I am currently an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley pursuing a BS in Mechanical Engineering. I hope to enter a career in aerospace and am considering several different minors to complement my BS. I am choosing between:
Math – probably the easiest in terms of number of extra courses I need to take
EECS – would this be the most useful for a career in aerospace?
Astrophysics – I’m most interested in this, but this would be difficult to accomplish in the time I have and I don’t know how useful it would be in the job search.
Which minor, if any, should I choose and for what reasons? Are there any other minors I should look at? Thanks!
If I were you, I would just take more ME design classes - that will be most helpful to you in your career. If I were hiring a new college graduate, a minor would not impress me AT ALL - I would wonder why the student didn’t take more engineering design classes, instead.
College should do at least two things, IMO. It should provide the basic tools for you to keep fed, housed, and clothed. And it should provide the basic means for you to arrive at 50, 60, or 70 years old with warmth, perspective, and dignity.
Math, to an even greater extent than with physics I think, helps us abstract and rephrase the world around us. For an engineer, I feel this adds breadth and power, but others may think differently, and for all I know they might be right. But as a tool to help make sense of things you experience … yeah, I really do think it adds long term value.
I’ve done some interviewing at a couple of different places, and don’t recall seeing any ME’s or EE’s with a math minor - and am pretty certain I’d remember if I had. Cannot imagine that it would have been a negative, and the couple engineers I’ve worked with who had degrees in either pure or applied math have been incredibly versatile.
I absolutely agree that a minor is unnecessary and usually at least a little detrimental (opportunity cost). Use the extra credits you WOULD have spent in the minor on more upper-level classes in a useful specialty - might be ME, EE, math, something else, or a combination. Can’t say which field or classes until you pick that specialty, which might not be until you are a senior, so for now just focus on getting to your senior year with some open credits to spend.
@phoebecaulfield, the difference is that a math minor is a set of courses designed to make you a better mathematician, whereas I am suggesting that you take a set of courses (perhaps some math, perhaps some other subjects) designed to make you a better engineer. Very few engineers would benefit from a math minor as much as they would from a similar number of courses selected to achieve a specific engineering focus from a variety of fields.
I’ll cast a mildly dissenting vote. It’s too early to specialize as an undergrad. Something like 2-2.5% of our local population - men, women, and children, are mechanical engineers. That is not a typo. A lot of these are not designing physical structures but are active in regulation compliance, field engineering (visiting a customer site), systems engineering, and controls engineering.
Really solid math and CS skills have set a couple of them apart. These are ready not just for the first job, but to branch out into any of dozens of different directions by the time they hit the third or fourth job.
The contrast, which isn’t universal, but happens far too often, is a person whose data analysis work “looks like a salad recipe, written by a corporate lawyer on a phone with autocorrect that only corrected things to formulas from Microsoft Excel.” (XKCD 1513) What’s worse, they don’t even know it’s awful - and it happens even to kids from “top” schools.
Of course a concentration in technical communications is maybe even more useful, but don’t let’s go there.
bottom line: I do think a math minor can be useful for an aspiring engineer.
A math minor is of little use to most engineers just starting out on their careers. Math thru differential equations is about all you need. You can solve the basic engineering problems with just that level math. Depending on which area you then specialize in within engineering, then more math may be useful. But it will probably be very focused on the type of problems you are needing to work out. I was a structural engineer but also did a fair amount of structural dynamics. My graduate classes were in an applied mechanics / applied mathematics department.
For undergrad, classes in other branches of engineering would be more useful. I took materials classes, manufacturing engineering, a circuits class, etc. in addition to my major in structural engineering. They were useful in talking with other engineering disciplines that I needed to interface with on a regular basis. We could have meaningful discussions without talking past one another.