What is the hardest majors?

<p>**** I need to better explain the engineering and e-m wave nature behind the cellphone.</p>

<p>Your talking to a person thousands of miles away and when you speak, the cell phone relays an electromagnetic radiation with a frequency and wavelength which is a signature freqency for your actual sound wave (which in reality is a pressure wave) and these e-m radiation waves travel the speed of light across the globe and hit the other person's cellular phone. That cellphone in turn receives the frequency of the sound wave, which, is received and converted to the pressure waves by the instrumentation and machinery of the cellular phone.</p>

<p>Ya'll are taking guns to destroy a pile of jello (being engineers/math people, go ask an english major to translate that for you).</p>

<p>Your hardest major and the dude next to you are probably two very different things. Ask my to explain random chemical theories, and you shall recieve a blank stare. Someone else could talk to you all day about it. Ask me how something is put together though and I can tell you. The beforementioned chemist will return that blank stare though.</p>

<p>People are all wired differently, there is no "hardest major."</p>

<p>currently i'm doing a double major in chemE/chemistry, and i would definately say from what i've heard from other students that chemE is the hardest major, because we have to have an understanding so so many different fields ie... we take take the most math of any engineer, i've taken calc 1-3, ode's & linear algebra, pde's, statistics and currently complex variables, we also have to take gen chem, o-chem, and p-chem. Not to say that other engineering majors arn't hard MechE and EE/compE are both really hard too. We just have the most diverse range of stuff we have to know. Following ChemE i would say it goes EE, Physics, MechE, Chemistry then Architecture(not necessarily do to course content but because of how many hours they have to put in)</p>

<p>I think that's interesting because if math was one's strong point then going into ChemE would be better than going into a stand MechE program - at least from a GPA standpoint. I used to think ChemE was the hardest major but know I believe that CompE is by far the hardest.</p>

<p>What is the hardest majors?</p>

<p>English, obviously...</p>

<p>wow, this thread is a blast from the past</p>

<p>I would say for engineering top 5
Electrical/Computer
Aerospace
Mechanical
Chemical
Biological</p>

<p>engineering uses both physics and math, physics uses math, math is the universal language. But math majors dig down into many different areas in math. Same as physics. For engineering, math & physics are the tools for engineers to learn, they use math & physics but not as deep and not as many different areas as physics / math majors go into.</p>

<p>there's a great quote. "scientists study and explain what happened in the universe, engineers create things that have never been"</p>

<p>Engineering is hard because of the amount of work involved.</p>

<p>Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to how dense, how deep, and how difficult Math is. Pure mathematics completely owns physics and engineering. Don't believe me? Try reading something like Godel's On Formaly Undecidable Systems. The sciences and engineering plunder mathematics for useful tools. Physicists and engineers are never really concerned about the rigor that justifies the math that they can use to describe something, they are concerned with only about how to apply math to a problem. Physicists like to think that they know math, but trust me they don't really know the whole story.</p>

<p>
[quote]

Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to how dense, how deep, and how difficult Math is. Pure mathematics completely owns physics and engineering. Don't believe me? Try reading something like Godel's On Formaly Undecidable Systems. The sciences and engineering plunder mathematics for useful tools. Physicists and engineers are never really concerned about the rigor that justifies the math that they can use to describe something, they are concerned with only about how to apply math to a problem. Physicists like to think that they know math, but trust me they don't really know the whole story.

[/quote]
I think most would agree. Engineering at my school works about 40-50% more time per week though.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to how dense, how deep, and how difficult Math is. Pure mathematics completely owns physics and engineering. Don't believe me? Try reading something like Godel's On Formaly Undecidable Systems. The sciences and engineering plunder mathematics for useful tools. Physicists and engineers are never really concerned about the rigor that justifies the math that they can use to describe something, they are concerned with only about how to apply math to a problem. Physicists like to think that they know math, but trust me they don't really know the whole story.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>It's moreso the case for engineers plundering mathematics for useful tools, but I do agree with this taking into account the shear abstractness of higher level mathematics, too, e.g. topology, etc.</p>

<p>we need to remember that engineering used to just be engineering and well ya didn't learn the math or the science. Now we can see how beneficial it is to learn it all. Engineering also uses only practical math and science, we dont touch theory to much.</p>

<p>thogh I would definatly say the hardest engineering is</p>

<p>Nuclear followed by EE/CSE</p>

<p>Im an EE major and hate math, so its very hard</p>

<p>Architecture is by far one of the hardest majors. Architecture students have the largest work load and probably one of the highest dropout rates out of any major. They seriously go through hell and have to take high levels of critisism. Personally, I could not put up with staying up all night at least 3 or 4 times a week. It burns you out. I have switched to engineering. Although the concepts may be more difficult and mathematical to understand, I find it way less stressful and I can still have somewhat of a scial life. Plus engineers get paid way more. Architecture is just a lose-lose career....unless ur amazin at
it. </p>

<p>Top 5:
1. Electrical Engineering
2. Architecture
3. Chemical Engineering
4. Mechanical Engineering
5. Biomedical Engineering</p>

<p>*music majors can also fit in here depending on course of study and school</p>

<p>A lot of you guys don't know what you're talking about if you think EE=circuits (signals sticks out like a sore thumb), or that physics majors know more math than math majors, or that you can rank majors by difficulty when you haven't taken enough classes within those majors to justify a comparison. </p>

<p>And also don't believe people if they say a class is hard because unless they did really well in that class and scored a hard-earned and scarce A, there's just no credibility to it. A lot of people just rather not admit that they weren't smart enough.</p>

<p>I'm with dukedevil: difficulty of a major is totally subjective. People need to stop glorifying their majors by boasting its rigorousness. It'll only detract interested and yound minds from entering that field. Try to find other ways of sharing your passion for your major (although ironically, the small group of people I know in engineering don't really like engineering). </p>

<p>Just my rant after a long, long day...</p>

<p>Yea...now that I've read these posts I don't know how qualified I am to do engineering....</p>

<p>I think we should just let math be the hardest. Just for math's sake. It's the language of the universe. It's cool. It's important. Give it the credit it deserves. Why not? I couldn't live in a world where the study of engineering is considered harder than what it's built upon. Even if Math isn't harder in this sense and in that sense, who cares? Anyone who chooses to study it is someone I envy.</p>

<p>CS is that much harder because labs take hundred of hours sometimes, computer engineering is that much harder as they do those labs and pratically everything EE majors do.</p>

<p>Really Zorz? CompE do everything that EE do? At many schools there are as much as 5-6 distinct elective pathways that the EE student must choose from (photonics, integrated circuits, solid state, signals/system, atennas/microwaves, etc). So two EE students will be learning different things during their senior year depending on their subfield. CompE do all these?</p>

<p>You are right about one thing: CS labs do require long hours with or without debugging.</p>

<p>My schoo, the EE and CompE degree only differ by 3 courses</p>

<p>PHysics 3 along with lab
Electromagnetic theory
and a electronics lab.</p>

<p>if you take these 3 courses you get both compE and EE</p>

<p>Well, My dad has a PHd in Astro-Physics and according to him Physices is the hardest major.</p>

<p>EE and CompE take very different paths at my school. </p>

<p>EEs take a second quarter of modern physics, two extra electronics classes, electromagnetics, one quarter of chemistry, and a second quarter of multivariable calculus. Then for specialization we take four "tech electives" of our choice. With these courses we can specialize in a certain topic (Systems and Signal Processing, Solid State Devices, or Power Systems) or just take whatever we want from the EECS department and have no specialty.</p>

<p>Computer Engineers take Boolean Algebra rather than the second quarter of multivariable calclus, two extra programming classes, org. of digital computers, microprocessors, system software, data structures and algs, real-time distributed programming, VLSI design, etc. The senior design projects are different also and their tech electives are restricted to a couple of classes as opposed to EE's free choice.</p>