Need Help deciding

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Hey, i think i have like a few weeks left till i choose my major. This is a really huge decision for me. I've already ruled out civil/mechanical/computer/chemical/mining/petroleum. The only two that I'm seriously considering are Materials and Electrical.
Firstly, in materials science and engineering, do you guys do stuff like finding out the maximum force a material can withstand? sort of like beam analysis in civil? or is it just purely properties/structure and stuff of the sort. Also, with materials, what do you do at your jobs? Is it interesting? ( I find working with steel and iron really boring ). Polymers and semiconductors seem interesting though.</p>

<p>Secondly, in EE, do you have anything at all to do with mechanics? I dreaded my statics and dynamics course.. which is why I'm not interested in either civil or mechanical. EE seems interesting.. Do you get to tinker with robots a lot? </p>

<p>Thanks a lot in advance..</p>

2

<p>I'll let someone else answer for EE, but I'm sure if you want to tinker with robots you could find some sort of program for yourself that'll let you play with robots, though I think that tends to be the realm of mechanical engineers mostly (unless you're doing onboard electronics stuff).</p>

<p>Materials engineering is possibly the best engineering out there. We typically don't do the type of force analysis that civil engineers will be concerned with, we'll care more about engineering the material to be able to withstand more force, fail in a less catastrophic manner, cost less to produce, be lighter, and play around with just about any other property you can think of. There's lots of work in materials theory, where you talk about how materials form, why they form the way they do, and how to control they way them form (form being from solidification from a liquid into a solid to how they deform when you work them mechanically, thermally, electronically, or anything else like that). You can engineer materials to have brand new properties they'd never have otherwise. One guy in my research group is taking metallic glasses (metals that were processed to be very strong, like glass, but are very brittle and break just like glass), and by adding in different percentages of crystalline metals into the amorphous matrix he can get the ductility (the ability of the material to be pulled) from around half a percent to 5-15%, around the ductility of a typical metal while retaining most of the strength properties of the amorphous metals!</p>

<p>If you're more interested in ceramics, you can do work there dealing with defect chemistry (how you control the distribution of atoms in your crystal), the properties, the processing, and a bunch of other things with them (I'm not a ceramicist, so I can't say a whole lot about it).</p>

<p>Similar options are available in polymers and composites, as well.</p>

<p>Semiconductors, as always, are a booming field, and with a knowledge of them you could get into CPU production, LEDs, photovoltaics, and plenty of other emerging technologies.</p>

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<p>Thanks a lot for your response.. Don't mechanical engineers only design stuff like robot parts, how to keep them on the ground, aerodynamics and stuff like that.. aren't EE's the people who actually make it move? Take an autonomous robot for instance.. I would love to work in the automotive field or to work in the electrical aspects of military planes.. I initially wanted to do mechanical.. but after my dynamics course, I've concluded that this isn't for me. </p>

<p>Materials seems interesting enough.. Although the bits about extracting a metal from its ore, purifying it seems extremely boring. Can you work in the aerospace/automotive/military field with a materials degree?</p>

4

<p>You seem to think that because you get a degree in something you have to do everything possible that people with that major do.</p>

<p>I'm a materials engineer. Materials engineers can work with polymers. I don't work with polymers because I find that boring. Instead I work with metals and how you can control their properties by how you create them.</p>

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Can you work in the aerospace/automotive/military field with a materials degree?

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<p>I have friends in materials engineering that worked at Lockheed Martin, NASA, Ford, GM, and at various military labs during their summer internships doing materials-related work.</p>