I was researching majors at Stanford when I came across a site that said there are fewer than five undergrads in energy resources engineering each year. This was just a post on Quora so I tried to find a reliable statistic somewhere but I can’t find anything. Stanford is a small school and I’m sure there aren’t many people interested in studying ERE but it just seems like less than five people is ridiculous. Can anyone confirm that this is true or at least give their opinion as to whether they believe it is possible?
Here is the link to where I saw this…
http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-study-petroleum-engineering-at-Stanford
It’s in the last paragraph under Lifestyle
You will find that some of the same principles involved in finding and producing petroleum can also be used for other types of energy transformation.
In 2014 there were 4 Bachelors, 6 Masters and 3 Doctoral degrees awarded in ERE.
There are a lot of small majors at Stanford (<10 bachelor’s per year) and as long as there are enough faculty to provide a good mix of courses in a given field I think that’s fine.
With ~60 majors and almost 40% of students in one of the five most popular ones (CS, human biology, etc.) it’s almost inevitable that there will be some fields with only a handful of students.
I’d say it’s because a degree in chemical engineering is more broadly applicable (you can go into biotech or petroleum or whatever else - there are so many options), and Stanford’s chemical engineering department is great. Hence, my guess is that people who want to get jobs in petroleum engineering post-graduation might just major in chemical engineering instead of ERE.