<p>Yeah there is no nanoengineering major. My school has a minor for nanoscience that is offered in the department of Material Science engineering. It’s basically 9 hours of nanotechnology courses and 9 hours of material science engineering courses.</p>
<p>From a practical point of view majoring in a traditional engineering discipline such as EE, ME, AE, MSE, ChemE, etc. then pursuing a specialization of some sort in a nanotech discipline in grad school would be a better choice. Nanotechnology encompasses a wide variety of engineering disciplines and each engineering discipline has a wide range of applications. Speaking from experience (having performed nano-materials research and fabricating nano-grained materials), I would not want to major purely in nanoengineering. </p>
<p>What the above poster Enginearsrfun is true. There is simply not enough time in a standard 4 year engineering curriculum (i.e. spending the last 2 years taking upper div engineering courses) to be competitive for jobs on the same level as more traditional engineering degrees. If anything, nanotech jobs in specialized industries will go to higher degree holders (i.e. M.S./PhD) in those specific disciplines. </p>
<p>Sounds like a grad school degree route in which case you may as well take a traditional degree and take electives or research to supplement the interest in nanotech.</p>
<p>Also, BME is too general of a concentration as well (once again coming from someone who has worked in the BME industry) but that’s a different story entirely.</p>
<p>Yup, totally agreed - nanotechnology seems to be taking a world now. For all that would like know more what is it about, I’ve seen quite good website about it: [Nano</a> technology news site](<a href=“http://www.nano-man.co.uk%5DNano”>http://www.nano-man.co.uk)</p>
Well I’m a 4th year nano engineer and i already have an internship going to be a job working on fusion energy. Getting a job has more to do with your out of class experience than in clas experience. Major only matters to a degree.
“Nano” just means the scale of the stuff you are using to solve the problem. There is a focus on chemistry and/or chem E, but the applications are often energy, structural, or computer.
Co-ops and/or internships matter more than your degree. In some ways, going for a degree that can include nanomaterials or nanoapplications might be more versatile than a nanoengineering degree.
But with any kind of specialty degree, you’ll be forced into basic and general pre-reqs anyway. Where I work there are perhaps 10 nanoscience specialists spread across more than five fields, but most of them do not teach nanoscience at all, it is just their field of research.
It would be common to get a more general undergrad degree like chemistry, chem E, physics, or math applications, and then study nanoscience as a grad student.
Based on my experience, don’t get too interested in an emerging field to the point that you’ll have to change careers or geography to make it happen. I ended up being limited by geography out of college, and though there were a lot of great cutting-edge jobs available in my niche, they weren’t where I had to live. Thus I had to change careers.