The problem is that @Dunshire’s highest level course was in middle school, which is somewhat different from the typical situation where someone starts the sequence in middle school, but continues on to higher level courses in high school. Colleges may prefer or require that the highest level course be in high school (or a college), rather than middle school.
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Interesting. It’s not that way in his high school… So different regions then might do it differently.
My D took a number of HS classes in middle schools as well but they didn’t exempt her from the state’s HS graduation requirements for years of certain subjects IN high school.
Yeah, the requirement stated was just 2 consecutive years of a foreign language, so I figured I could get it done in middle school. I was given the opportunity to continue french in high school, but I didn’t think it was that important.
This depends on the school. At Purdue for example, you need 4 semesters. There’s no requirement that they be consecutive and they expressly say they don’t even need to be the same language. ASL counts too.
Having gone through all of the thread (as of 5/21/21), some thoughts based on my personal experiences.
Early in HS, I was focused on Aerospace Engineering. But by senior year HS, I had settled on ME and that ended up being a good choice. As others have said, with an ME degree you can still work in aerospace (which I did). Note that in some aerospace companies, especially larger ones, their departments may be organized around engineering disciplines anyway: Structures, Aerodynamics, Mechanical, Electrical, Propulsion. But there’s no “Aerospace” department. And at a regular company (e.g. major household appliances) there’s no Aerospace period, though you are good to go with an ME, EE, or Engineering Science degree.
As for perhaps a greater Systems focus in an Aerospace Engineering curriculum, I think that for the most part college hires are plugged in to very specific tasks within a small part of the project as they start to learn the profession (undergrad engineering really being more “pre-engineering”, akin to pre-med). Not that Systems thinking/knowledge isn’t good to have, but it’s generally the more senior people with experience as to how all the pieces fit together who are in a position to concern themselves with such bigger-picture things. Perhaps at a small company/startup, that sort of coursework might be seen as valuable, however?
HS vs College difficulty: I attended an average public HS, completing two years of Calculus at a local CC my junior/senior year, and finished with a 4.0/4.0 GPA (helped by an apparent “sympathy A” from my French teacher – thanks Mr Romeo!). At Brown I was getting 85-95’s on the weekly homework sets ahead of the first engineering test (basic Statics)… and got 14/100 on said test. Meanwhile, my future wife had one of the highest scores out of the two hundred of us – a 60 – and freaked out because she had never scored that low on anything (one of the highest scores in her state on their HS math prize exam… as a freshman). Looking back (even a few months after), it wasn’t a hard test at all: “Sum of the forces equals zero” and you’re done, just like on the homeworks. So yes, college can be an adjustment. Just keep plugging away. The courses get even harder, but your ability to tackle tough material will also improve commensurate with the effort you put in. It’s rewarding to look back after the first couple of years at how far you’ve come.
A note on how engineering programs differ: At the Ivys and other highly selective colleges, it’s a whole lot of math (ordinary and partial differential equations, mostly, one after another for the final 2-3 years). Things are somewhat more balanced between math and practical/hands-on at the selective college level, and even more so for colleges where admission requirements aren’t so severe. That “Ivy” balance (or lack of it) is about right for those considering an academic career or heavy-duty research, but can be overkill for those who simply want to work as an engineer, i.e. wasted effort to the extent you may never end up using much of the fancier stuff (I didn’t, even in a relatively math-y group at an airliner manufacturer… but I’m such a geek that I liked learning it all anyway). So when thinking about college choices, don’t assume that the most prestigious (whatever that means) program is the best fit to your goals and interests.
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Thank you for the detailed response!
About the systems focus, could you still gain that knowledge through standard job experience, or would you have to study it additionally?
I don’t really mind learning math, but I would much rather focus on hands on experience. Are the Ivys more focused on preparing you for grad school/research papers, while other colleges focus more on getting a job as soon as you graduate?
You can’t group all Ivy’s as the same.
MANY schools are like this…lots of books, not much application of learned theory. Some schools dumb down theory and favor practical knowledge because their average student can’t handle the rigor. The secret is to find a school that does both.
I also have to chuckle a bit about the difficulty at Brown. It must have changed because now they have the highest grade inflation in the nation, bar none.
Still, there is a fairly high minimum level of theory (engineering science) and practice (engineering design) in any ABET-accredited engineering major. However, curricular organization may differ. Some college engineering majors do math and natural science first, then engineering science, then engineering design, which makes sense for prerequisite sequencing, but does not give students as much taste of what engineering design is like until late in the program. Some other college engineering majors try to introduce engineering design earlier, despite limitations of prerequisite knowledge.
Brown’s open curriculum also means that students can more easily avoid out-of-major courses that are more difficult for them to earn high grades in. Due to ABET requirements, Brown’s ABET-accredited engineering majors do require humanities and social studies courses, but the volume is on the low side compared to many other schools, and there are not other specifications on them.
“You can’t group all Ivy’s as the same. MANY schools are like this”
I have written elsewhere cautioning HS students that all Ivy’s are not the same, so agree to an extent. But in general the farther up the food chain you go, the more the math-centric things get, and with far more rigor… something a HS applicant considering their options should be aware of. Even when I was an engineering student, back before Ivy admission was ludicrously hard, my Sophomore dynamics textbook was a UC-grad coworker’s Senior dynamics textbook. Helping another coworker with a dynamics problem from a grad course they were taking for a Master’s at UC, I recognized it as something I had done Sophomore year at Brown. As for my Sophomore E&M text, “Suitable for an introductory graduate course”, according to the preface. Which brings us to the present: “I also have to chuckle a bit about the difficulty at Brown. It must have changed because now they have the highest grade inflation in the nation, bar none.” Now admission to Brown is ludicrously hard. I interviewed 40 applicants for Regular Decision. 39 – many of them excellent candidates – were turned down. The one admit had been taking math courses at UC since his freshman year of HS, and by the time I chatted with him was doing postgrad-level research in computational solid mechanics (beating heart model). With that kind of student body, one could ask whether the grades are being inflated enough.
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“Brown’s open curriculum also means that students can more easily avoid out-of-major courses that are more difficult for them to earn high grades in.”
In my case at least, I took the non-Engin stuff as a break from the grind. Much easier to write a well-received analysis of the death of Stupid Ludmila in Kozinski’s “The Painted Bird” than solve a hyperbolic partial differential equation with unique boundary conditions along each side of the bounding rectangle.
“Due to ABET requirements, Brown’s ABET-accredited engineering majors do require humanities and social studies courses,”
It actually started following my class’s graduation (pre-ABET), when they noticed that some hadn’t taken any liberal arts courses over the four years. It has become more and more “strict” over time, however, adding such requirements as at least two courses (of any sort) which involve writing.
“About the systems focus, could you still gain that knowledge through standard job experience, or would you have to study it additionally?”
My prejudice is that it’s best gained though job experience, though there are no “rules”. It would depend on for example how real-world-useful those notional college Systems courses are (or aren’t). Some people have even majored in Systems Engineering and done quite well. A friend of mine went on to a stellar career running a large transportation company (automated mass transit systems), yet can also design and build his own electronic circuitry. What I’m trying to indicate (poorly) is that an engineering career starts with enthusiasm for the discipline, and then how you get to where you’re going can be via numerous paths. My college education was just the beginning of my engineering education.
“I don’t really mind learning math, but I would much rather focus on hands on experience. Are the Ivys more focused on preparing you for grad school/research papers, while other colleges focus more on getting a job as soon as you graduate?”
Not so much “focused”, but just that if you want to go to grad school for research/teaching preparation, an Ivy gives you more options as to where (assuming reasonable grades). The more selective the school, the more it’s going to be about math (IMO – as a nearby poster noted, schools vary). But over the last 5-10 years, even math-centric holdouts (such as Brown Engineering) have moved a bit more towards some hands-on things. Undergrads learn how to use a commercial design/analysis program, for example. When I was there, we ME’s got no instruction in using Finite Element software for structural analysis. But we did have to code our own from scratch – another example of how things are more rigorous in a highly-selective program (and that “rigorous” isn’t necessarily “better”… depends on what a particular person’s interests are).
Not having talked with you extensively, I would mainly suggest that you focus on one of the many schools which integrate collaborative projects into the engineering curriculum. That would probably give you the best college experience in terms of a balance between academic/theoretical and “bending metal”.
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My son loves to read, but would poke his eyes out before he’d ever write another literary analysis. 
He took graduate level viscous flow, compressible flow and continuum mechanics a never found any of it particularly taxing. He did his senior project on ultrasound, a boundary layer thesis, and is now an acoustic engineer.
I think easy is in the eyes of the beholder. As @boneh3ad would say, figuring out what’s hardest is sort of like determining what the best ice cream flavor is. It depends on the cloth you’re cut from.
Now that’s where we disagree. 
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“I think easy is in the eyes of the beholder … It depends on the cloth you’re cut from.”
Well said.
“never found any of it particularly taxing”.
Yeah, like my wife. She was thinking of switching from Engin to what she really liked (CS). I had to cajole her to stay with Engin, so that I’d have someone to help me with the homework.
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Let me show you the PDE I was struggling with, and then decide. As the grader red-penciled across my arm-waving attempt at a solution, “This is getting pretty wild”.
I don’t want to suggest any of that isn’t complex or doesn’t require horsepower. It just seems to come to him without much force, sort of like words flowing from an author. He comes from good genes (that passed this optometrist by 
). My dad has an engineering BS/MS from MIT and my uncle has an engineering PhD from Stanford.
You may not know this, but the person you’re asking has a PhD, a National Lab post-doc and runs a graduate program in aerodynamics. I think he’d be up to the challenge (and probably hates English 
).
My first exam in graduate school was an utter failure in a class taught by my own advisor. It had a note at the top: “It’s time to get serious; this is the big time.”
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“Let me show you the PDE I was struggling with, and then decide.”
“I think he’d be up to the challenge”
“My first exam in graduate school was an utter failure”
The above brings up (obliquely) an observation I’ll pass along to HS students for when they are later making course choices in college (not so much the first year, but upper-level): There’s something to be said, in terms of “personal knowledge”, for finding your limits.
I was a minor HS math whiz (though nothing like my future wife). Two years of college Calculus: Got easier with each semester. Then right into upper-level math my first semester at Brown. Junior and Senior year I took some graduate math and engineering courses (back then Brown didn’t care who took what). I kept going, kid in the candy store, until I finally got to math which was beyond me. Stuff that my brain just couldn’t process.
In retrospect, I liked finding out what I was and wasn’t capable of… plus I was still able to find a job (barely) despite the C’s peppering my transcript. At the time, Brown grad courses were numbered 2XX. That would be a mid-undergrad course number at UC etc, so it looked as if I had several C’s in math and engineering courses my last two years, e.g. a C in “Engineering Mechanics” which was actually a second-year grad course.
In summary, you HS students shouldn’t be afraid to extend yourself in college. Go for it. See what you can achieve. Cram as much into the four years as you possibly can. But perhaps be smarter about the particulars than I was.
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