<p>My 16 y/o son has always wanted to be an engineer. In grade school it was airplanes and rockets, in middle school more of the same plus robotics and missles. Now he's in 10th grade and says it's MEng with an interest in aerospace companies especially in DoD projects. However, this year I noticed a change in attitude bcs he doesn't really care for his Engineering teacher. Over the years he's done small robotics or solar car projects and although he's in the Engineering Club he shows no passion. When I ask him about it he says "too many Chiefs and not enough Indians" or "everyone wants to show off, waits until the last minute and nothing works right so why bother being a part of it". He will probably have this teacher for 2 more years and his classmates will mostly be the same. I would hate for a bad experience in HS to turn him off from his goals. I think he's more of an Economics, Finance, History type so any change in career is fine w/me but I wonder... Is this typical teenager stuff? How many of you who are majoring in Engineering or work as Engineers know this was the career for you? Did you know as a teen or decided in college? How into it or passionate were you about it at 16?</p>
<p>Your 16 year-old son has an “engineering teacher”? I don’t know much about what this entails, but I would really be cautious about abandoning my interests based on a high school teacher. Crappy physics teachers couldn’t dissuade me from going into engineering. In fact, I wanted to know more than they seemed capable of explaining, so I may actually have been more motivated to keep learning by the sub-par physics class.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if he is interested in the subject, he will be passionate about it regardless of one bad teacher. Hopefully he is mature enough to realize that that one person is not necessarily representative of all engineers and engineering professors.</p>
<p>To answer the question that is the title of this thread, I knew I wanted to be an engineer some time between when my dad showed me a McDonnell-Douglas promotional video for the first time and my first Lego set. That was pretty early on and I probably didn’t know the term engineer, but I knew I wanted to know more about how those planes worked.</p>
<p>When I was sixteen I thought I wanted to be a writer or journalist… I never built lego as a kid, built solar cars or anything. Fortunately i still went into an engineering program and will be making the switch from industrial to civil or mechanical. He has to figure it out for himself. I didnt figure out why I was in engineering until I took statics this first semester. </p>
<p>Just make sure he continues with sciences and maths to keep the option open. Its really something he will have to figure out himself. But IMO its better off to start off in engineering and switch majors then the other way round. My friends who switched had no problems ( this will depend on university). If engineering isnt what he enjoys he will likely realize it before the first midterms when he is swamped in work.</p>
<p>Thanks for the comments. I feel better now and will just keep an eye on his grades just in case. The engineering teacher is just that. An engineer that is now teaching at a magnet high school’s engineering/robotics program. My son has always been a math/science geek so now he’s in a high school surrounded by similar kids so it’s a bit competitive. These kids actually get upset if they can’t get an AP class bcs it’s full! I tell him we all had at least 1 bad teacher in school so he just needs to accept it. Besides most kids his age don’t get to use the software programs or build stuff like he does in his school. They have lots of resources so he should take what he can from the teacher and continue on. Thanks!</p>
<p>I first wanted to become an engineer when I learned that entry-level engineering positions were amongst the highest paid for all undergraduate majors. Although I didn’t have an interesting or aptitude for mathematics or science before college and must catch up on math courses, I am enjoying the challenge and am confident that I will be better for having gone through it.</p>
<p>Hi all. 
</p>
<p>Since last year, I was dead set on becoming a pharmacist, but now I’m beginning to think it isn’t for me. I understand math pretty easily, but with the sciences it seems as if it’s just rote memorization. </p>
<p>I’m getting more and more interested in engineering now because I think I can handle the math courses, where as I was a bit intimidated by the idea of Organic Chem 1 and 2…plus having to go to pharmacy school. I really like the idea of getting a high-salary job and being able to support myself with only a BS, and perhaps getting an MS if some company paid for it. I like that there’s no English or History requirements, because those subjects bore me to death. </p>
<p>Now I just don’t know what type of engineering I should major in!</p>
<p>I am an Engineering major because nothing else is good enough for me.</p>
<p>Dreburden, wanting to go into engineering because you’ve read that engineering has high entry salaries is a poor decision. Good engineers are that way because they have passion for it. With a good GPA and some luck you may land a high paying starting job. But without passion, you won’t progress. And making progress and becoming a well performing engineer is the key to continued success and the resulting pay raises. Instead pick a field you enjoy and do well in, you’ll be much better off in the long run, and working 30 years is a long run.</p>
<p>HPuck, I am (now) interested in the subject that I plan on studying, not only because of my potential future earnings. I want to be an Industrial Engineer.</p>
<p>I was born in the early 50’s, so I guess you could say that my interest in engineering was a product of the early NASA space program. Coming from parent’s with no clue what engineering was, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an astronaut at one time but realized that my vision wasn’t up to the required standards, so that was out. But that didn’t stop me from reading about space. </p>
<p>Not sure what age it was, but I had read all the books on space in the children’s library and was bugging the librarian for more. She took me up stairs to the main library and told the librarians there to get me an adult library card. From those books I started to figure out what an engineer was and that is what I wanted to be. So, it had to be somewhere a little before my 10th birthday I’m guessing. </p>
<p>I did science fair projects on space related subjects, built and flew many model rockets, etc. but I also did other things. I was in scouts and really enjoyed backpacking. I played sports.</p>
<p>It was space program passion that drove me to do my best in the STEM areas all thru school. I just retired from a career working on the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, and many other space related projects. Can’t say I enjoyed every day at work, but most days I felt like I was just living out my dreams (and got paid for it too).</p>
<p>My son is also an engineer, but just starting out on his career. He is into robotics. He just loved to build things out of those K’nex (not sure I’ve spelled it correctly). He started in about 5 years of age and was still building things while in college, only then with motors and controllers that he bought. He also liked to build things that could send a projectile somewhere. He built several small to midsize trebuchets that are still out in the garage. </p>
<p>Not all my son’s teachers were good at encouraging him. Some knew their subject (math for instance) just by a set of rules with no great feel for the subject. I was able to fill in with some of the passion but also knew enough to back off and let him figure it out. </p>
<p>He wasn’t always doing something related to engineering. You can get burned out with everything else that is going on. Both he and I have our sports passions although they are not the same sport. I still play my sport twice a week although at a much slower speed than I used to. Injuries have limited his sports activities at the levels he used to play at but I keep trying to have him get back into it just for the recreation value of it. </p>
<p>So, let your son follow his passion. Good engineers have both the STEM skills and the passion about their field of engineering.</p>
<p>{Sorry for rambling a bit with this post}</p>
<p>I had always assumed my son would go into engineering. As a little boy he was big into Lego and K’nex. His grandfather was an engineering tech and repaired medical equipment and my husband has a full wood shop downstairs that my son grew up playing in.</p>
<p>When my son got to HS he started taking CAD (his teacher is an architect) and was drawn to the design side of building and thought he might become and architect or industrial designer. As he learned more about those roles he moved back into feeling that engineering was a better match so plans to major in mechanical engineering. </p>
<p>I think that sometimes a student with a bend towards engineering needs to explore a bit of other majors to see if engineering really feels like it is the preferred choice.</p>
<p>I just picked engineering since I was good at math. I didn’t really research much in high school.</p>
<p>I had god-awful science and math teachers in high school, but I knew my whole life I loved working with my hands and that science was a passion for me. My worst subject in high school was probably chemistry, the teacher was a complete ass and more than half of my sophomore class failed; in college, it’s now my best subject. Persuade him to take a liberal arts education in high school, and then try science and whatever his other interests are in college.</p>
<p>When I saw the salaries.</p>
<p>I think the first “sense” I got of (software) engineering was sometime during the early 1970s, when I was about ten years old. My mother, who was a grade school teacher, took me along to one of her after-work classes. The teacher was showing them how to use some computers that were fed punch cards. I watched him submit the program that ran the Euclidean Algorithm. After the demo, he let me play with the computer to give it sample inputs. Although I didn’t tell anyone this, I wanted him to show me how to make the program work (especially since for a reason I didn’t understand at the time, hitting the clear button didn’t just reset the inputs – it erased the program, requiring it to be reloaded).</p>
<p>I had very good grades in math through junior high and high school, but wanted to be a doctor, until I went to a weekend program at a city hospital for prospective premed students. Part of the program required us to extract blood from behind the eyes of mice. I didn’t like doing that at all. At the same time, I was taking calculus and the second of two programming classes offered by my high school, and enjoying them, so I figured it would be better for me to pursue EECS.</p>
<p>However, what really brought me to my “true calling” in (software) engineering was a conversation I had with a guy who I worked for at a summer job. I was discouraged about my grades (long story) and was actually considering leaving school and trying to get a programming job without a degree (as several people I knew had done). He not only talked me out of leaving school, he pointed me in the direction of the MIT Lab for Computer Science – in particular, the folks who were doing early Internet research. My boss had gone to MIT also, had struggled, and had dropped out, but regretted doing so. So I spoke to his old advisor, who suggested I talk to another professor and a staff researcher, who were both a couple of principal players in the early designs of TCP/IP.
I got a UROP and undergrad thesis through the research group, and that’s what got me started in what would eventually become my career (when I was able to get work in it), developing IETF protocols and other things associated with Internet infrastructure.</p>
<p>Wow I am in the exact same boat as you! I am in my junior year and was all ready to apply for pharmacy school, but also don’t like the memorization. I am doing really bad in my anatomy/physiology classes, at the same time, I am better at math and physics. Also, I keep hearing that with the healthcare reform, there will be less jobs for pharmacists. I’m kind of reluctant to give up pharmacy though just because it is something I was always interested in. Like you, I also don’t know what engineering major to pick, I’m learning towards Mechanical because it can be applied to any other engineering major. What about you?</p>
<p>The day I realized I wasn’t attractive enough to cut it as a gigolo.</p>