<p>I’ve been accepted into Cal Poly Pomona for mechanical engineering, but I want to become an automotive engineer in the future. Is the engineering at poly any good?</p>
<p>My exact major and career choice.
I know the polytechnical part mean engineering will be hands on and excellent ive heard. IM CURIOUS TOO</p>
<p>I just asked my friend next to me. Yes, it’s good. They’ll chew you up and spit you out.</p>
<p>Well when you put it that way … not soo appealing lol</p>
<p>Well, that’s pretty much true for most places when you do engineering. I mean people band together and try to get through it. I know that a lot of engineering majors wind up changing their majors to business or something of that nature. I was having a chat with a stranger on campus who said he transferred in and couldn’t hack it in engineering so he switched. He said that a lot of his friends switch because at a certain point people start looking at their transcript and start thinking that doing your best and pulling off a C is terrible…but it is hard to earn good grades in those majors. I think it just comes down to perseverance. Things can get pretty tough and you’ll start looking to greener pastures for some majors here, like I had considered switching from my math program to political science a few weeks ago. I decided that I’d stick with it in the end.</p>
<p>I’m not an engineering major but doing “applied math” has been very hands-on. I know that it’s been very hands on from the get-go for my friend. I’ve had to do projects every quarter where I tackled some real world problem like logistic modeling of fisheries where there is some constant harvesting rate (or “quota”) that fisheries use and that if they exceed a certain limit it’ll affect the entire system because fish populations rise and fall but can be driven to extinction, which you calculate the limit of that system by solving for the critical values through linearization. I also did a project where I was handling the inventory of a company and trying to maximize profit and determining actual revenue while conducting sensitivity analysis to see what I could do to make my profit better with the resources I had. The most recent projects I had that were due this week were to use a two-variable chemical model in Differential Equations to calculate equilibrium points and examine the dynamics of the nonlinear system. I also had to do a scheduling problem where you assigned teachers based on their preferences to courses that were being taught in the actual school year and had to model that through software. </p>
<p>So, you’ll learn a lot. Just walking around the library I know that a lot of people even in the library are engineering majors and they’re often working in a group together. I heard it’s difficult. My friend got through math and physics basically unscathed (no less than an A in lower-divison math/physics classes) and has struggled this quarter with dynamics and manufacturing. Or maybe it was materials science? One of those classes. All I know is he has a book about 6 inches tall for one of the latter classes and most people are pulling a D in that class where a 50% is a C. That was intimidating.</p>
<p>Do you have any idea what the average GPA for engineering majors is upon graduation?</p>