I’m a girl, and I’m not sure if I want to major in an engineering field or if I want to major in finance.
For engineering, I want to follow my dad’s footsteps and go into academia. However, I’m not sure if I want to be in school for that long to get my bachelor’s and PhD. Additionally, some people have laughed at me for wanting to become a female engineer; apparently there’s no females in either Aero or MechE?
For finance, I know the work-life balance is horrible, but both the pay and hype of working in NYC, specifically Wall Street, are quite attractive to a high-schooler like me. I would like to get a MBA after a couple years of working. However, I don’t have any family connections in that field, whereas my dad can guide me since MechE was his major.
Some schools I’m looking at are: MIT (Aero/MechE or Finance), UPenn (MEAM or Wharton Finance), Harvard (MechE or Applied Math/Econ), UChicago (Math w/ specialization in Econ), Cornell (MechE or Dyson AEM), and 2-3 safeties.
Please give me some advice? It’s basically academia vs. finance and the rest will follow…
You may not have to decide now. As long as you get into one of the top wall street feeder schools, both doors will be open for you. Not only you will have time to decide on the major, you can easily pursue wall street / finance jobs with Aerospace/MechE from those schools. So, as long as you’re interested in studying Aerospace/Mech Engineering, I would go with it at this point. BTW…if “apparently there’s no females in either Aero or MechE” is true, you get an amazing opportunity to change it!
Senior in aerospace engineering here. I recommend starting out in engineering. It’s very common for people to switch from engineering to business/finance in the first couple of years of college, but not very common (never heard of anyone doing it) to go the other way.
Additionally, the professors I’ve seen who have been professors their whole careers are generally not very happy people. You’ll probably want to work in industry at least for a few years before returning to academia if you choose the engineering route. The careers you’re looking at with this choice are very different, and you’ll need to think hard about what you really want to pursue for the rest of your career.
Note that academia is extremely difficult to get into, since each faculty member at a research university supervises far more PhD students to graduation that will be needed to replace him/her when s/he retires. So the “excess” PhD graduates have to go somewhere else. If you do an engineering PhD, you may later end up in industry anyway (although PhD holders may go into more basic research jobs).
Also, why does engineering = academia and finance = wall st? Wall St likes engineers just fine, and most engineers are not in academia (also, research does not necessarily = academia).
And not to be rude (or to discredit parents!), but the fact that your father walked one path and not the other- 20+ years ago is really not relevant to your experience. His ability to give you practical guidance for your own journey is much more limited than either of you might realize at this stage. For one thing, when he was in engineering it was 99% male and the odds are good that he was taught how to use a slide rule (google “engineering generation gap”).
Aerospace may be 8% female right now, but I have a post-collegekid who is doing a PhD in engineering- and her cohort (at a top-10 school) is 50:50 f:m, so if you are hanging out with people who “have laughed at me for wanting to become a female engineer” you are clearly hanging out with the wrong crowd. My post-collegekid did physics as an undergrad, a field with less than 15% women, but was part of a fantastic national ‘undergraduate women in physics’ group that worked to help the 15% find each other and develop a peer group- and there is a similar group in engineering.
As @esssse points out, it is easier to go from engineering -> other than other -> engineering. As for Wall St finance, it is no friendlier to women than engineering is!
Yeah, it’s true about women being few and far between in those fields waves from computer science. Stupid stereotypes, I don’t even see why. Especially nowadays, when you don’t run around with dead heavy tools. Also what Collegemom said is true about engineers going into bankinh and frequently disliking the academia.
The engineering class profiles will also give the OP an idea of who her classmates will be. For example, at MIT, there were 40 men and 16 women in the aerospace engineering class for 2016 while for mechanical engineering, the ratio was 41:42.
As an aside, the majority of engineering students at the schools she mentioned end up on the business side of the industry relatively early in their careers.
I would suggest starting in the engineering courses. See if you like them. You will take lots of math. If you don’t like it, then you can move to finance.
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