Most difficult branch of engineering?

NeoDymium
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 15:58:29 +0000

Just looking at this for a moment, I’ve never seen anyone put nuclear engineering under an EE hat. Sometimes ChemE, sometimes MechE, sometimes on its own. But never as a part of EE.

To an extent, it’s hard to classify NukE because there’s not all that many programs of it. One that’s worth looking at is: [MIT NSE: Undergraduate Education: Curriculum + Requrements](http://web.mit.edu/nse/education/undergrad/curriculum.html)

The core curriculum seems to be:
The basics (Physics, Calculus, DiffEqs, General Eds)
Thermal/fluids (MechE, ChE goes into more depth than this on that subject)
Computation/CS
SigSystems (Definitely EE)
Specialized nuclear physics courses
NukE design

At a first glance, it seems closer to EE than to anything else. It has a bit of MechE and focus on NukE in and of itself, but the core seems closest to EE. The mindset seems quite similar between the two.
I’d say if you had to classify NukE, it’s either its own major or an EE one. ME and ChE are too far removed from what you actually learn there.