Just curious if anyone knows which are the easiest engineering disciplines to get into versus the most difficult? I know Aerospace is one of the most popular, and I think mechanical? And I believe industrial is one of the least competitive? Is this right?
Also, does it matter if the applicant is female? I have heard rumors that female applicants are given an advantage…?
Gender does not matter at Cal Poly. By total number of students, ME is by far the biggest department. CS, BME and ME are the most competitive. IE and manufacturing, the least.
Thank you for the response. That’s good to know.
As a rising 4th year AERO student, I can testify that BMED is nowhere close to being the most competitive. ME’s have a big unit count reason why it is considered one of the hardest. They take a lot of 2 unit classes which are really like 4 or 5 in complexity. The AERO department is somewhat small and classes are only once a year so it’s really hard to stay on track as there is no leeway to take classes at another time. CS is definitely up there as well and they hit the ground running learning multiple coding languages during their first year. BMED, GENE, MATE, I.E., are smaller departments and are hard to get into mainly because they are small and don’t have the facilities to have more students. If I would rank the majors based on what I’ve learned throughout the years and the classes I’ve taken I would rank them as such
1.- ME/AERO/CS
2.- Software
3.- Civil
4.- ENVE
5.-BMED/MATE
6.-GENE
@thetavixx, I think the OPs question was about admission not how difficult they are per se. BMED and CS accept the lowest percentage of applicants, but we never know how strong the pools are, so that’s only part of the story. Based on past reported MCAs, I do believe CS is the toughest admit.
Toughest admit (hardest to easiest):
CS, BMED, ME/AERO, Civil/ENVE, MATE, Industrial & General, (not sure where EE falls in here)
For toughest academically Here is a list for % of A or B grades by major at Cal Poly:
Materials Engineering - 94.5%
Biomedical Engineering - 94.2%
Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering - 93.3%
General Engineering - 93.2%
Aerospace Engineering - 89.7%
Computer Science and Software Engineering - 79.4%
Electrical Engineering - 75.8%
Civil & Environmental Engineering - 74.3%
Computer Engineering - 73.3%
Mechanical Engineering - 64.5%
Whichever major has the hardest material is debatable, but grading wise we can see that ME would be the hardest grading wise followed by Computer/software/CS/Civil/EE.
@thetavixx: Aero has 9 units more than the typical 180 program like CS, and ME has 16-22 more units (depending on concentration) than a typical 180 unit degree. Plus most of those units are from upper division classes so both should be considered a bit more difficult due to the exta units
@r77r77, those are interesting numbers to know and reference in the future. Where did you find them?