<p>I’m enrolled in my university’s school of engineering, but I’m having a little difficulty picking a specific major. I’m currently in a Materials Science & Engineering class, and I find the material to be extremely intriguing; however, it’s not offered as a major at my school. What other engineering majors would you consider to be closest?</p>
<p>This is just me guessing. I was thinking that Bioengineering would be the closest especially if you are going to specialize in biological materials.</p>
<p>You can do a lot of materials engineering with a mechanical engineering degree. One of the areas that there are a lot of jobs is composite materials, and much composite work falls under the mechanical engineering domain.</p>
<p>After college, though, your degree often becomes less important and different engineering majors blend together. I’ve done a lot of materials engineering, mechanical engineering, and even some electrical engineering with my degree, all the while working at a major aerospace firm.</p>
<p>MechE can be similar and ChemE can be similar. Those are the only two that really stick out, though there’s probably something I’m leaving out.</p>
<p>If your interested in research/academia you could look at the professors at top Mat E Research University and see what they did their undergrad in before doing Mat E for phd. I think you’ll see Mat E’s, ME’s and other sciences like physics and chemistry along with metallurgical enginering</p>
<p>I think ME and others would do well to prepare you for grad school in Mat E…</p>
<p>random…my Mat E prof. advised us to look into it for grad school and told us this funny story too of his colleague that came up with a new composite for a noble cause but the buyer ended up being a random fashion exec walking into his office from NYC…so beyonce nulls could have the ‘highest quality’ high heels on the red carpet hahah he made big $$ though hahaa he had a lot of good stories</p>
<p>mechanical and chemical, like others have said</p>
<p>Yeah, Mechanical or Chemical are the two biggest relatives to Materials Science. I don’t know what that guy was talking about with bioengineering.</p>
<p>
ditto. probably more towards chemical rather then mech. not so much bio…
mechs tend to know materials, but you really have go out of your way to do electives in heavy duty material classes. if you want to do things like synthesize materials or study the properties, etc, go for chemical; or even a standard chemistry/physics degree. </p>
<p>look into inorganic chemistry and condensed matter physics. those fields over lap strongly with materials/solid state physics.</p>
<p>(this field has a lot of overlap/names…)</p>
<p>It all depends on the type of materials you want to work on. If you’re interested in structural type materials, go mechanical. If you’re interested in polymers or some electronics stuff, you can do chemical. If you’re interested in making devices, I know electrical engineers can do a bit of it. If you want to do the more fundamental side of things, you can get there through (applied) physics. If you want to do catalysis stuff, chemistry is probably your best bet.</p>
<p>The fundamentals of chemical engineering are closer to those of MS&E than mechanical engineering. For instance, materials thermodynamics is very similar to ChemE thermo but quite different from ME thermo, and important materials subjects like kinetics/mass transport are usually absent altogether from the ME curriculum. As chemistry is a major part of MS&E, the knowledge of chemistry gained from a ChemE program versus a standard ME program might be quite valuable. Of course, if you want to work in a specific area there may be better options as RacinReaver pointed out, but ChemE best parallels the underpinnings of a typical MS&E degree.</p>