<p>In my case, watching japanese mecha shows like Gundam/Evangelion/Eureka 7 as a kid made me want to be a mechanical engineer. This is probably the stupidest reason to choose that major other than “because they make good money”, but dammit, if some congressman decides to push for a giant fighting robots program I want in on it. Plus I’m doing well so far anyway.</p>
<p>Haha, well I’ve switched back and forth so many times on the different subfields. I’ve always had outlandish thoughts about them and only valued them by the futuristic applications they could have and not necessarily what I could currently do with them. But I didn’t always want to be an engineer. In fact, I wanted to be a biochemist because it just sounded cool (but then I took one look at the classes and was like, “hell no!”).</p>
<p>Ahem. Back to the point.</p>
<p>Once I heard of engineering, I wanted to be a bioengineer because I wanted to make artificial hearts, and do genetic-type engineering (like clones, augmentation, etc.). Then I switched to Electrical Engineering because I wanted to create forcefields and create laser weapons, and invisibility devices, as well as phasing devices. Haha I even wanted to control electricity itself and -to be even more outlandish- break the light barrier! Then I wanted to do Mechanical because I wanted to live in an era of robots, and create cars that could move at speeds of Mach 2 and Mach 3, or create a ship similar to Captain Nemo’s submarine from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And then I wanted to be a civil engineer because I wanted to make 7 pyramids stacked on each other, but in a special pattern where the shadows would appear to spell my name as the sun passed over them-- and yes, that particular idea was very self-centered.</p>
<p>So now what am I doing?</p>
<p>Now, I want to be an Aerospace engineer because I’m totally into missiles and spacecraft. I won’t say that I don’t have aspirations of commanding a star fleet or something, because that would just be epic! But I’m also wanting to be an Aerospace engineer in the hopes that one day, whilst drudging through a particularly boring day at work, I make contact with beings from far, far away. (Notice, I don’t say extraterrestrials because what if their planet has no land? It could be gaseous or entirely liquid…so they’d be extraaquaticoids or extraqaseons, right? =/). As if all of that wasn’t weird enough, I’d like to use my Aerospace engineering job as an excuse to research the stars and learn how to create an ACTUAL Dyson’s Sphere.</p>
<p>As far as shows go, I could say that I was slightly influenced by Gundam, DBZ, Beast Wars, Reboot, Jimmy Neutron, X-Men, G-Force, ThunderCats, Escaflowne, and some others.</p>
<p>That’s it in a nutshell, I guess. :]</p>