^ the whole thing sounds odd

Wow, I have a son who is in his first year hoping to get into Computer Engineering and needs a 3.75 GPA to be competitive (he is in general engineering for now), after his first semester he has a 3.45, which is great but might put him in the running for electrical or mechanical which are his fall backs for now. We have a daughter in her third year at a different university majoring in systems engineering with a minor in mechanical. They both work hard and I will give them extra props this week before they head back to school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most people don't realize how much harder an Engg degree is compared to other strong degrees (science, econ/finance etc)

My DC engineering student has almost double the amount of class hours (class, discussion, labs) as non-engineering friends. It is more difficult than most kids realize and many drop out.

This is an underrated difficulty of engineering programs. I needed 140 credits to graduate with a BSCE eons ago. Most of it was very scripted and left only 9 hrs for electives (essentially just 3 classes) over fours years. There was little to no room for error or taking less than the 17-18 hrs per semester and you often don’t even get “credit” for the many required labs.

We also had to take one “basic” engineering class in a different E discipline (which, at the time boiled down to Circuits/EE or Thermo/ME) and that one darn near killed me. But I loved all my CE classes (except Steel Structures, which, last I checked, isn’t even undergrad work now) and spent 10 years in that career before transitioning to another STEM field.

It is hard. It’s not for everyone.

lol come on thermo was fun!!

-ME

Anonymous wrote:Gosh this is making me rethink my daughter’s plans to major in engineering. She’s super good at math but has never expressed interest in building things. It sounds quite hard.

There are many different facets of engineering, not all necessarily involved in the actual 'building' of something. I actually went into it wanting to learn to 'blow things up' (I can watch an implosion video all day long and still wonder, very sadly, just how/why the Towers mostly did so almost as if....by design). I figured the best way to learn about how to destroy something was to learn how it got designed and built. But my "Structures" class(es) (I'm the PP who hated Steel), took care of that and I became fascinated with, well, water and its mechanics. Groundwater, stormwater, drinking water, and even, ah, wastewater. Stormwater...rain water (one of my rare electives was meteorology) held a particular allure and was where I chose to focus my upperclass studies and what my engineering career revolved around.

Math is central to so much of engineering and if your daughter loves it....and is open minded....she might find an engineering (or an application of that math, science, and data) aspect appealing. Good luck and good searching! It's a fun journey. And regardless, an engineering education, almost regardless of the school (and there are many "good" ones), is top-notch. She would be able to flex into just. about. anything.

Gosh this is making me rethink my daughter’s plans to major in engineering. She’s super good at math but has never expressed interest in building things. It sounds quite hard.

My freshman year, I met so many engineering majors. After the first year, most of them switched to business or other major.

Anonymous wrote:Most people don't realize how much harder an Engg degree is compared to other strong degrees (science, econ/finance etc)

Since when is this the proper abbreviation?

Are engineering majors getting their Fe certification?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most people don't realize how much harder an Engg degree is compared to other strong degrees (science, econ/finance etc)

My DC engineering student has almost double the amount of class hours (class, discussion, labs) as non-engineering friends. It is more difficult than most kids realize and many drop out.

This is an underrated difficulty of engineering programs. I needed 140 credits to graduate with a BSCE eons ago. Most of it was very scripted and left only 9 hrs for electives (essentially just 3 classes) over fours years. There was little to no room for error or taking less than the 17-18 hrs per semester and you often don’t even get “credit” for the many required labs.

We also had to take one “basic” engineering class in a different E discipline (which, at the time boiled down to Circuits/EE or Thermo/ME) and that one darn near killed me. But I loved all my CE classes (except Steel Structures, which, last I checked, isn’t even undergrad work now) and spent 10 years in that career before transitioning to another STEM field.

It is hard. It’s not for everyone.

Anonymous wrote:Does everyone think they can be an engineer? Feels like every kid I know is either an engineering major or trying to get into a program. Several of them seem to be struggling to take a full load or get decent grades...is this a sign of the times where its considered a super stable career path so it the "hot" option...

Engineering is a very tough major.

I have a kid doing it at a top 20 school that's known for it.

Good lord, I would flunk out so quickly.

It's very intense. And it begins right away with the weed out classes freshman year. Macroeconomics is the easy class. There's multivariable, organic chemistry, physics and so on and so forth. You don't even get to the engineering until the 2nd or 3rd year.

Anyone that is graduating with an engineering degree from a good school and has a decent GPA - that's the best and brightest. And they are in high demand. They have the smarts. They have the discipline.

But goodness, it's tough

Anonymous wrote:I don’t get what’s so difficult. Couldn’t you just copy someone else’s answers & forget to cite them?

That only works at Harvard.

I don’t get what’s so difficult. Couldn’t you just copy someone else’s answers & forget to cite them?

Female with an EE undergrad. Most classes were so hard for me, but I powered through and graduated with a poor GPA. As a result, internships and first jobs were hard to get. I eventually found my footing and I’m now a successful software engineer (thanks to the CS classes required for the EE degree).

Anonymous wrote:It gets sifted rather fast, most peeps brains just cannot handle that much abstraction, especially at EE or ChemE level. Try to understand Maxwell's equations and or Quantum physics and then we'll talk. Majority of UMC people around me struggle to multiply two digit numbers in their heads.

The topic that blew most ugrad E-school students in my day was in PHYS 206E when they got to time dilation.

Friend of mine did a PhD in Chemistry and now she does data science work at a tech company.