I am currently a accounting major but Im thinking about changing to engineering. I am thinking this because I enjoyed AP Calc and AP Physics and the pay seems very good compared to a accountant. I don’t like designing things, building things, nor am I a good artist or good with hands on activity. If I just enjoy math and the physics can I still be a engineer and are those other things necessary to be a engineer?
Absolutely you can be an engineer - you will go on more of an analysis/computational career rather than a design/hardware career.
You will be able to do “math and the physics” with this route. For example, you’ll use differential equations and Newtonian physics to anaylize the vibration of an aircraft wing, and help designers make decisions based on your analysis. Stay strong in math/physics, and learn to code. You’ll be a great engineer
It depends on the type of engineer. Civil Engineering is probably too much designing for you. Chemical engineering requires that you understand how to visualize molecules in space, especially for ochem. Aero and Mech require that you understand orthographic and isographic projections (which means you need to be able to picture 2D drawings as 3D drawings. Sometimes this is hard for people and they have to drop out of the basic engineering fundamentals course. Most of your beginning engineering classes will be learning concepts you’ll need later on. The upper level classes you’ll need to take will be designing, and therefore applying the concepts. This will be mostly group projects and those are frustrating when people don’t pull their weight or don’t know what’s going on and you can be the one doing all the work. So if you can’t take an idea in your head and put it down on paper, or build it, engineering probably isn’t for you. Even with the analyses AeroEngineer28 was talking about, you cant just get away with not being hands on. You could be asked to draw something in your analysis job that would work better than what the designing engineer has drawn, and you need to be able to interpret other’s drawings and that works best when you know how they came to be in the first place. I would suggest practicing drawing straight lines, perfect triangles, perfect circles, then move on to drawing 3D shapes like pyramids, rectangles, spheres, trapezoids, diamonds, etc. Just doodling things like this in your notebook during particularly boring lectures, and arranging the shapes together in different ways can help you visually connect with the artistic side of engineering. My margins are always filled with random doodles of a mix of 2D and 3D shapes just because my mind is always active with picturing different objects in space and I can see how one simple line can become anything I want it to be. You don’t necessarily have to be hands on, but you have to be able to visually see things before they become things.