Hi everybody, I’m going to be a freshman at CMU in CIT in the fall, and I’m planning on majoring in biomedical engineering. However, I know that biomedical engineering can only be a major in complement with one of the ‘core’ engineering majors, and I can’t decide between chemical and mechanical engineering as this second major. Chemical interests me because of it’s applications to pharmaceuticals, drug delivery, etc., but I don’t want to end up just designing pipelines for giant industrial chemical plants. Mechanical engineering has grown more interesting to me because I want to actually design and build machines (ok, fine, this was partly inspired by watching Iron Man and other movies like that, I’m sure it’s not actually that glamorous in real life!).
Thoughts from current students or anybody else? Sell me! Thanks in advance for any answers.
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But seriously, you have to do 2 intro courses anyways. If you’re set on ChemE or MechE, just take both intros and choose the one you like more.
Chemical engineers work in the energy sector, including solar, wind and oil and gas industry, the semiconductor industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the chemical industries, often on liquid chemistries. Mechanical engineers work in the energy sector, the aerospace industry, the oil and gas industry, semiconductor industry on robots for manufacturing, computer and peripherals, the robotics industry, auto industry, and hundreds of other industries. Electrical or mechanical are your best bet with many job options in many industries. Electrical engineers work in many industries including computer, aerospace, test and measurement, biomedical, and the energy sector. Computer science could be another double major for you. BME is a very overtaxed major, although perhaps not at CMU, I am not certain. Over the whole USA, there are now thousands of students majoring in BME. Its not the best plan, unless you want to go to graduate school. Other engineering majors are going to have more opportunity going forward, especially electrical, mechanical and computer engineering. Chemical engineers can end up specialized in drug manufacturing or semiconductor manufacturing, and not be able to switch between these two very different types of specialities, one is solid state, semiconductors, the other is more on the chemical processing end, drug manufacturing.