<p>my school offers biomedical, chemical, civil and environmental, electrical and computer, materials science, mechanical, and school of computing?</p>
<p>Which ones the best? pros and cons? </p>
<p>Depends on what you’re looking for. What gets you excited about engineering?</p>
<p>Biomedical:</p>
<p>PRO: BME is really solid when it comes to research + and the BME/BE sector is becoming a really exciting area that might just be the “big thing” pretty soon
CON: I visited a lab a while back and the researchers told me it was going to be around a decade before the field started making big money (they and their colleagues are personally having trouble with jobs, apparently); BME’s also a fairly narrow degree</p>
<p>Chemical</p>
<p>PRO: Fairly broad field with many research and industry applications, pretty high pay in jobs like those at oil companies
CON: You might find yourself working on curing cancer during college/grad school and then working on making a better shampoo at your job (this skit: <a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>
<p>Wasn’t thinking about CivE/EnviroE (although my Chem teacher has a PhD from Rice in EnviroE and she said her job at a big oil company + her research experience were both really awesome) so I won’t cover it.</p>
<p>ECE</p>
<p>PRO: High pay, diversity of applications (hardware and software), tech jobs (tech companies are consistently rated as some of the best employers), always something exciting and innovative going on in your field, and applicable in a ton of contexts (and you can innovate if you’re not cool with any of them)
CON: this is my major so I’m not going to say anything here</p>
<p>Skipping MatSci due to very limited familiarity</p>
<p>Mechanical</p>
<p>PRO: Broad, an “evergreen field” within engineering, and applicable in a lot of areas
CON: no idea here</p>
<p>I’m assuming School of Computing is CS</p>
<p>PRO: endless innovation (machine learning, next-gen touchscreens), tech industry, being with a bunch of really smart people, the big thing right now, high pay, and I can’t think of very many contexts where computers aren’t useful
CON: tends to be very tough; CS vs. ECE just comes down to a hardware vs. software preference for a lot of people; also you’ll need to keep up on your side-projects because a CS degree alone won’t get you the job you want (ditto for any other degree, ofc)</p>
<p>what do you mean by side projects?</p>
<p>If you’re doing CS, on top of what you do in class, you should work on pet projects on the side (mess around on github/check out some open-source projects) to hone your skills and demonstrate your ability/passion. CS courses often don’t even require a computer since they can be more about dealing with things on a theoretical level.</p>
<p>Gotcha…also, i want to ask your advice on one thing… in your opinion would a major in business or engineer be better in terms of job salary and availability? </p>
<p>Depends on what you’re interested in and what motivates you. Neither one is a bad choice in this economy; for starting salary lists, engineering majors dominate the top 10- but there’s a TON of variation between schools in terms of starting salary ranks. If you’re genuinely motivated to do well in those fields, I wouldn’t decide based on job availability and salary because at that point you’re not going to make a wrong decision (outside exceptional cases) and you have the privilege of picking what you’ll genuinely enjoy the most.</p>
<p>But an interesting difference between finance companies and tech companies is that tech companies’ high earners tend to receive more stock options as a portion of their compensation than do finance companies’ high earners- so the guy making $3M at Goldman Sachs gets more immediate/real/actual money than does someone making $3M at Google (not that Google stock is bad); this likely won’t be an issue for either one of us, but it demonstrates how wages work differently at these companies.</p>