Engineering Student Identity Crisis

Progress15
Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:23:00 +0000

I’m currently in my third year of mechanical / aerospace engineering (double major). I usually don’t comment on topics but after reading your post it seems to me like mechanical / aerospace engineering would definitely be your sort of thing. Every branch (structures, dynamics, controls, thermo, astronautics, fluids, electronics) in the upper division involves heavy (what some would call grueling) amounts of math. I would strongly recommend you to look into switching to mechanical or (preferably) aerospace.

Just as an example, you’d be dealing every day with matricies / multi variable calculus / differential equations. And all this math would actually be describing real life phenomena ie. masses attached to springs under non linear resistive forces, fluid flowing past an object creating lift, beams bending / deforming under stresses, designing trajectories of spacecraft, etc. etc.

Just my 2 cents though. Also, in case you’re wondering aerospace engineering requires even more “physics oriented math problems” than mechanical. Hope that helps.