<p>Civil, and Mechanical. Now don't get me wrong I'm pretty good at math, but physics is better for me. It just seems more interesting. Which field fits that description? For some reason I feel like civil or mechanical is the best fit for me, but I don't know. By the way I'm in my junior year of highschool.</p>
<p>If physics is better for you, then why are you looking at civil and mechanical engineering?</p>
<p>EE!!! ChemE!!! {"engineering" disciplines which are really closet physics majors}</p>
<p>I think the OP is saying that they prefer physics to math.</p>
<p>There's math in all engineering, OP, but there's definitely more physics in both civ and mech than there is math, and of physics, it's more the mechanical sort of physics rather than the E&M sort of physics.</p>
<p>Yea, that is what I meant aibarr. How hard is the math on the road to a CE or ME degree, just curious. I have an aptitude for it, and am a great math student. I'm in pre calc now.</p>
<p>There is a lot more math for a physics major than engineering.</p>
<p>I get the impression that MechE is more math intensive than CivE just based on comparing my own math experiences to my friends in CivE. I know here at Illinois, you need Calc 1,2,3, Diffy Q, Linear Algebra, and Statistics to do ME, and that if you go into an area like fluids you will be using pretty much all of it minus statistics every time you go to solve a problem, so that particular sub-branch is very math intensive. Controls also has a lot, though not so much multivariable stuff. The rest of the ME fields such as design and materials are much less math intensive than the two I have already mentioned. A Civil could help you out with their side of things.</p>
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EE!!! ChemE!!! {"engineering" disciplines which are really closet physics majors}
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<p>No engineering major is remotely like physics, however. You'll be pretty disappointed in an engineering discipline if you really like physics.</p>
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I get the impression that MechE is more math intensive than CivE just based on comparing my own math experiences to my friends in CivE.
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<p>Depends highly upon what sort of CivE subdiscipline you go into.</p>
<p>How does the math in structures, transportation, and fluids compare? I get the impression that calc 3 is used a lot, which I'm enjoying right now.</p>
<p>Calc 3 is a rather nebulous term...</p>
<p>The math in structures and fluids is much the same, because finite element and computational fluid dynamics are pretty similar, computationally. Lots of PDEs. Lots of matrix manipulation. Lots of derivation of shape functions. Check wiki for an overview of the FEM:</p>
<p>Finite</a> element method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>The math in traffic and transportation has more to do with statistics, as I understand it. It's not really my field, though I've worked in it before and I seem to recall it being very statistically-intensive.</p>
<p>EE can potentially involve a lot of physics. Undergraduate study will only feature electromagnetics, and intro to semiconductor device physics (quantum). But at the graduate level, if you go into semiconductors, lasers, or anything to do with electromagnetics (antennas and transmission lines, etc.) then you will have more exposure to physics.</p>
<p>But none of the engineering disciplines really compare too well with a physics degree. I'm in EE because I felt it had a lot of physics, and I'm somewhat disappointed. Though I still feel that EE and probably ChemE have the greatest potential of running into problems where a good understanding of physics (the E&M part, and some aspects of modern physics) would really help.</p>
<p>I've also heard that materials science has a lot to do with physics, which makes sense. People with physics B.S. tend to go to graduate school in materials science for this reason.</p>
<p>"You'll be pretty disappointed in an engineering discipline if you really like physics."</p>
<p>what about theoretical areas of grad level engineering, like controls and systems?</p>
<p>From my limited experience working in traffic engineering, there's both probability and statistics. You'll use various distributions to predict vehicular and pedestrian movements. There will also be linear regression at times.</p>
<p>"what about theoretical areas of grad level engineering, like controls and systems?" I would think that there is a pretty significant difference in a lot of areas of graduate physics and grad engineering from the standpoint of math.</p>
<p>"No engineering major is remotely like physics, however. You'll be pretty disappointed in an engineering discipline if you really like physics."</p>
<p>I thought ChemE and MechE were both really heavy in thermodynamics and EE in circuits and electricity and electrical currents - isn't all of that physics?</p>
<p>Thermo and electricity etc are small subsets of physics. The courses while in both departments also may not have the same emphasis. Physics E&M is more math intensive than in engineering.</p>
<p>Just like taking thermo in the physics department is going to focus a lot more on kinetic theory and everything on the microscale than it would if you took it in the ME department. Physics strives to understand why things happen. Engineering tries to take things and use them to make other things happen. Basically. Using the thermo example, in the physics version you get more in depth into what is happening to each molecule (when I took it) and what the energy changes really represent, while the ME version really was telling you how to quantify the energy changes and how to use them and how it applied to practical problems.</p>
<p>As a physicist, I took E&M and I now teach E&M in the electrical engineering department. When I started teaching this course, the thing that stood out immediately was that the integrals in the textbook had numerical values vs in the physics course which had variables.</p>