<p>Its pretty common knowledge that engineering involves math but I’m not necessarily the greatest in the subject. I’ve been getting mostly B to B+ in my honors math classes in highschool and sometimes I do struggle to follow along but if I put a little more effort into my studying I wouldn’t do so poorly. Lately I’ve been thinking about majoring in biomedical engineering and I’ve talked to a friend who studies it and he said a good foundation in physics really helped him out. I’m going into senior year this fall and I’ve yet to take physics because until now, I’ve been focusing on bio and chem. Do you think my iffy skills in math and my lack of physics experience will make studying engineering difficult for me?</p>
<p>A good foundation in Math is needed above all else. I used to be terrible at math, to the point where if I saw a polynomial on an homework assignment or test, I would freak out. Truth is, I never paid attention to Algebra when I was in high school. I had Bs in those classes as well. But by looking at advice from the great people of this forum, I realized that my biggest problem was not that I couldn’t do math, but I lacked a decent foundation in it. What I did a couple of months before my senior year was I bought a book that assumes you knew nothing in the subject and started from the very beginning (Like teaching you what a term is, and what is a factor, what is a polynomial, how to cancel terms (and how that it doesn’t disappear, but remains a “1”). Simple things like that. I think it was called Practical Algebra from Amazon. It seemed really stupid, but I still just went page by page, repeating any problems that I couldn’t instantly do over and over. And after that, I was trying to study for the SAT math section. I read all of SparkNotes SAT math and SAT Math Level 2 sections to get a tiny bit more advanced knowledge into Algebra 2 and some Precalc. Then I bought this book thats called John Chaungs SAT Math, which had really hard (at that time) logic problems that improved my Algebraic manipulation skills(Most of calculus is just that, Algebraic manipulations). Doing all of these really helped me to the point where I went from being scared simple Algebra problems to get an A in Calculus BC (with the Highest average amongst kids going to Princeton and Harvard), and to get a good score on the exam (In my Junior year I took PreCalc and decided to skip AB to BC which is uncommon in my school, this gave me extra motivation to really get the mathematics down). Now you may take a different path from I did, but just understand that you need a really good foundation in math before you can understand the more advance stuff, because its an accumulated subject, you cant just have holes in an area and expect to do well later on. Practice is also really key, I dont care how many books you read, if you don’t do the problems, you will never get it. Im now going to college for engineering in the fall, and Im confident I can do really well. I wouldn’t be worried about not having a foundation in Physics, as long as you get some exposure, you will be fine. If anything, it would help you to not become complacent when you take it again in college. My teacher was terrible, and I didn’t learn a lot, but talking to many of my college friends, they say that many intro to physics college classes assume you know nothing, and begin from there. You will have to work harder than kids who already know it like the back of their hands, but that would apply with any subject. Math is what I really would focus on getting skilled at this next year before college. Many of the engineers here can give much more useful answers than I did on the amount of math and physics there is in college though. </p>
<p>PS. Be aware that for Biomed engineering, you usually need a graduate degree to find a job.</p>
<p>Yes iffy Math skills can make Engineering difficult but “math” is not one skill - it is very broad. There are engineers who struggle with multivariable calculus (and later with Fourier transforms) who found Linear Algebra easy, or Logic courses easy or … </p>
<p>Geometry and Algebra and Calculus are surprisingly different skills.</p>
<p>There is a wide variety of math involved in different types of engineering and just because you struggle in a high school math class does not mean that your aptitude is bad in all areas of Math. </p>
<p>A reasonable “minimum” level of Math used by some engineering schools is 550 on the SAT (e.g. Texas A&M won’t let you apply if SAT math is under 550), but typical is much higher for engineers.</p>
<p>I also agree that for most engineering fields (computer engineering being an exception), Physics is very helpful.</p>
<p>Short answer: yes.</p>
<p>Long answer: There could be a lot of different factors contributing to poor performance in your math classes. It can also be hard to extrapolate high school performance into how well you will do in college. If engineering is really what you want to study then don’t give up just yet. Take physics this year and put a little more effort into math.</p>
<p>The general consensus on this forum is that Biomedical Engineering is not a great field to major in due to the lack of opportunites for undergraduate degrees. Instead, think about getting a BS in another engineering field and going to graduate school for biomedical.</p>
<p>From a job perspective:</p>
<p>It is also job dependent, some “engineering” jobs require no more than a technician understanding of the math and physics (read by intuition and experience). However, even as an intern at an R&D optics lab, I need to pull from algebra and trig/precalc daily with a smattering of diffeq here and there. I have a good foundation in math, so when I see a governing equation or derive a formula for use in a testing procedure it isn’t too bad. However, the most challenging aspect of the job for me is trying to understand and apply the physics concepts that get tossed around by all these senior scientists and engineers. The problem is that introductory physics in college is woefully inadequate and oversimplified for use in the working world, but to be fair, some of this stuff is highly specialized (hence the PhDs on payroll). They’re not expecting me in my role as an intern to be able to grasp this stuff right away (or even without an advanced degree), but it is nonetheless frustrating to me that I couldn’t step into a full time role and immediately start contributing ideas or to solve real problems. Luckily they put up with my ignorance and are happy to try answer questions I have–and I have a lot!</p>
<p>All that said, there are interns and entry level engineering students at my company that aren’t/weren’t the greatest students at math or physics, but a few still ended up in very interesting (and more lucrative) roles and others are merely glorified techs/machine shop workers (one exclusively does 3-D drawings, but went to a trade school to learn it before getting the BS). The biggest factor separating these two groups seems to be motivation and willingness to learn and take on new responsibilities.</p>
<p>tl;dr math and physics are important in engineering & work ethic trumps innate ability most of the time</p>
<p>Depends on what field of Engineering you end up in, if you move into Research it would be more prevalent. Cold hard truth that many Engineers will deny to disclose, most do not use Calculus or Differential Equations at all on a day to day basis many have not touched it since graduating. It teaches you critical thinking, which is the most useful aspect at the end of the day.</p>
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<p>I strongly agree with both of the points mentioned by @ssoulin - And I have been quite
surprised to see how many strong physics and math majors end up excelling
outside their field. They learned “how to think” - critical thinking is hard to
develop but advanced mathematics (which many of us engineers have had to
take) I strongly believe helps. I did have at least one classmate who was
passionate about engineering but lacked the math skills that his classmates had
and that he would have needed to make it through. The majority of my college
engineering classes assumed good mathematics skills (but EE and MechE
would have been even more so where I went)</p>
<p>Yes but you must have a command of math to successfully get through engineering school and then onto a decent job, because poor grades in math will drag down your GPA, obviously. Lots of engineering firms have a cutoff point of 3.0 (and higher) when they solicit resumes from both interns and from graduating seniors.</p>
<p>It’s true that most engineering jobs don’t use the math or the more advanced topics day in and day out. Something in this thread bothers me though. Why limit yourself to only those jobs that don’t? Try to get a solid grasp of math and physics so that if you decide later on that the jobs that do use a lot of them are where you want to be, you won’t be out of luck. Additionally, if you end up doing graduate school, you are going to wish you knew your math better even if you were good at math already.</p>