<p>I'm hearing random stories from friends about freshman engineering majors switching out of the major after a semester or two. Some say they found out they just didn't like it, some that it was too hard. They'd never gotten C's/D's before and that either made them not like it or their merit scholarhsips were at risk. </p>
<p>Does anyone have a sense how many students stick with it versus not? Presumably college is the first time they actually take engineering; they just majored in it because they like math/physics/money. Is it really that killer and unappealing to many students when they get their first get look? Or do most like it and survive?</p>
<p>I ask because if it's harder to get into schools as engineering majors than math/physics (LAS), you might end up at a "lesser" school for a major you end up dropping.</p>
<p>Any thoughts? (California school-specific comments especially welcome)</p>
<p>Most of your freshman classes will be basic math and sciences, along with maybe one engineering class. I don't know if is so much difficult as it is just a lot of work.</p>
<p>Engineering is both extremely difficult <em>AND</em> a lot of work. That said if someone can't handle the basic math and physics courses in your freshman and sophomore years, it will only get much, much, MUCH more difficult in your later years.</p>
<p>Actually, I've heard the opposite from engineering students. Some say that freshman year is the hardest due to "weed-out" courses, and the subsequent years in the major department are easier. I was never in engineering, but it makes sense that smaller classes in an area of interest would be more engaging and perhaps "easier".</p>
<p>Your friends are BSing you. That may be true in other majors, but I didn't find it true in engineering...At least not aerospace engineering.</p>
<p>Of course it depends on factors such as your own strengths/weaknesses, university and the major you pick. In my experience my engineering courses were much, much harder than my freshman and sophomore level courses. People always complained about weed-out courses like "Electromagnetism" "and Calculus IV", although, I aced all those supposed "weed-out" classes . My GPA after the sophomore year was a 3.9 GPA. In comparison, it dropped to just below a 3.5 by graduation.</p>
<p>At Georgia Tech, they take pride in flunking their aerospace students. Our program was particularly brutal in that what were normally graduate level courses in other universities were part of our undergraduate coursework.</p>
<p>The workload was also much greater your junior and senior years. Just an example, homeworks in freshman/sophomore level physics or calculus rarely exceeded an hour or two a week. And I would be able to complete those by myself pretty easily. OTOH, My upper division aerospace courses regularly exceeded 5-10 hours or MORE of homework per week, PER CLASS. And most of these assignments had to be worked in groups. The homework was too conceptually difficult many times for me to get on my own. Not to mention that most engineering classes had huge computer projects to do that would take many, many hours to complete often leading to all-nighters for many. </p>
<p>But no, I felt classes like Vibrational and System Dynamics, Aeroelasticity, Virtual Work, and any of my Aerodynamics courses were much more intense regardless of how interesting you find them. The Calculus and Physics "weed-out" courses were easy in comparison.</p>
<p>The "weedout" process depends upon the school that you go to. If you go to a top engineering school (meaning: you are smart enough to be accepted), there will be very little weeding out due to grades since most people accepted to these programs have the intelligence to make it through - although GPA may not be what you experienced in HS. On the other hand, if you go to a school that is generally easier to get into, you will see a considerable weeding out as those who can't really hack the rigors and intellectual demands of engineering fall by the wayside. The bottom line is if you are smart enough and have the work ethic (probably at least as important as raw intelligence) to succeed in engineering you don't need to worry.</p>
<p>By that token, it may be possible that a lot of the propaganda you hear about the freshman and sophomore years being the hardest are probably most strongly propagated by those who never even made it to their upper level classes.</p>
<p>I doubt most people that actually went through all 4 (or 5) years of an engineering program would seriously say that their freshman and sophomore years were more difficult than their upper division classes. </p>
<p>But as fundingfather said if you have the work ethic that will help you greatly. However, even more important is to make sure that this is what you really want to do. I would go as far as saying that ideally that having a natural curiosity for gadget-fiddling since childhood is even more important than intelligence and at least as important as work ethic. Your intelligence will only get you so far if you find out that engineering is not quite what you had expected.</p>
<p>Nationwide, the percent of freshman who start in engineering who go on to graduate in engineering within six years is close to 50% and most who leave are gone by end of sophomore year. High ranked privates like MIT, CalTech, Cornell, Stanford, usually have a higher engineering retention rate, more in the 80% or higher range. High ranked engineering publics like Berkeley, Mich, UIUC, and Gtech are closer to the 70% range.</p>
<p>Differential equations was the roughest class I took in undergrad at Rice. I despised it. My upper-level courses weren't as bad, because I really enjoyed them. Things got a little harder when I went to grad school and started in on the finite element analysis/structural mechanics/risk analysis sorts of things, but the starting-out engineering courses were the ones that nearly made me walk away from engineering. By the time I was a senior, I knew that since I'd conquered all those annoying math/theory requirements that didn't wholly pertain to what I'd be doing, then I could certainly stick it out for any other courses I might encounter.</p>
<p>I once heard someone say that everyone <em>knows</em> exactly what it takes to earn an A in most of their classes, it's just a matter of whether or not the student is willing to put in the time and effort in order to <em>get</em> the A. If you're willing to go through an engineering program and to do what it takes to study and cram and learn and understand, then you'll get through it. Don't worry, just persevere.</p>
<p>Maybe CE is different from AE. Or maybe, I was just in a particularly difficult program..</p>
<p>But what I don't understand is how could your freshman/sophomore level courses possibly be harder than your upper division courses? Makes little sense when you take into account that much of the mathematical theory (calculus, physics, and differential equations among other things)that you learn your first two years, you use AGAIN and AGAIN in your upper level coursework..And you use them for larger, more complex problems than the ones first given to you in basic calculus and physics courses... At least that is how it was in AE.</p>
<p>Any other AEs, EEs, MEs or ChemE's wanna comment?</p>
<p>Alright here's what the people mean when they say that the first 2 years are the hardest. It's all about adjustment. The ones who really want to stay are going to after the first few years. The classes don't get easier but the temptation of going-out, being new at college, all these difficult classes start to ease up. Also most engineering majors become hughly focused after the first two years and I think that helps rather than being spread too thin over all the other classes that you have to deal with your first two years.</p>
<p>I think that's what people mean. Also a TON of people have friends who dropped engineering or did themselves and they can only complain about the first 2 years and just because their friends stayed it is only logical that it became less ridiculous or they would have dropped. It's a complacency thing. Once your there long enough, you're going to stay. No matter what. So the *****ing stops (sort of).</p>
<p>Point taken, but you are bringing in another issue altogether.</p>
<p>I had been talking about coursework difficulty not about how easy or difficult it would be to adjust to college life. These are two different issues and it seems that people are confusing the two. Certainly the first two years were harder in terms of adjusting to college life but my point in this thread has been <em>just</em> about the courses ignoring all other external factors such as being away from your parents, or losing your long distance girlfriend, or other emotional issues..etc.
It is just a simple question:</p>
<p>If you were to compare your freshman/sophomore level courses and compare them to your upper division engineering courses in difficulty.. Honestly, which set of courses was more difficult/demanding?</p>
<p>My personal answer to that question is that my upper level AE courses were so much more demanding and difficult both to learn and to make a good grade on than any of my calculus, DFQ, physics, chemistry, english or social science courses.</p>
<p>I could be far off, but I bet a good part could be just that most pre-engineering students don't reallly know what engineering entails. And from what I <em>hear</em> from some CS/CE majors I know, a lot of people drop that major because you will instantly know if you like it or not. After a semester of it, you pretty much know if you're going to stick around or not. I'm guessing a lot of people who chose computer science/engineering drop it relatively quickly after finding out that an interest in computer and physics/math makes not a CE/CS major.</p>
<p>My freshman year, I wasn't committed to engineering yet. I was good at a lot of other things, and I could've switched to major in any of those other things.</p>
<p>I got into all these courses where math was flying at me at ninety miles an hour, and I'd done okay in math, but my real intuition was in statics. I was in large classes where I didn't know anybody, I was new to Houston, I didn't really feel like Rice was "my" school yet. I didn't feel like that for a couple of years, either.</p>
<p>I couldn't see how any of this seemingly pointless math was going to help me design buildings. I didn't know enough about the math and science to be able to appreciate the beauty in it.</p>
<p>I suppose I shouldn't have said that my lower division courses were <em>harder</em>. I should have said that they were more <em>painful</em>. They weren't fun, they were hard work, and I didn't see the applicability. Once I got to the upper-division courses, I'd already learned all the tools I needed to solve those much more difficult problems, and once I was able to see how it all came together, everything just clicked. I could see why I'd learned all that stuff. I was walking towards a goal of becoming and engineer, rather than blindly stumbling through a ton of inexplicably complex math and physics.</p>
<p>And yeah, I'm in structural, which is just as rigorous as any other engineering discipline, so... you just watch those implications there, mister big-shot astro engineer! ;)</p>
<p>Lancer, you're in a VERY difficult program. I believe you said you go to GT, which is ranked #2 for AE. So, yeah, I'd expect it to be difficult, haha.</p>