I'm so lost... Mechanical vs Civil.. help?

alexithymia
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:09:36 +0000

So I’m currently in my sophomore year and I really need to decide by next semester if I’m going to switch to mechanical engineering. I’m currently declared civil. I’ll list what I like/don’t like about each field.

Civil: If I do civil, I think I’d want to do stuff with coastal protection works and whatnot. The structural part of civil (bridges,buildings,etc) doesn’t really appeal to me. I think I’d also be interested in doing stuff within civil that deals with water resources and drainage systems, maybe. I think I might like transportation stuff as well.

Mechanical: My school offers an extra semester for mechanical where you take aerospace classes and then have a dual bachelors degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. I think designing missiles, shuttles, etc could be really exciting. I’m also kind of interested in biomedical engineering and my school doesn’t have a program for that yet, but my advisor said if I wanted to do biomedical, the best track would be to do 4 years undergrad mechanical then get my masters/phd in biomedical. I find it interesting, but I wasn’t the best at biology :-/. As for the rest of mechanical, designing actual engines doesn’t really appeal to me.

Other: I really like math and physics. Specifically within physics I pretty much enjoyed everything in physics I (kinetics, forces, torque, momentum, all that good stuff), physics II (electricity, magnetism, etc) I still find interesting but I don’t like it as much as the stuff that’s on the more macroscopic scale. When I took ap physics in highschool, I actually found thermodynamics kind of interesting. Also, HATED chemistry with a passion, so I definitely want to stay away from anything that deals with that. I’m not sure if this has any relevance to engineering, but I find extreme weather interesting (specifically hurricanes/tornados/storms etc) lol. But alas, my school doesn’t have a meteorology program.

I say all of this with a large degree of uncertainty. I say “I might like _____” because I’m not entirely sure, I’ve never had an internship, and something that could theoretically be interesting to me, I might end up hating.

So what would you recommend for me? Also, how much more difficult is mechanical than civil? From what I hear, at my school, the mechanical engineering department will screw you over as much as possible and it’s made infinitely harder than it needs to be. But that’s just based off one person’s opinion.