MechE vs CS for career in robotics?

College Majors Engineering Majors
21

Your school list is VERY diverse, from one of the smallest schools in the nation, to some of the biggest. They seem to be unified by a single thing, reputation. You should dig deeper into what the undergraduate experience is like at each of them. For example, the size of Intro to CS at UCB, currently the largest single lectiure in the nation, with over 1000 students, is larger than the size of the whole Harvey Mudd student body, at 800 give or take. Mudd engineers BTW are by all reports solid, but they only offer General Engineering, not Mechanical. Again, look beyond reputation. The last thing you want is to hate your school because you knew nothing about it but its reputation when you chose it. It is a completely avoidable problem.

Pomona is probably safe, but in this day and age, I’d add a guaranteed safety, that you will absolutely get into and you are certain you can afford. There are several good WUE options that are solid in ME and CS including, but not limited to Utah and Colorado State (the safeties my son happened to chose, and BTW, almost chose to attend Utah over Cal Poly).

Don’t make the same mistake others do every year and assume Cal Poly SLO is a safety because it is a CSU. Every year students get into UCB and/or UCLA and get rejected by CP for ME and CS. CP admits competitively by major. Those two are very competitive, CS especially so. For the class just entering, the actuals are not out yet, but their planning estimates were for over 5000 applicants for 100 spots. Their estimates are never off by much.

I can’t speak for the non-CA schools, but the UCs and CSUs don’t care about your high school’s weighted GPA, only your capped, weighted UC/CSU GPA, as calculated in their calculator. Capped simply means you only get extra weight for up to 8 semesters of honors, AP, or IB. Kf you have more AP/IB/honors, they simply count as regular courses. Cal Poly throws in an extra curve ball. They count 9th grade. The rest of the CSUs and UCs only count 10th and 11th.

Your parents are wrong about ME. Sure, a few might design parts of big construction projects like skyscrapers and football stadiums. HVAC and fire protection are examples, both subsets of ME, but they are minor in a VAST field (ME is the largest engineering field) and they don’t DO the actual building. Construction companies do.

If it’s any reassurance, my son’s ME masters thesis is a device that’s roughly 2 inches by 4 inches that sticks to the side of aircraft and takes complex boundary layer pressure measurements. His Senior Project was to design, build and test a device to calibrate a medical ultrasound device. He’s designed a torque vectoring algorithm using a neural network. He also designed a regenerative braking controller. He also designed an active, three axis camera phone Gimbal. It’s hardly bulldozer sorts of stuff.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what part of robotics you plan on doing with a CS degree that doesn’t involve programming. If you want to expand on that, you might get better direction. As it stands, my advice would be that you should do what you want to do, not what your parents want to tell their friends you do. If you don’t want to spend all day in front of a screen, don’t choose CS.

Good luck.

22

Well, some things that I observed other CE and EE majors doing in Robotics Club are soldering circuit boards, writing code for driver programs, writing code for microcontrollers, coding AI for the robot, designing printed circuit boards using software, etc.

I wish I could give you more information, but I was in robotics club only for a few months and didn’t really end up contributing much to the project, so my information on what people do exactly in robotics is a bit limited. I have some idea of what people do from being in the club, but I can’t really give much detail on those tasks.

But I do want to add, if you decide that you are more interested in programming than the overall design of the robot, I believe that a CE major might be better than a CS major if you do robotics because even though there were a lot of CS majors in robotics club at the college I went to, it seemed that they were more limited on which tasks they could do (like they did AI and controls but most CS majors there didn’t do lower level stuff like coding driver programs and working closely with microcontrollers) whereas it seemed that there were a good amount of CE majors doing both higher level and lower level programming and I think that might be because having an engineering background helps CE majors be able to work more on the lower level stuff whereas CS majors usually don’t have much engineering background and stick with the higher level stuff like AI. But if you don’t like EE, then that might be a concern because CE and EE share a lot of the courses. Although, based on a post by eyemgh, you may have to take some EE courses as well as a ME major, so you might be learning at least a little EE either way.

23

@eyemgh, agreed, this list is definitely unrefined. Honestly I would prefer a private like USC over UCB simply because of the class sizes - but I would like to have the option of Berkeley or LA if the privates don’t work out. Smaller schools (they don’t have to be as small as Mudd of course) are preferred - or rather, smaller class sizes - but the smaller schools I’m looking at are hard to get into so I wanted to have some UCs on there. SLO is definitely not on my list as a safety since I’m applying for engineering. I thought UCI would be considered close to a safety for me? I would apply to a safety such as the ones you suggested but I’m not sure if I would be willing to go to Utah or Colorado if I had the option of staying in California. Do you have any safety suggestions within CA?

I didn’t include my UC gpa because I didn’t want to overload with stats but it’s a 4.27 weighted capped (it’s not as high as I’ve seen elsewhere on CC because my school offers more than the typical number of classes/year). It would decrease with how Cal Poly calculates it - I’ll calculate it at some point today. Thanks for letting me know about that! I need to do more research about applying to Cal Poly.

I’m glad to hear their perception of ME is incorrect. So what exactly do most MEs do, if not construction-type projects? Your son’s thesis/Senior Project are pretty much exactly what I’m interested in!

I think pretty much all I could do with a CS degree would be coding. However maybe I could also get involved in AI which is interesting to me but again I couldn’t see myself in front of a screen all day. Maybe I could incorporate some aspects of AI while majoring in ME.

@CompEngGirl123 That sounds pretty interesting, I’ll keep CE in mind. I don’t dislike EE, I just don’t think I would want to major in it. It definitely plays a role in ME so I think I would find it interesting in that context.

24

I’m not the best resource to answer “what exactly do most MEs do?” I have multiple engineers in my family and my son is a ME graduate student, but I’m not an engineer.

What I can tell you is that MEs can do an overwhelmingly large number of things. For students who don’t know exactly what they want to do within ME, narrowing can be a challenge. MEs do many cool things. That’s not an issue for you though, as you know what you want to do…robotics. @HPuck35 might be able to shed some light.

If you want small classes, Cal Poly should certainly be on your list, especially as a CA resident. It is a great value. With the credits you’ll bring in, getting out in 4 years shouldn’t be a problem. Other schools I’d look at are RPI, WPI and Lehigh.

Also, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with any of the institutions on your list. It’s just when I see Berkeley and Mudd both on the same list, I can tell that the person formulating the list hasn’t yet dug into what the day in and day out experiences will be like for undergraduates.