Assessing my aptitude for engineering

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Hello folks, I am new here and looking for some honest advice!</p>

<p>Quick background: I attended Baylor as a music major for one year before leaving… pretty much skipped all my classes due to some serious family/personal things going on, and it destroyed my GPA. Classic screwed up freshman year. I then spent a few years in the military working on advanced aircraft systems (electrical, avionics, armament on Apache helicopters) and was the distinguished honor graduate of my class, took some random academic courses from a community college and am now completing my Associates degree in Aviation Maintenance and will have my Airframe and Powerplant license in about a year. </p>

<p>I have a 4.0 in every post-military class I have taken. I am a Phi Theta Kappa member. </p>

<p>Our program has given us a great introduction into aviation physics (aerodynamics, hydraulics), materials sciences (composites, sheetmetal structures, etc), some light chemistry, and a great foundation in electricity (DC, AC, generators and the like, troubleshooting, logic gates, etc). Obviously, I have a lot of hands on time as well across these disciplines.</p>

<p>I am fairly academic but have a serious fault in math ability. I had a string of terrible teachers in grade school and missed a LOT of the basics in math. I had been on the “regular” math track and had “too high of an average” so they moved me to honors and the teacher made me sit in the hallway and read the textbook for the rest of the year since I wasn’t caught up. Yeah, that pretty much did me in and I struggled for the remaining few years to get through each course. My SAT was a 1290 (the older SAT) and ACT was a 31. I did however perform pretty well on the math Accuplacer for a community college and was not made to take remedial courses. The aviation math course I took 2 semesters ago I did fine in. I can learn, but I need to be taught when it comes the mathematics. </p>

<p>So the question is: will the mathematics in engineering programs be too much for someone who is weak in math? Or is a desire to learn enough? </p>

<p>Will my knowledge of applied mechanics really be much of an advantage as an engineering student?</p>

<p>Also, is mechanical engineering a good place to be for someone with a background in aviation maintenance? Any thoughts are appreciated.</p>

2

<p>You can easily gauge your ability in engineering mathematics by taking the Calculus I and II courses at your community college. If you are able to handle those, then you can move to Calculus III and Differential Equations, which are necessary for any Engineering curriculum.</p>

<p>Mechanical Engineering is a good place to go for your skills and interests.</p>

3

<p>What was your ACT math score?</p>

<p>It’s not clear to me what “missed a LOT of the basics in math” means but I think your hands-on experience is very valuable.</p>

4

<p><a href=“https://www.khanacademy.org/[/url]”>https://www.khanacademy.org/&lt;/a&gt; Use this to fill the gaps in your math knowledge.</p>

<p>Having a strong work ethic is the most important thing. If you can commit to 4 years of what will at times be extremely unpleasant, then you’re fine.</p>

5

<p>Well if there is anything the military prepared me for, it’s years of misery… All endured with a smile. :)</p>

6

<p>Oh, and an added bonus: many companies love to hire ex-military engineers. That should give you a fair bit of windfall in job searches and internship searches.</p>

7

<p>Good to know. Sometimes it feels like the employer preference for veterans is all hype. I am also service/deployment-connected disabled so I have a hiring preference for government jobs, although it seems all the guys collecting fat retirement checks are snatching up those spots with their hiring preference level.</p>

8

<p>You should probably get in contact with whoever from the VA you’re supposed to early on, to be sure you get your tuition benefits with minimal hassle. Maybe they might have info on particular schools with programs aimed at helping students like yourself, as well.</p>

9

<p>AviationGirl, I second the suggestion of Khan Academy. </p>

<p>As an engineer, you need to be able to teach yourself. You’re inventing stuff. It’s new. There is no course, there is no book. </p>

<p>I would spend some serious time with Khan Academy, find the level of math you need and learn it well. Get yourself to the point where you could score in the 700s on a Math Level II SAT Subject test(not that you need to take it, but that’s a good metric for where you probably need to be to do well). </p>

<p>The most important thing though is getting comfortable teaching yourself. If you can get to that point, then I think you have the aptitude. </p>

<p>There are also many fine technical careers that fall short of being an actual engineer. </p>

<p>Thank you for your service.</p>

10

<p>“So the question is: will the mathematics in engineering programs be too much for someone who is weak in math? Or is a desire to learn enough?”</p>

<p>Mathematics in engineering is much more “graspable” and intuitive than pure mathematics, because the mathematics are in some way motivated by applicability and “real world correspondence”, i.e. you can contrast them to physical realities/theories and quantities and it helps with forming an intuition about the mathematical abstraction and specifically “what it’s used for”/“what it can be used for”/“why it’s meaningful”. There’s also that mathematics in engineering specifically, because it’s used in the applications that you’d be studying in other courses. The mathematics you study is the language for those other things in other courses. In pure mathematics (mental gymnastics) you’d only have definitions and logic, and that’s what some people find difficult, because there’s no mention of “applicability” or “how it relates to the real world” (because it maybe doesn’t) and there may not even be visualization (except of logic of course), apart from those mathematics that have geometric visualization.</p>

<p>I’d like to second the suggestion of “learning to teach yourself”. That’s really what this (and engineering) is about. Finding out about things that you don’t know, finding out about things that you want to know about and making some use of that knowledge.</p>

11

<p>Thanks everyone! Really good information here. I’ll be doing some more research, for sure.</p>