fields
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<p>What do you mean, "credit"?</p>
<p>You've got time to decide. At this point, you don't really know what different engineering activities you will enjoy, unless you have a lot more engineering experience than most high schoolers.</p>
<p>Since I am not an engineer myself I cannot offer much help, but wanted to share S's and my favorite site for "exploring" engineering fields:</p>
<p>may have used the wrong word there sorry he doesnt know if it will look like an engineering degree becuase there is computer science then computer engineer so he brought up if they were interchangable and if it was concidered an engineering degree</p>
<p>A degree in computer engineering is very different from a degree in computer science. CS people tend to do more programming and algorithm oriented activities, while CEs will make and design the actual hardware. Like, if you want to write drivers for nVidia, you do CS. If you want to design new graphics cards, you do CE.</p>
<p>My first choice would be computer engineering, second would be EE. It seems that you know what you want to do in general, so just go with what you think will be best for you. I highly recommend computer engineering since you know that you like computers and programming.</p>
<p>ok thanks.</p>
<p>Actually, Computer Systems Engineers (or Computer Engineers) also program for companies. They usually take a course specifically on software engineering and follow through project development to design new software. They do focus on hardware/EE courses more heavily, but they are trained in software engineering.</p>
<p>Computer Science, you take programming courses, in which you usually are assigned problem sets. In most cases, this will not be the equivalent to the software engineering courses that the engineers take since it's not a structured project-oriented, but more so of a "solve this problem using this language and these methods".</p>
<p>A better summation is:
Computer Engineering = applied CS/EE/hardware/software engineering
Computer Science = research CS/theory/algorithms/database/programming</p>
<p>Programming and Software Engineering have overlaps, but as the name suggests, software engineering is much more structured and project based, as suppose to just programming a cool looking ajax/javascript powered site.</p>