MechE and ChemE? HELP

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Hi, I'm a freshman about three weeks into mechanical engineering. </p>

<p>The thing is, I keep hearing about how the mech e. students have loved building stuff since they were little. That's not really me. In fact, in my high school engineering class we used Fischertechnik(which are basically really advanced LEGO's with outlets and motors that will let you build just about anything) to build stuff like bridges, brakes, wheels and conveyer belts that ran on motors, and I sucked at it. I mean, I was really good at coming up with ideas, and my group would implement my ideas for the project, but i just sucked at the actually building part. And I was bored. It sucks because I think it'd be badass to build something and watch it move and do its job, but once it actually comes down to building its boring. </p>

<p>One thing that I did really well and enjoyed was AP chemistry. It was a lot of work, but it was the one class that was worth studying for. I remember I had to make up a titration lab by myself once and loved every second of it. But I also hear that chemical engineering in college is little chemistry and a lot of math and physics.<br>
What I'm trying to ask is, what do mechanical and chemical engineers start doing around their sophomore years? what are classes like Fluid Dynamics and the advanced CHE classes like? would I like chemical engineering? I enjoy calculus, physics not so much. I'm currently not taking chemistry because I skipped CHE 131 (only required CHE course for MechE) with my AP credit.</p>

2

<p>I’m a junior ChemE major. As far as chemistry I’ve taken 2 semesters of GenChem, 2 semesters of Organic, Quantitative Analysis and I’m currently in Physical Chemistry. I’ve taken Physics 1&2 but some of the other classes pull directly from physics like fluid mechanics. For ChemE classes I’ve taken Intro to ChemE, Chemical Process Principles (sort of like an overview of the whole cheme curriculum but just briefly covering every topic, analogous to GenChem for Chemistry majors) 2 semesters of Thermo, Fluid mechanics and I’m currently taking Separations Process Design, Heat Transfer, Process Dynamics and Controls, and Intro to Materials (an eng elective). ChemE is tons of math, and a good bit of both physics and chemistry but it’s mainly Chemical Engineering which you really don’t start learning until you start taking the courses. If you like math and chemistry I’d do ChemE over MechE. I knew I liked Math and Physics but not chemistry so much and I went into ChemE. Because of my interest in how it all comes together in this curriculum I’ve ended up loving my chemistry classes.</p>

3

<p>As a mechanical engineer you won’t be building things anyway for the most part; you’ll be designing them and sending them off to the machine shop or manufacturing floor.</p>