Mechanical engineering or petroleum engineering? Internships?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

Hi, Im new to this forum and have a few questions regarding college majors.
I am a junior in high school and interested in majoring in mechanical or petroleum engineering but do not know which one to do. If I choose to go with mechanical engineering, I would like to go into the oil and gas industry. What would be the best choice for the future? I know with a me degree you have more job chances and with a petroleum degree you are pretty narrowed down. Also, if I do go with mechanical engineering, should I intern at chevron, shell, Conoco, bp etc. in my junior and senior year in college?
So my questions and concerns are:

  1. What major will have more of an advantage in the future ?(job availability, salary, family life)
  2. How do you get an internship and/or job at an oil company with a mechanical engineering degree?
  3. What colleges/universities offer good mechanical engineering programs? ( Cornell, RIT, Penn State etc.)
  4. What colleges/ universities offer good petroleum engineering programs? (Marietta, West Virgina, Texas a&M etc.)

I have not taken the SAT yet but will in a couple weeks, but my PSAT score was around 1500, yeah I know its pretty low. My gpa is 4.3 weighted (don’t know what it is unweighted). Thanks for the help!

2

I was just accepted into Petroleum Engineering at UT Austin, and I am worried about my choice of major. I am interested in the oil and gas industry, but I am hesitant to pursue a degree in PetE because of the cyclical nature of the industry. After all, you will be spending tens of thousands of dollars on an education and the last thing you would want is for your career to jeopardized by your choice of major. This is why, if I have the opportunity to transfer to chemical engineering, I will.

Sure, you could major in PetE and make 180K if the market is right and you are committed to the industry, but it seems like a marginal benefit in my book. You have to really want to be a petroleum engineer. I think you have the right idea by wanting to study MechE. You could still work in oil and gas if you wanted, but it would be more difficult to get the upstream jobs that command a lucrative salary (before bonuses). You mentioned “family life” in your post. All of the threads I have read on college confidential seem to assert that family and petroleum engineering don’t mix well(due to traveling, 14 on 14 off schedule, location rotations). Then again, there are different fields of petroleum engineering. You could be an operations engineer, reservoir engineer, or drilling engineer just to name a few. I would research the different specializations to see if you can identify with one you would want to do. Petroleum engineering is also very linear. After the second year, almost all of the courses you will be taking would be within the PetE department. Take a look at the course outlines of each discipline of engineering and see which you would most likely be interested in studying:
http://www.engr.utexas.edu/undergraduate/programs
On a side note, there are’t many schools that offer PetE (most are concentrated along Gulf Coast), while there are many schools that offer MechE. This is just one more reason why PetE could limit you. If you live in Texas, good schools for PetE are UT, TAMU, Texas Tech, and UofH off of the top of my head.

All of this said, I am only a prospective student so take everything I have said with a grain of salt! Work on your standardized test scores. Good Luck!