I am a senior in high school deciding on a major for college. I have an interest in both mechanical engineering and computer science, and ultimately want to create a startup or work for a small company where I can be significant. Which field has more innovation? Ive also heard that a meche major with cs minor works really well since cs can be self-taught which ive been doing since middle school. I am good at and enjoy long projects and problems. i am good at math, physics, and the creative thinking and problem solving involved in programming. both of these are my interests but i am not sure which direction to go. since my ultimate goal is to have some kind of technological startup which advances people and the world (sounds crazy and really broad but thats the goal, just like elon musk is doing through tesla, solarcity, and spacex and just like google and nasa and many other companies are doing), which is the best option for me? i see college as my time to learn as much as possible and get as much experience as possible to hopefully find a job i like and put myself in a good position to have a successful startup eventually. thanks in advance for any advice, comments, etc. please ask questions if i was unclear about anything.
This seems like an odd thing to value personally. Can you be more specific about what you mean here?
Beyond that, your reasoning sounds solid for the ME major with the CS minor. I’d also consider EE over ME as well. For working at a high level as a founder of a startup, having the hardware understanding will be very helpful.
@PengsPhils thanks for the response. to answer your question, as i said i want to learn as much as possible in college in order to put myself in the best position to have a successful startup. i feel cs has much more room for innovation, new ideas, and it is the fastest growing thing out there right now. i have a passion for more, but engineering is definitely more, but at the same time, learning cs is the future. mechanical engineering while also constantly innovating, is closer to its peak as now innovation in mechanical engineering is always including computer science. the way to mechanically create things and other engineering of the sort is pretty much at its peak, if you get what i mean. please share your opinion on what i think as i am jsut a high schooler and could be horribly wrong. thanks for the advice in general and i will definitely look into an EE degree as well.
Based on my experience, I think you’re getting caught up a bit too much with both buzzwords and hype of CS (don’t worry, it’s very understandable to do so).
This is an absolutely great aspiration and we need more of this. The problem I see most with this type of thinking, however, is that every startup you see these days tries to spin itself as this. You’ll see it all the time with slogans like “Changing the way the world does X”, where X is something very unimportant to the world in the grand scheme.
You mention Musk, NASA, and Google. Every one of those companies is heavily invested in hardware. In fact, while I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest fan of Musk as of late, Musk’s companies have actually checked the “advancing the world” aspiration box exactly because they work with the physical world, not just software. Code/CS goes into pretty much everything these days, but the true value is often generated by things not CS. CS is simply a tool that uses those hardware things.
I think the difference with CS isn’t the room it has for “innovation”, but how easy it is to do so. Anyone with a laptop can do important work in CS these days. But I think that makes the hardware side all the more important, as it takes more resources, usually formal education, and people putting in the time to come up with those crucial discoveries. And that’s exactly why I’d say that for someone like you, ME/EE would likely be the better pick. I’m no expert on the ME/EE side, but I wouldn’t say it’s close to a peak at all. Engineering tends to move in big jumps at a high level, and you never know what thing will jumpstart the next one. A CS minor should give you enough grounding to get the best of both worlds, but the other way doesn’t really work as well.
Hope that helps!
@PengsPhils completely agree with pretty much everything you say. i feel cs will become extremely competitive since its so easy to learn, many kids including myself can learn it just at home on random websites. i have decided doing mechanical engineering is the best route and as for your comments on startups, Elon Musk, etc. i completely agree. i think meche is the best pick since i want to learn about constructing new technology and the AI and programming aspect i can learn on my own. thanks for the help!
No problem 
Good luck!
I know absolutely nothing about startups, but I would like to suggest that you wouldn’t want to put all of your eggs in 1 basket. Most of the startups fail, and in case you decide not to continue the start up path, I would say CS degree gives you most job opportunities than MechE.
Also, I have the impression that there are a lot more CS startups. Either way, I don’t think your degree really matters in terms of the startup. The idea and the business side of thing matters a lot more. Just look at Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. They never even finished their degree.
This is just my experience as someone who has tried going down both routes and take what I say with a grain of salt because things change over time.
I currently work as a software engineer for one of the biggest insurance companies in the U.S. I earn a good salary. If I compare myself to my peers, I earn a VERY good salary.
Prior to becoming a software engineer, I graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, where my sub-plan was Applied Mathematics & Statistics and I had a heavy emphasis on my coursework with Physics courses.
Afraid I was going to become an actuary, I took the first job offer that came at me, which was actually just an internship. It was an internship in systems development and I learned how to code on the job there. From there, I became a software technician, which had its named changed to technical engineer. While I worked as a technical engineer, I hated what I was doing. I was basically finding and fixing bugs with the company’s application and fixing bad data. It was a pretty thankless job; nobody from any of the software engineering companies thought we were any good and management was terrible. So, I convinced my director to let me go to school because honestly, I was really good at my job, I just hated every minute of it.
I enrolled back into school for mechanical engineering in 2016. It sucked. I was going to school full-time and going to work full-time. I had absolutely zero free time on the weekdays and the weekends for over a year before I called it quits on the degree. It was too much for someone who has to work a full-time job to support a small family.
As I was making only about 30K at the time as a technical engineer, I thought I was getting played pretty hard because I could see that the salaries being posted for mechanical engineers were much higher, somewhere in the 50’s and 60’s starting. But then my boss at the time recommended that I apply for a software engineering position within the company and after a few months, I received the offer and that bumped me up to 50K+. I had one of the most stressful teams of the company because we managed so much stuff, but it was fun a lot of the time and we were really a great team together for a while. Having found out that I enjoyed working as a software engineer, I just could not see why I would continue doing mechanical engineering because the salary eventually has a ceiling and its much lower for mechanical engineering than it is for computer science… I got a different job because I thought the company was ripping me off and am now making 80K+. My next job hop will probably net me another 20 or so K and put me in the six figures range by thirty years old.
Most of my mechanical engineering friends have either switched to computer science careers or they have taken a different job within their engineering companies that isn’t strictly mechanical engineer. Like I said, the pay is great starting but eventually you can’t go up that much anymore where it feels super comfortable to live with.
With more and more of our lives becoming reliant on software, I see that basically programming jobs are going to be aplenty with good salaries to offer. I’d choose computer science over mechanical engineering.
I feel like by writing this post I’m over-recommending computer engineering since I just made a long post talking about computer engineering as an option for the “MechE vs CS for career in robotics?” thread on the engineering majors forum, but I think I should talk a bit about computer engineering here too since it might be a good option for you.
Computer engineering is essentially very similar to a double major in electrical engineering with hardware emphasis and computer science. This might be a particularly good option for you because, like computer science, computer engineering also involves a lot of programming, and if hardware is important to know about for tech start ups, the computer engineering major should be a really good major for tech start ups since the major covers hardware.
If you are considering computer engineering as an option, you should check the course requirements for that program at your college because I don’t know if the computer engineering major differs much depending on college, but at the college I went to at least the computer engineering major covers both software and hardware really well and prepares students for both hardware and software positions. If computer engineering is not offered at your college (or colleges that you are considering if you aren’t in college yet), you could also maybe pursue an electrical engineering major and take hardware classes to satisfy electrical engineering elective requirements and maybe even double major that with computer science (if you do that you will have something really similar to a computer engineering major).
Also, I don’t know much about mechanical engineering, but I’m not sure if mechanical engineering covers hardware that well because I always thought that hardware was mostly covered in computer engineering and electrical engineering rather than mechanical engineering, and I’m not sure if mechanical engineering is particularly the best option for tech start ups. I could be wrong though, maybe mechanical engineering and CS minor is a good option for tech start ups, especially if there is an overlap between EE and ME. It might be a good idea to post this also in the engineering forum, maybe if you did that some mechanical engineering major experts can give you some advice.
If your goal is to someday own your own company ( nothing at all wrong with that! ), you should focus on business skills and add in technical knowledge on the side as required. Your goal should be a business first and then you run it based upon your area of passion/interest.
In colleges now there is course work for start ups. Make sure the college you pick has that. Many like Michigan has this culture through organizations you can join. You can even start your own business, club etc and get grants. My son did it as a freshman and got two grants worth $15,000 and worked with the groups and graduate students to build it. The opportunities are out there in college. You can be any major but it seems lots of students are business or engineering…
Also my son wants to go into business type work like management or start up etc. Industrial engineering is his path to get there with a business minor or just more business type classes. Take s look.
Don’t take this as me telling you what to do but just as an example to give you more ideas. I started my business in CS by simply making web pages and getting money off of ads. I then started making apps and getting money from ads and Android. After I had this initial start I began to move into a little AI research which is where I’m currently at. I also still get money off of web/app making because it is dependent mostly on if it’s just out there. Also, remember that businesses are always changing their products so it doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to CS or ME. Good luck!!!