<p>Just curious, </p>
<p>what made you decide to pursue engineering as a major and what specific type of engineering?</p>
<p>I like fixing things. I chose petroleum because geology fascinates me and the money is good.</p>
<p>Well, at first I was going to go with Computer Science due to a hobby of coding since 11th grade. But it was just merely a hobby and not a passion. I did get bored of it every once in a while. So I picked Electrical Engineering since I really enjoyed the Electricity & Magnetism chapters in AP Physics, programming can be a huge part of EE, and I wasn’t as nearly interested in the aspects of ME, CE, etc.</p>
<p>$$$
i wanted to accomplish something that would make me feel smarter than other people, and most other jobs don’t interest me</p>
<p>I have always enjoyed reading your posts Dreburden.</p>
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<p>just being honest :)</p>
<p>I wanted to pursue Biomedical Engineering so I could make a societal impact while doing the stuff I love such as math.</p>
<p>I wanted to know why things worked the way they do.</p>
<p>I think I first picked electrical engineering because of a high school physics class where I had great fun in a lab where we played with electric circuits, and I was fascinated by making the light bulb turn on and off, and get brighter or weaker depending on what I placed in the circuit. </p>
<p>In my experience, many engineers have a “What happens if I do that?” type of curiosity. There is an old joke that a normal person touches something and gets a shock, and thinks to himself “I won’t touch that again”, while an engineer thinks “I wonder if that will still happen if I touch it again.”</p>
<p>I enjoyed problem solving activities. Puzzles, riddles, logic games, etc. really interested me. I liked to know how things worked and how things were put together. I was also really drawn to science and math. Mainly physics and chemistry, but I also enjoyed life sciences, biology, ecology, etc. The field of engineering is essentially problem solving, science, and math all rolled into one. So when I became aware of this field as a middle schooler, I knew that I wanted to pursue it.</p>
<p>Choosing optical engineering came later. As a junior in high school, students from the program at the local university visited and talked about the field at length. I was pleasantly surprised how broad the field actually was. There are applications in medicine, communications, defense, transportation, etc. And a lot of very cutting edge technonogy is coming out of this field. One more year to go and I love it as much as the day I began.</p>
<p>One word: Job</p>
<p>I heard engineering is easier than other majors to get good jobs that can be completed in four years. I chose ee because most countries hire ee (unlike chemical engineers which was my previous choice).</p>
<p>Never regretted about my decision</p>
<p>My dad was (and still is) an engineering prof, and I got to sit in on his classes occasionally even as a little kid. I liked math a lot and thought I would enjoy applying it to building design. I also liked the challenge!</p>
<p>I always liked thinking technically and have always loved and had an interest in fixing/modding things, building things, understanding how they worked, etc. I’ve always admired the great minds of human history which pushed me to return back to school at 24. I fell in love with math and physics classes (I was an academic degenerate in high school, I didn’t realize how awesome they were then) and chose engineering since it seemed to be a good blend of technical thinking, knowledge, creativity, science and math.</p>
<p>Since I was young, I was fascinated with aircraft and spacecraft and our universe. Those fascinations, with a mix of too many opportunities to watch Star Wars movies, military aircraft based movies and air shows, fueled my desire to go into aerospace engineering.</p>
<p>I did Honors Physics in 11th grade and I loved it! I felt like Neo in the matrix, I could see the physics happening everywhere! It was great! So then I took AP Physics C in 12 grade and did pretty well there too, but hated the E/M portion. At that time, I still didn’t have a major in mind, so I talked with my physics teacher and how I loved applied Physics. He was an ex-chemical engineer and he recommended Engineering to me. After research and figuring out what I liked and didn’t like (no to Electricity, Chemistry, Biology, YES to mechanical physics), I was choosing between Mechanical and Civil (Structural). My neighbor happened to be a retired Civil Engineering professor, I talked to him, and he tipped the scales to Civil. </p>
<p>It was a long process that involved a lot of second guessing and differing opinions and time… But so far, so good.</p>
<p>I want to make a difference in the world. Improve the lives of all living beings on the planet whilst doing something I enjoy.</p>
<p>Radio was the main reason I got interested in science/engineering. Growing up, our main source of news and entertainment was a large multiband tube radio with a cat’s eye. The fact that we were able to hear sounds from hundreds of miles away fascinated me to no end. When no one was around I would open up the back panel and gaze at the fascinating mishmash of wires, glowing tubes and connections from the knobs on the front panel to the world behind it. One day when I was in 5th or 6th grade I saw an older kid in our neighborhood tinker with a single coil radio receiver and that was it …</p>
<p>I wanted to save the world. </p>
<p>Ok, that is a bit of exaggeration. Here’s my convoluted story… In hs I saw a movie (believe it or not in German class) about the the negative impacts of pollution, especially in cities. It inspired me to consider being a Climatologist, which nobody else had even heard of. That idea steered me toward Environmental Engineering. This was long before the days of easy internet research. I enrolled in a Civil/Environment Eng program not realizing it was the wrong pick. But once I got into engineering, I enjoyed the problem solving aspects. ChemE (the better pick for pollution abatement) was not my cup of tea, but MechE was a good fit.</p>
<p>I was watching an episode of stargate and started wondering what was actually out there in the universe. Then I realized we weren’t really doing enough to further a human space program. I looked at the profiles of people who influence policy and chose a few role models to emulate and had ask myself what I could to do help. I didn’t think I was smart enough to make a breakthrough in physics, and I also wanted at least a chance to make something tangible in my life time. My endgame is just furthering human expansion beyond earth, but for now aerospace engineering seems like a solid way to start and say I’m serious about it. I originally looked at systems engineering because I knew I’d need a little bit of background in multiple branches of engineering, but it turns out that SysE degrees don’t really do that. Better to pick a specialty and broaden from there.</p>
<p>Like a lot of kids growing up in the 70’s, Sci-Fi (Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Robert Heinlein, etc…) got me interested in Science and building the future. I loved history and anthropology, but the builders are engineers.</p>
<p>When visiting my best friend at college, while I was a senior in high school, I met several of his engineering friends. That’s when I discovered there was such a thing as Nuclear Engineering. Hard Science, generating power and blowing up things…I was sold!</p>
<p>It’s a shame I never got to blow anything up :(</p>