Lets say I want to become a computer hardware engineer and I get accepted to Caltech.

<p>Caltech offers Comp Sci and Electrical Engineering, but not specifically Computer Engineering majors. Would it be wiser to go to a different school? Would it be alright to just go to Caltech and take their Electrical Engineering major?</p>

<p>Comp Sci, EE, Comp Eng, the fact is, in the working world, nobody really cares. For the purposes of hiring, what is far more important is your work experience (as evidenced by summer internships, co-ops, research projects. etc. ), what you know about the industry and how your interview skills are. No computer company is going to say "Your technical qualifications are great, your experience is your interview is great, you know the industry well, but since you have a EE or CS degree but not a computer engineering degree, we're not going to hire you". Never happen. </p>

<p>Which gets to something I've been saying many times - just because you major in something does not mean that you can only get a job doing that thing. I knew a guy with an English degree who got offered a computer job. Of course it should be said that he did a lot of computer work as a hobby and to make extra money, and by the time he graduated, he probably had more practical computer experience than even some of the CS/CompE grads did.</p>

<p>^Exactly what I was hoping for.</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

<p>Computer Engineering is just a specialty of Electrical Engineering. Just major in EE and take some computer hardware classes and you should be fine.</p>

<p>You'll love CalTech. One of my good friends runs one of the Intel chip lines and has an EE from CalTech.</p>

<p>Frank</p>

<p>Actually Google will not hire you unless you have a BS in Computer Science. Some guy wrote about this in his blog, he got his BS in EE at some university and was pursuing a MS in CS at UC Irvine and they rejected him and told him flat out that he needed a BS in CS, lame.</p>

<p>Rage_fan, I don't know about that. Wayne Rosing was the legendary long-time VP of Engineering at Google who just stepped down recently. Rosing is widely credited with scaling Google to the virtual supercomputer cluster that it is today. Yet not only does Rosing not have a BS in CS, he doesn't even have a bachelor's degree at all. </p>

<p>I think that the guy in the blog is either himself lying, or that Google lied to him in not telling him the real reason for why he got rejected. The fact is, not only are there are engineers at Google who do not have BS degrees in CS, some of them never even went to college at all.</p>

<p>I hardly believe he was turned down because he didnt have BS in CS. I'm sure that had to be something else on his resume that made the HR person immediately turn sour.</p>

<p>he probably put that he is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.. :D</p>