| If you're interested more in polymers (materials like Goretex) you might want to look at chemical engineering or a materials science with a very strong polymer engineering department.
Materials is typically based upon metals, since most materials departments grew out of metallurgy departments. I think it's actually a good thing, since metals are kinda the "idealized" material. There's many which are fairly simple and are what people originally studied when developing various theories for material behavior.
I'm sure most any MSE department out there will have some faculty members which specialize in polymers, so if you're interested in doing research with them there would be the opportunity there.
Most of my friends in undergrad didn't ever want to touch metals, and they were able to find projects that made themselves perfectly happy. Semiconductors and electronic materials may be mostly based in ceramics or metals, but you can be sure the focal points of their research are quite different your typical metals-based research lab. |