Entering engineering from a social sciences background

Graduate School
1

Hey guys,
I have an undergraduate degree in economics and politics from the UK but wish to change my field to engineering. USA is the obvious choice as its education system is much more flexible than other countries. I know this has been discussed many times and I am aware many people with a BS in physical sciences and mathematics are able to do an MS in engineering but I haven’t seen many cases where people with a BS in a social science subject were able to do an MS in engineering. I am interested in mechanical engineering in particular. So I was hoping someone here can guide me. I know a bachelors in engineering is more suitable but as it’s a time consuming and expensive route, family pressures aren’t allowing it
I have found 2 universities which can help me in this regard (Boston uni and NYU) and was wondering if there any other universities that can accommodate cases like mine? Moreover, will doing an MS without a BA in engineering make it harder for me to find good jobs in the US? And since I need to fulfill pre requisites , what are my options in this regard? That is, will graduate schools allow me to study pre requisite subjects or are there other options where I can study one pre requisites prior to applying?

Thanks!

2

To be honest, you are lucky you found those two. I have never really heard of this happening at all, so it must be pretty uncommon.

Generally, no it will not. However, I’ve honestly never heard of someone with a BA in something like economics/politics going on to get an MS in engineering next without first getting the BS, so I suppose I can’t rule out the possibility that it might give some employers pause.

That will depends highly on the individual universities and departments in question. They will all have their own policies. The make-up work you will require will likely be pretty substantial.

3

Whether or not they can “accommodate” you of not isn’t the question. It’s under what circumstances. Very little of your degree will be applicable to engineering. You likely didn’t take a sufficient level of calculus or enough, and certainly didn’t take calculus based physics if you took physics at all. Those are the first year foundation for all that follows. So, could you do it? If they say you can, I guess you can. You won’t do it in two years though. Then it becomes a question of whether or not it makes sense over a second BS.

4

You’d like to know whether there are any other universities that might accommodate cases such as yours? How about none other than arguably the most prestigious engineering school in the world: MIT?

Here’s a woman whose undergraduate degree was in English literature - a field surely farther removed than a social science undergrad degree relative to engineering - who nevertheless later obtained an MS in engineering from MIT. To be sure, that MS is in ‘Engineering and Management’ from MIT’s Systems Design and Management (SDM) program. Nevertheless, it’s still a bonafide MS degree awarded (jointly) by the MIT School of Engineering. Nor am I aware of MIT requiring her to complete any makeup work whatsoever. Nor does it seems as if she paying much of a penalty (if any) for not holding an undergraduate engineering degree, for she’s now the Director of Engineering at a software firm.

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/ilana-davidi-reeves#/entity

Want another example? How about Stanford? The Management Science & Engineering MS program - a degree awarded by the Stanford School of Engineering - specifically states that applicants need only have “completed a course in differential calculus of several variables before applying.” There is no requirement that applicants hold an undergrad STEM degree. Even if you’ve never taken such a course before, you can easily complete one at the University of Phoenix or other similar online entity.

https://msande.stanford.edu/admissions/frequently-asked-questions-graduate-admissions

Granted, none of these examples are regarding an MS in mechanical engineering specifically. The OP therefore needs to ask himself how important it really is for him to obtain a mechanical engineering MS. {Personally, I’d be far more inclined to obtain an engineering master’s from MIT or Stanford rather than from BU or NYU even if it wasn’t in my preferred field of engineering, but perhaps that’s just my personal preference.}

5

That’s an apples and oranges example. If he wants to be an ME what good it a unrelated degree no matter how prestigious the institution?

6

If your goal is to go into a non-technical role that requires such a degree as the ones you linked, then sure, that may be nice and advantageous. If your goal is to go into a technical role, and more to the point, be a mechanical engineer like @james007123 has specifically stated, then those degrees would be a waste of time and money.

7

Which is why I said that the OP ought to evaluate what his true career goals are, particularly in the long-term. The fact is, many (probably most) mechanical engineers eventually transition to non-technical managerial roles anyway.

Furthermore, it should be noted that even most technical engineering roles do not actually use the vast majority of the technical content that dominates most engineering curricula. For example, with the possible exception of R&D roles, I struggle to think of a single real-world hands-on engineering role that actually requires the daily derivation of pages and pages of calculus-based equations that characterizes engineering coursework (and such R&D engineering roles are distinctly in the minority). Any mechanical engineering program will therefore force the OP to learn reams of technical material that he will almost certainly never use on the actual job. Is it really worth it? Again, that’s a question that the OP must determine for himself.

8

Even though most of those career paths don’t requires one to derive “pages and pages of calculus-based equations” on a daily basis, there is still a reason for learning those things. They build the foundation upon which all of the higher courses and all of the relevant engineering software are based. It’s not about what you will use day to day. It’s about what gives you the right basis to use what you actually will day to day without having to think too hard about it. Otherwise you run a greater risk of garbage in, garbage out.

9

I’m glad that at the very least, we both agree that most of what comprises an engineering curriculum is not actually used by most real-world engineers on a daily basis. As a particular case in point, I doubt that anybody would dispute that other than perhaps at the highest levels of R&D, practically no real-world engineers actually derive solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations as part of their daily routines: which immediately raises the question of why engineering programs insist upon spending so much time teaching them.

Regarding your point that such knowledge serves as “the right basis to use what you actually will day to day without having to think too hard about it” - I would dispute this notion. In contrast, I would point to the not insignificant proportion of engineers who barely graduated with GPA’s at or close to the minimal 2.0 cutoff. Let’s be perfectly honest: those engineers who barely graduated didn’t really understand the material. They don’t have much of a foundation upon which any higher level knowledge of software might be based. Nevertheless, they still hold bonafide ABET-accredited engineering degrees. They’re still allowed to work as engineers - and indeed, many do. Heck, right off the top of my head, I can think of a few such people who have nevertheless successfully worked as engineers for several decades now. To this very day, they freely admit they don’t really understand the material taught in their coursework and never did.

It’s therefore hard not to draw the conclusion that - unless one is aiming for a career in research or academia - you don’t really need to know most of what is taught in a standard engineering curriculum in order to work as an engineer. Might it be nice to know? Perhaps. But you don’t actually need to know it.

10

Nobody ever said everyone is a good engineer, nor would they imply that every engineer is suitable to every job. The more solid an engineer’s command of the fundamentals, the more opportunities will open to them. Those who didn’t “get it” were automatically excluded from the most high horsepower jobs by GPA alone. Anyone who squeaked by that step certainly didn’t do well in their tech interviews. To imply that because a few can practice with substandard understanding equates to everyone being able to seems pretty silly.

@boneh3ad is the resident authority on Navier-Stokes. I’m looking forward to the reply. :smiley:

11

Let’s pretend for a moment that I am working on designing an airplane and I need to hire an engineer to work on the project to do CFD simulations. Now, the Navier-Stokes equations are much too complicated to solve directly on the scale of an airplane, even on the most modern supercomputers, so CFD programs generally make a series of approximations that use “simpler” models to simulate certain aspects of the flow to get a good engineering answer. Now, if the guy running the CFD for this project never learned how to derive the Navier-Stokes equations, how am I supposed to have any sort of confidence in his ability to know what each of the aforementioned turbulence modeling methods means, what sort of approximations it makes to the N-S equations, and what the implications are to the solution the code spits out? In other words, how am I supposed to trust that this engineer has any clue that his CFD solution is valid?

I could make the same argument about designing the internal components of an engine at Ford or John Deere, the external shape of the next Corvette, the external aerodynamics of a suspension bridge (hello, Tacoma Narrows Bridge), and so on. If a new hire never learned the fundamentals, I have no reason to believe that he or she has the ability I need to understand the implications of various settings and models built into any commercial CFD package, and I have no reason to believe he or she will have any idea how valid the output of the code is.

Another quick example would be the ability to draw conclusions based on incomplete information. If someone has a good grasps of the fundamentals, such as the meaning of various terms in the N-S equations, they can usually use incompletely information to draw conclusions much more effectively based on reasoning through the features of the governing principles of a problem. This applies to the above example when an engineer has to assess the validity of CFD results, but it also applies to many other situations. Any time an engineer is reading through a set of results of any kind of engineering analysis, interpreting those results is going to be easier if he or she has a grasp of the relevant fundamentals.

Is that a job task that every single mechanical (or aerospace or civil or chemical) engineer is going to have to perform in their career? No. But enough will have to deal with it that it makes sense to learn it. You could make the argument that these people could just learn it on their own as needed and not burden everyone else with such topics, but then you could use that same logic for essentially every core course in an engineering curriculum. Where do you draw the line? Should engineers not take physics because they are almost never going to have to know about a cart rolling down a hill? Should they never take calculus because they will not often be required to perform a derivative in their job? Where do you draw the line?

12

boneh3ad, I’m glad that once again, we both agree that not every engineer will need to understand the NS equations. Indeed, the vast majority will not, and the examples that you described only exemplify that point. The overwhelming majority of engineers will never be involved in the design of a new airplane at all, let alone be the guy running the CFD for a new such design. They will never be involved in the design of a new Corvette, a new Ford or John Deere engine, or a bridge similar to the Tacoma Narrows. Indeed, these roles seem to be precisely the ones that fall into the category of R&D positions that most engineers don’t have and will never have, and therefore I have chosen to exclude form this discussion.

Quite frankly, I wish that most engineering positions would involve the types of tasks that you’ve discussed, for that would mean that engineering would be a far more exciting and glamorous profession than it currently is. But the unfortunate truth - which I suspect you surely know despite your valorous attempts to dutifully avoid acknowledging it - is that most engineering roles are rather mundane.

But that’s precisely the problem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the fact remains that plenty of engineers didn’t exactly excel in their coursework. Let’s face it: if you graduated but with less than a 2.5 technical GPA - which is true of a great many engineers - you didn’t really learn the fundamentals. If you got less than a B-minus in your fluid mechanics course - which, again, is true of a great many engineers - you didn’t really learn the NS equations. You don’t know what is going on.

Nevertheless they’re still engineers. Will they be offered the glamorous engineering design jobs that you’ve described? Probably not. Nevertheless they’re still working as engineers.

I could easily turn that question around to you. Just because there might be a small handful of engineers in the world who find, say, algebraic topology useful, does that mean that every engineering student should be required to study it? Where would you draw the line?

But to answer the question, I don’t think that I (or you) need to draw any line anyway. Rather, the market has drawn the line. The market does so by hiring people to work as engineers who, quite frankly, never actually learned much of the fundamentals as exemplified by their GPA. Sure, they’re not designing new Corvettes or new Ford engines. Nevertheless, they’re still working as engineers.

It seems to me that you would prefer to live in a world where all engineers demonstrated true technical fluency in their coursework. But that’s clearly not descriptive of the world that we live in. There are plenty of working engineers who struggled to survive their coursework without ever truly understanding it. Indeed, I’ll always remember one such guy who once proclaimed: “I didn’t understand any that stuff back then, I don’t understand it now, and I think I never will understand it.”

How so? I would argue that it’s silly to deny that you don’t use most of the technical material taught in engineering curriculum in most engineering day-to-day tasks: a point that boneh3ad himself readily acknowledged. And look how far he had to stretch to come up with examples of engineering positions where such knowledge might be useful - positions that the vast majority of engineers will never hold.

13

I see no reason to lower the bar for the lowest common denominator. There is a reason that engineers with a 3.0 usually still have no real problems finding jobs, and that’s because even when they don’t understand the ins and outs of the N-S equations they still learn useful skills. The ones who excel in those sorts of topics get the “top” jobs that you are alluding to, and the ones who don’t have plenty of jobs to choose from that don’t require that. On top of that, hopefully by at least being exposed to the material, even if they didn’t fully grasp it, they will know where to look in the future if they do have need of it later.

In this sense, you are correct that the market has already drawn the line. Those jobs like airplane CFD guys are hiring up the students who excelled a little bit more at things like the N-S equations, and the jobs that will never require that again are perfectly content taking those guys with a 3.2 GPA that really only picked up the practical skills and didn’t really excel at the theory.

And yes, I would love it if every student exhibited true technical fluency. That’s the Utopian goal, in a sense. Sure, I am pragmatic enough to know it will never happen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to get as close to that as possible.

For students who have zero interest in that stuff, they can always go get an engineering technology degree, which is a course of study that I think is probably underutilized in modern US curricula and industry.

14

And yet there are plenty of engineers today who didn’t even come close to sniffing a 3.0 GPA. Indeed, a not insignificant fraction of them barely squeaked by with the bare minimum GPA required to graduate (which is a 2.0 at most schools).

Come on, boneh3ad, I think you would agree that those guys hardly understood the material at all. Their fundamentals are basically non-existent.

Nevertheless, they still graduated. They still hold bonafide accredited engineering degrees. They’re still employed as engineers. Sure, the demands of their positions do not involve anything even close to that of designing Corvettes or airplanes. Yet their job title still says ‘engineer’. Nor do I detect any movement to remove them from the profession.

Now, perhaps you might argue that they should be removed from the profession. Yet the fact remains that they’re not. Perhaps you might argue that engineering programs shouldn’t graduate anybody with a GPA lower than a 3.0. Yet the fact remains that they do.

That exemplifies my central point that only a small fraction of the extant engineering jobs actually require that one, on a day-to-day basis, deeply understand the technical content that comprises the modern-day engineering curricula.

Look, I wish I could tell people that every (or at least, the majority of) engineering position involves the designing Corvettes, Ford or John Deere engines, new airplanes, suspension bridges such as the Tacoma Falls, or tasks of comparable technical complexity and scale. But that would be a lie. Most engineering roles are rather technically mundane. Indeed, most engineers that I know have outright stated that the day-to-day technical demands of their roles require little more than high school math.

15

You need undergraduate engineering. Thermodynamics, circuits, mechanics, diffy q. Granted you will have all of your gen eds done, but you need to take these prereqs to use CAD and design things. If you think you can think like an engineer then forget what your background is. Everyone is an individual and just because you know sociology doesn’t mean you can become and engineer; in addition, an engineer could conduct research and write a dissertation on social sciences without an undergraduate degree in it.

16

You are either missing my point or willfully ignoring it. My point is that if those engineers who didn’t get it are still gainfully employed, and meanwhile the ones who did get it are employed in jobs that do need all of those more difficult topics, then why should we dumb down the curriculum?

We shouldn’t be lowering the bar. Students who excel at those topics can often grab jobs that require them (if they so choose). Students who struggle with them can still go get jobs that don’t require them anyway. If we removed those topics, those top students would be at a substantial disadvantage compared to now, and nobody wins.

17

[quoteMoreover, will doing an MS without a BA in engineering make it harder for me to find good jobs in the US
[/quote]

There are no guarantees that you will be employed as an engineer in the US.

As a non-citizen engineer, most engineering positions require US security clearances; many engineering firms are required, by the US government, to hire US citizens first and must state that there are no US candidates before even considering a non-citizen candidate. Your job prospects in the US would be limited by immigration policies.

18

Neither of those programs you recommended are designed for non-engineers, @peterquill.

Here’s what MIT’s SDM program says is required of applicants:

It’s very possible that Ms. Reeves took some supplemental classes in between her undergrad degree and graduate degree, or had some other special circumstance we’re not aware of.

I can’t find anywhere the Stanford MSE webpage says that applicants need only “have completed a course in differential calculus of several variables before applying.” Here’s what it says:

From here: https://msande.stanford.edu/admissions/graduate/ms-admission

19

I highly doubt most US engineers hold a security clearance.

20

In @“aunt bea”'s husband’s job that is probably the case. That’s a very small portion of what engineers do though.