<p>Have any of you jumped into your college engineering education without any prior knowledge of it in high school? How and when did you know that engineering was what you wanted to pursue in college? I'm asking this because I really love math and science, but I have no experience with engineering; I think that if I was exposed to it, then I might really like it. Also, if you didn't have any experience with engineering in high school, did you struggle in your engineering classes in college? Thank you for reading. :)</p>
<p>I had no idea what an engineer really did when I was in high school. That was primarily because I had no exposure to anyone doing engineering. </p>
<p>I went to college knowing that I wanted to do something involving math and science because that is what I liked and that is what I did well in. The college I went to had a common freshman program as they did not require (or even allow) you to designate a major until after your freshman year. I was exposed to many different fields and ended up deciding on an engineering path.</p>
<p>My kids did have some exposure to people doing engineering as my wife and I are both engineers. We also have many friends (as you would expect) that are engineers. They both choose engineering but it was a much more informed decision.</p>
<p>I did struggle some in the first part of college, but it wasn’t because of any lack of knowing what engineers did. My study skills coming out of high school were quite poor and I definitely needed to improve them. Once they improved, I did fine.</p>
<p>I started building model airplanes when I was like 10 years old. Got very good at it, too. All the mechanics of materials textbooks in the world won’t teach you what a few years worth of balsa wood can :D. When I graduated HS it was simply that, there was nothing else to choose.</p>
<p>Well, I’m not technically engineering (CS), but I’ll give my story anyway. Ever since I was young, I wanted to know why and how things worked. I made a plethora of home-made science experiments (mostly failures), such as a water purifying system using solar energy and a bunch of stuff with magnets. When I got around to middle school, I lost most of my scientific interests and wanted to “fit in”. After a few years of trying to have popular interests, I gave up on it. In high school, freshman year, I took an elective class in IT and Web Development and loved it. This experience rekindled my curiosity for the way things function. At this point, I was less interested in how the natural world worked and more into the mechanisms that drove our technological world. As that class was the only computing-related class my HS offered, I enrolled in an (extremely rigorous) extra-curricular program for high schoolers interested in computing, in which we used Scheme and functional programming. And here I am, three years later, as a freshman CS major doing pretty well.</p>
<p>If you’re aiming for a highly competitive college, it’s pretty hard to show you’re interested in engineering, in your app, if you haven’t tested that. It can be a challenging major and there’s the tinkering/problem-solving personality Turbo and HO describe, plus a lot of the work is collaborative. See what you can experience now- some kids test their interest through robotics, some sort of work experience, sometimes a summer program. Many will tell you that you can do it without this- but for a highly selective, you want to show them you went further than just thinking about it. The competition will.</p>
<p>Most people graduating from an engineering program did not have engineering experience of any kind prior to entering the program, and they do just fine. The bottom line is that if you are interested in math and science and want to use them to solve real-world problems, you should consider engineering as an option.</p>
<p>For me, I just knew I loved learning about how things worked, so I figured I would do engineering. As I moved along through my engineering work, I learned that I liked the physics behind why things worked, so I went to graduate school to get into research. I had zero engineering experience outside of things like AP Calculus AB and AP Physics C before entering my engineering program (unless you count Legos). I didn’t really struggle in my mechanical engineering (unless you want to go look at my circuits grade), and that was at a top school. All you really need is the interest, a willingness to work relatively hard, and an above average level of intelligence (no need to be a genius) and you are solid.</p>
<p>My dad told me to apply to Engineering school because salaries are higher so I did and I never bothered to do anything different. I wound up finding something I liked well enough and went with it. I like math but don’t like (nor understand) science so I went with majors that played to my strength there. You don’t have to like both math and science, just one or the other and there will be something there for you. </p>
<p>Most people’s stories are similarly boring and uninspiring. I had no experience going in, didn’t know what I wanted to do (well, I knew I was planning on a “regular” office-type job) and didn’t know what engineering was. It doesn’t make much of a difference.</p>
<p>My daughter is having to write essays about her interest and experience with engineering. I think for some schools she also has to say what she plans to do with college x’s engineering degree. It would obviously be very helpful to have some experience related to this when you apply. Her experience is probably more limited than most applicants, and I wish she had done a bit more.</p>
<p>Engineering classes tend to have foundation prerequisites in math and science, so many HSs do not offer any engineering classes. And at many colleges, engineering majors do not take any engineering classes until their 2nd year. This can make it difficult to decide on an engineering major during high school. </p>
<p>I was initially interested in engineering because I was especially interested and talented in math and programming. I also had various tech type hobbies as a kid. For example, I was always the one who wired up and installed any kind of technical device at our home, as well as the one who figured out how it worked and did any kind of setup/programming. I also did some more complex things, such as adding phone outlets and figuring out related wiring (my parents are quite old fashioned and still do not have a cell phone today). When I was growing up, I used to be into video games and would sometimes get my name in magazines for being the first to complete the game, which sometimes involved cracking the password system and/or altering programming settings (I had a special device that could do the latter). However, it wasn’t until I took Intro to Electrical Engineering in my sophomore year of college that I decided on the major and decided on pursuing a career + grad degrees in engineering, rather than medicine.</p>
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<p>Again, this is not typical. I remember writing a statement of purpose back when I was applying, but really all I talked about that was related to engineering was math, physics, Legos, and the fact that my dad worked at Boeing so I liked aircraft. Very, very few places will want to know what you plan to do with the degree because very, very few incoming freshman have any clue what they want to do with the degree, and very few of the very, very few who do know actually end up doing that. Places like MIT and Caltech will want to know this sort of things perhaps to help them whittle down the gigantic pile of junk applications they get, but otherwise, no one is going to be that detailed.</p>
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<p>On the contrary, it probably isn’t more limited. Most people really don’t have any prior engineering experience.</p>
<p>In our situation, a most selective, so many kids do get some experience- this is not being an “engineer,” but reflects the sort of skill sets needed and the endurance. That is your competition. Every once in a while, a certain poster says you don’t need higher math, you can get it in college. Others, as here, point back to being green when they started. </p>
<p>But we look for these things- the prep, the mindset, the confirmation of interest and the experience. Again, not working as an engineer (like, yeah, right,) but putting yourself into situations where you show this is a genuine enough interest to have tested the waters in some relevant way. And, darn it, you better have physics and that higher math. And have done well. </p>
<p>Want to know how many kids just say, “Ever since I got my first set of Legos, in kindergarten-?” And/or point to Discovery Channel. Or, say they like math-sci and figure engineering is a good way to make life better around the world? That’s good, it’s real. But the next kid may have taken it a step further. </p>
<p>I wonder what OP has actually done but not yet mentioned. Math-sci team/competitions? Some techie club or things? Tinkered or programmed? Just sharing IME and, of course, it may not apply for the colleges OP has in mind.</p>
<p>A couple of my high school teachers were engineers (Chem and Physics teachers were Chemical engineers, tech elective teacher was a Mechanical Engineer). I loved physics (but hated how there was a lack of application) and was talking to my physics teacher when he suggested Engineering. I thought about it, sounded interesting, talked to my parents about it. Turns out, one of my neighbors was a retired Civil engineer and Adjunct Professor at Rutgers. Talked to him, narrowed my interest down to Civil engineering. </p>
<p>As a kid I plaid with Barbies, legos (big pink chinese knockoff castle and police station set, whoo!), and Pokemon.</p>
<p>We always knew our daughter would be an engineer, but it took her a full eighteen years to figure it out for herself.</p>
<p>D credits an art history course for getting her interested in engineering. Her favorite part of class was learning about architecture and as she learned more about that subject, she found she was more interested in how buildings/bridges/monuments were constructed rather than how they were designed. She’s working on a civil engineering degree now, and will probably follow with graduate studies in structural engineering. Who would have thought that would come out of an art class?</p>
<p>Why did we think she would be an engineer? She was always building some contraption or tearing one apart to see how it worked.</p>
<p>I wanted to be like Tony Stark/IronMan…no lie. I figured getting an EE degree was the way to go…UNTIL…Electromagnetic Field Theory may be “tap out in the octagon”. After not getting admitted to the EE program, I went to just being a Math major but figured to take CS electives as a “Plan-B”.</p>
<p>Once it was time for me to graduate (and probably because of my sub-3.0 GPA), I could not snag any “Math jobs” but every employer wanted me for my programming skills. Hell, some employers even lied and said they wanted Math majors but when I get to the interview, said “well…can you meet with the software development group manager?”. Well, money was running out, parents focused on my younger sister in college and yours truly had to take one of those programming jobs.</p>
<p>The rest is history :-)</p>
<p>Great responses, thank you for sharing!</p>
<p>One of my Ds thought she might want to be an engineer – like you, she liked math and science but wasn’t sure what was involved in engineering. She attended a three week engineering summer program the summer after junior year of high school, partly to see if she liked engineering or not. She actually decided she did not want to be an engineer – but that was a valuable thing to find out before she headed off to college. She is attending a STEM college where she still has the choice to go down the engineering path if she changes her mind, though.</p>
<p>If you don’t mind me asking, what was the program? :)</p>
<p>Well, I fought being an engineer/science person every step of the way, mainly because I’d heard that I would have no social life. That was horrifying to me. My friend (who is actually a theater major) said “I might not have a social life outside of acting, but it’s what I’m good at and what I love!” That really hit home. I absolutely love the idea of engineering healthier, delicious foods , artificial organs, and artificial intelligence! I actually went to a government agency-sponsored camp one summer, and loved it. So, I took my friend’s advice, and I am an unspecified engineering major (leaning towards biomolecular & chem, though). It was a convoluted path, but I got there. And you know what? My friend was a physics major and she still has time for a social life! Maybe it won’t be that bad for me!</p>
<p>@bonehead (#10). Actually, like the OP, my daughter is more of a math and science person than an engineer. She’s planning to major in computer science, which is often housed in engineering schools, and so she has been writing a lot of “Why engineering” essays. When she started high school she was thinking about majoring in science and only took her first computer science class and settled on that as a junior. I’m sure there are plenty of kids applying to some of the competitive programs she is interested in who have way more experience than she does and will be able to submit significant applications they have written or talk about jobs they have had in the field. Young people can get quite far in computer science at an early age but that’s unlikely to be true of students of other engineering fields. </p>
<p>For the OP: Why did she make this decision? She has very strong math theoretical/analytical skills, but she wants to do something she felt was more immediately practical than abstract math. She loves math and science, especially physics/astronomy, but after 2 years of chemistry she decided chemistry is not something she wants to do. I also felt that doing lab experiments isn’t really her strength. On the other hand, she had enjoyed tinkering around with some small programming projects and she liked AP computer science. So it came down to computer science or possibly some kind of applied math/statistics, or perhaps physics. We felt that computer science should continue to be an interesting field in the coming decades where she could see her work having an impact on society, also might allow her to collaborate on scienc-ey projects she finds interesting, and has good job prospects, so she settled on that.</p>
<p>My point is that yes, some students will come in with some kind of engineering experience from high school, particularly from the better-funded high schools that can find such programs. The percentage will be higher for computer science because the cost to run and participate in a program of that sort is much lower. That, said, except at the top private schools like MIT, it shouldn’t be a real issue as the majority of incoming students will have the same little to no experience. Even some of the top engineering programs are this way, particularly those that are public (think Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, etc.). These schools have an obligation to educate the citizens of their state and are generally, do to this mission, less selective despite having top programs. What it means is that they don’t need to resort to such rigorous entrance requirements to whittle down the overlarge applicant pool. They can, and should, admit the student who didn’t have the time or reasonable opportunity to obtain such experience, as is the case with most high school students.</p>