<p>I've posted before about son's friend who is struggling with engineering. He is continuing to struggle with Calc III, after barely passing, C-, Calc II. He is seriously considering changing his major to accounting now.</p>
<p>I've warned that accounting is not an easy major, but he feels that he can't conquer calculus and will not be able to continue in mechanical engineering.</p>
<p>Anyone have any experience in changing majors from mech eng to accounting? </p>
<p>Student is concerned about being dropped from the honors program, which requires a 3.3 GPA, so is looking for a major where he can maintain this GPA. Current GPA is probably around 2.8.</p>
<p>Where is his real passion; engineering or accounting? If it is engineering, then switching might not be such a great idea. </p>
<p>It was suicide to try Calc III after such a poor performance in Calc II. If I was advising him, I would have told him to repeat Calc II. Poor performance in math only compounds itself as you go on. Better to go back and really learn Calc II, then go on.</p>
<p>There are a lot of students that enter engineering colleges as pre-business majors. I did but that was a long time ago so I can only offer general comments. There aren’t any difficult concepts to master in accounting. Accounting is a logical framework to record things that you own, owe, and to record things that happen. Some students find accounting difficult because they don’t like to memorize rules or they don’t understand relationships between different accounts. I don’t think anyone with a general aptitude in math (at least enough of an aptitude to get into an engineering school) would have difficulty in learning accounting. Engineering students should perform well because they should be fairly strong in their analytical ability. Accounting, however, may be boring if the student really had a desire to create things.</p>
<p>Personally, I would say out of all the important classes you take in an engineering curriculum calculus is important, but not at the top of the list because your done with that type of math after your sophomore year. If the situation was you can’t get through physics I and physics II then I would say you should rethink things because after physics you take statics, strengths of materials, material science, thermo, fluid, and the list goes on all of them require solid physics knowledge.
Just stick with engineering until your done calculus and if you cant keep up with the other classes then maybe consider switching</p>
<p>Although accounting is not easy, it is a different kind of thought process. I have studied both and think that someone who finds calculus tough going might do very well in accounting. They should plan to dedicate a good number of hours to the first and second semesters and NOT get discouraged when things don’t make sense immediately. I am a working engineer with graduate studies in accounting. My daughter is a CPA for a Fortune 100 company. She really struggled with Calc 3 and made a great decision when she changed to accounting.</p>
<p>I wish my son’s friend would just stick out the two more semesters of math, Calc III and Diff Eq, and I’m happy he’s not dropped statics and physics and thermo. He started the semester with a light load, so it’s even lighter now. Perhaps if he gets into accounting and doesn’t like it, he can go back to engineering, maybe when he’s more mature and maybe takes the math classes at another university. My son and he have shared math teachers all three semesters they’ve been there, and son has done fine, but he had a much more rigorous math curriculum than his friend did.</p>
<p>you didn’t answer the previous guy’s question about the guy’s effort. If he tried hard, and still get very low grades, he’s going to have problems later. These weeder classes are hard, but the real engineering classes are only going to get harder. </p>
<p>Charlies1902, because calc III is conceptually much more difficult.</p>