<p>I assume most people on this forum are prospective or current engineering students. I wanted to ask both groups why you've decided on a specific concentration (chemE, EE, MechE, etc.). I find i'm especially drawn to ChemE and civil.</p>
<p>I'm drawn to aerospace because of my love of airplanes. The want to have a career with anything to do with airplanes exceeds the engineering aspect. I go to an all-aerospace school where this is the case, and I am minoring in aviation safety, which is the career I hopefully can get into.</p>
<p>ChemE is really cool because it encompasses so many things. It is the only engineering major besides bioE that could legitimately go to med, law, or grad. It is really interesting and there is so many areas to work in. You like food stuff, go into factories find the most efficient way to make tasty potato chips (I was thinking about going into a brewery haha.) Or if you like computers a lot of chips are chemically or materially based.</p>
<p>I worked in a chemE lab that was doing experiments with carbon nanotubes. (My prof was awarded top 25 researchers under 35 award and went to Harvard or something to receive it so I thought the fact I had worked in my lab that summer was awesome.) Carbon nanotubes have all kinds of applications from the space elevator (strong enough to build a structure but light enough not to collapse under it's own weight) to biosensors. There are a plethora of areas that one can do research in. I liked chemistry in high school and now find it even more intriguing. It really is interesting.</p>
<p>My chemE teacher spoke to us one day talking about what things we need in our lives. She explained how a chemE was involved in every process. So now not just interest in Chemistry but an interest in how it can be applied to so many different things is incredible. For instance, a ketchup bottle has 7 layers of polymers, each with a different trait. Heat is transfered through each of those differently and that needs to be known to calculate the temperatures (cold & hot) the bottle can withstand to not melt or break.</p>
<p>yea a friend of a teacher of mine's son was a ChemE major and is now the assistant brewmaster at bud or something cool like that. What a hot title,
"Nice to meet you, what do you do?" </p>
<p>"I'm the assistant brewmaster" </p>
<p>"...."</p>
<p>HAHA,. that's great...</p>
<p>I hear the benefits are awesome and they just advertise b/c they want interesting, cool people to work at those kinds of places. awesome.</p>
<p>I started out in computer science. When I gave that up I decided between civil and mechanical, and mechanical seemed to be more broad, at least with the college courses. I've always been interested in how things are physically designed and MechE has given me the opportunity to do that. I know some ChemE students I have absolutely no interest in it at all. The thought of dealing with chemistry was enough to keep me away and I am simply more interested in the opportunities the MechE has to offer.</p>
<p>And as far as ChemE and BioE being the only engineering majors that can legitimately go to med, law, or grad.....that is ridiculous. Med, maybe since ChemEs take more chemistry than MechEs but I don't see any significant advantage for the other two.</p>
<p>I meant that having a lot of the stuff within the curriculum naturally for pre-meds and writing a lot of techinically related stuff (chem labs) for law. I didn't mean that they are the only ones that can go. I just meant with the program being naturally the way it is, it makes it easier to go to med if you want to do engineering & med. Law and grad are even for all of them. I worded that really wrong.</p>