<p>Chem-E sounds pretty rough. I don't think I could stand 4 years of chemistry courses.</p>
<p>ChemE followed closely by EECS. I'm in BioE, which people say is difficult, but it hasn't seemed that bad so far.</p>
<p>is civil really considered the easiest?...after looking at the courses required for an IE degree i think IE would be the easiest</p>
<p>IEOR isn't really THAT easy</p>
<p>ChemE (I'm biased...;))</p>
<p>chem E...junior year and i leave home at 8am and come back at 12 am everyday. I spend more time in the chem E department- homeworkl takes forever to complete. :(</p>
<p>another vote for cheme/nuclearE then second ee/cs. </p>
<p>did someone say aero = rocket science? lol...</p>
<p>the chemE's make the fuel for rockets..</p>
<p>^ True. ChemE's will blast 'em in space...</p>
<p>The aeronautical engineers will get 'em home safely.</p>
<p>ChemE isn't rocket science... ChemE is harder.</p>
<p>"Rocket science is an informal term for aerospace engineering especially as it concerns rockets which launch spacecraft into or operate in outer space."
Rocket</a> science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>It depends on you. I was good at physics and bad at chemistry but for some people it was vice versa.</p>
<p>Aerospace. At least army school, it requires a fundamental understanding (I.e. classes in) all of the aforementioned engineering disciplines. I have had to take chemistry, thermo, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering classes and software engineering. And these were all just pre-requisites to the harder stuff like orbital mechanics and aerospace structures.</p>
<p>It varies, but the general consensus is ChemE and EE are the hardest.
ChemE is hardest because you have to master quite a few things. You take a lot of math, physics, and upper level chemistry and you have to learn how to use it for engineering. Really, the major teaches you to do engineering with chemistry on top of that. Paradoxically, you usually end up having to take a few more humanities classes than most engineers. This is because a ChemE is supposed to be both a specialist and a generalist. In some ways, ChemE is the most versatile major. It’s not the most versatile because there’s the most areas a ChemE can work in(that would be MechE), but because ChemEs tend to be the best at being interdisciplinary(hence they’ve been referred to as “universal engineers”). About half of ChemEs work in traditionally non-ChemE fields(biotech, electronics, medicine, law/consulting, finance, large engineering projects), which helps support the “universal engineer” title. Having to learn your field in depth and everyone else’s work to the extent that you can understand it is quite hard. Though it’s often a goal to be both a specialist and generalist, most students fail to become both (You’re not exactly forced to be a generalist, but it’s an implied purpose of the major. Also, some are less than excellent at high-level ChemE courses). However, ChemEs are better than most at this task.</p>
<p>EE (which, IMO, includes NukeE) is about as hard as ChemE, although for entirely different reasons. EEs seldom try to be good generalists, and for that reason, EE tends to have a number of concentrations/specialties (ex: power, telecommunications, AI, specialized electronics such as integrated systems). All of these specialties share a common toolbox. Though this toolbox isn’t very general, the difficulty is in the fact that you really have to know it inside-out. Basically, you have to be quite skilled at various types of math (discrete, continuous, and statistics), E&M Physics, Computer Science, and to a much lesser extent Mechanical physics. Granted, you don’t have to know CS quite like a strong CS major (less focus on design, CS theory, and the like, more focus on high-performance programming such as C++ and Assembly), and you don’t need very much theoretical math, but you have to be able to use all four of these specialized tools effectively to do EE work. </p>
<p>In short: ChemE and EE are the hardest. ChemE because you have to be a specialist and a generalist, and EE because you have to understand a LOT about your specialty.</p>
<p>‘Hardest’ depends on your expectation (gap) of the subject. If you choose EE because you think it is all about playing with radios and circuits and robots, then you might be frustrated by all the fourier integrals and wave equations and lyapunov bound that go behind the theory; if you study ChemE only because you like chemistry, then you might be overwhelmed by the repertoire of fluid dynamics and maxwell’s relations and enzyme kinetics that go beyond ‘pure chemistry’. </p>
<p>It is only hardest when you don’t know your strengths well or have wrong expectations.</p>
<p>
That being said, there are majors that have harder concepts and larger workloads than others that almost everyone will agree are more difficult overall.</p>
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<p>Maybe according to your circle of friends… not according to mine.</p>
<p>I tend to enjoy vanilla with grilled peaches and butter rum sauce. That is easily the best ice cream flavor (for now, anyway). That is clearly the only correct answer.</p>
<p>
While I understand your position and do partially agree with it, I think that such value judgments can have merit because there is a general consensus on what specific things are harder and what specific things are easier (with a fair number of exceptions).
So while this kind of thread is usually breeding ground for people to promote their own major as the hardest, there can be an answer that is mostly correct.</p>
<p>That’s just it. There is no general consensus. The question and answer is as subjective and personal as asking what is the best ice cream flavor. What is hard for one person is not necessarily hard for another. That is the only objective fact.</p>
<p>For example, I found circuits to be absolutely mind boggling at times (at least at the time when I took it 6 years ago), but things like fluid mechanics (another subject often cited as hard) came easy to me. At the same time, I had plenty of friends who could do circuits in their sleep, but fluids was an opaque subject for them.</p>
<p>There simply isn’t a correct answer and it is laughable that so many people think that one exists. More times than not, the answer a person gives is either their own major (to make themself feel good) or the major that they personally have the most trouble with (again, to make themself feel good).</p>
<p>There is no objective measure of the difficulty of a major just like there is no objective measure of the deliciousness of an ice cream flavor.</p>
<p>I would also like to point out that out of all my interaction with various engineers, the only ones I have ever heard claim that ChemE is the hardest are ChemE’s themselves. That isn’t to disparage the degree, but to illustrate that it is not a universally accepted answer as you seem to claim.</p>
<p>Majors depend on the school. At Stony Brook, CSE(Computer Science)is known to be incredibly tough(to an extent that they had to drop a few CSE courses from the Computer Engineering program, since they couldn’t pass them).</p>
<p>IMHO, if a CS major has a lot of projects(the way they have it at SBU)where for a database class you are creating a social network, and Google comes to judge it(it really happens here) – then Computer Science could be considered pretty difficult. </p>
<p>I’ve taken about 4 EE courses, and I found them to be a joke. My CS classes however, because of all these projects, I found to be far more difficult. In fact, to be honest, I wouldn’t even classify CS as difficult. I’d just say it’s time-consuming, and requires a lot of critical thinking. Ranging from designing an advanced game, to making a Robot do what the professor requested.</p>
<p>Since CS here is part of the Engineering school, from my experience with students, most find it ‘difficult’. I’ve noticed they focus a lot on these massive projects.</p>