<p>Understanding how important research is for graduate school as well as future careers, it's best to do as much research as possible. I'm majoring in ch e right now. I might switch from it.</p>
<p>My question is this:
does all of your research have to be specialized towards your area of study? Or do all engineering research do essentially the same things - prepare you for more important research projects.</p>
<p>I'm shaky about ch e right now. I might switch to mech e or even aero e. So I might have a chem internship/job and be a part of another area of research like aero e. That way I know what I really want. To be honest, I really don't like the tedious processes that goes into experiments in biology or chem labs. I mean in engineering, the idea usually sounds cool. But the processes are really long and boring. We're building a model rocket as a semester project in my aero e course, and that seems much more interesting than extracting and crystallizing protein or using linux to calculate relativistic effects on molecular behavior (two subjects that I picked up during summer and then ditched).</p>
<p>side note: there’s a lot of hot girls on campus, but none of them are in engineering. My friend told me that Marine Biologists are known to have the best combination of salary and happiness. I might ditch engineering in the long run.</p>
<p>Like I have said many times before: No one can tell you what is right for you. You have to do what makes you happy. If you don’t like ChemE, by all means, do NOT do it – find something that is right.</p>
<p>Although I must stay that not all courses in your major are going to be lovable – some of them are going to be hard, tedious and alot of work. This is true for all majors. However, if you find that you are feeling this way about nearly all of your classes, you are probably in the wrong field. </p>
<p>Also, while money is of course a factor that should be considered in the job selection process, please do not let it dictate your future. Some students in the US are known for going the “I want to be a Doctor because I can make 300k a year” route.</p>
<p>Yes, graduate schools tend to look at cumulative research time. If you have some summers of research, and maybe 2-3 semesters, you should be ahead of the game.</p>
<p>"it was hooked up to some machine. linux was used to send commands to the machine genius "
Hey, calm down. It was a pretty funny (read: noob) thing to say. In case you’re interested, it would have been better to say the programming language or command toolset you were using, instead of the operating system. In the interest of helping you career-wise, the sooner you realize that saying things like “used linux to calculate…” is silly, the better your chances of getting a job will be (don’t believe us? tell it to a (competent) interviewer and see how long it takes to be shown the exit).</p>
<p>Grad schools like a centralized research focus. While you don’t need to have it down to the dot you should have an “idea” of what field you want to research into.</p>
<p>Trust me, once you get into graduate school, you’ll find a vast stratification of fields and therefore you need to find a “niche” or area to focus on.</p>
<p>I think the overwhelming factor in grad school is a general interest and passion for said niche. While there is a wide variety of fields (hell you can split Fluid Mechanist into a series of sub-sets) there is a lot of overlap with other majors. ASE/ME both look at boundary layers, compressible and turbulent flow. ME/ChemEs will both look at porous flow and biotech. ME/EEs will look at photonics, MEMS and microfabrication.</p>
<p>As long as you major in something that gives you a good foundation you’ll have the knowledge to go into different fields. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that you NEED to have a general interest in the field.</p>
<p>Yeah your just gonna have to find out which engineering discipline you go into by yourself. But just for the record. Why the hell do you have to change careers to date a bunch of hotties? You don’t have to do that. Stay in engineering and search it out further if it really is what you want before you jump ship. In the mean time, go for the hotties anyway :)</p>
<p>I hope you would be able to get a chick outside fo your own field. If not then you got more problems to deal with</p>