Expert: Daniel Mazur - 5/30/2007

Question
Hello.  I am a high school student (junior, senior in two weeks) at a somewhat prestigious private school in Las Vegas.  I will be taking the Physics SAT2 this Saturday, and physics B next year; however my question isn't about that.  I plan to go into some kind of engineering or maybe computer science in college; but I am not sure what kind of engineering to look at.  What are some main differences between them all, and what kinds of people are suited for such things?  Examples (but not limits) include electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering...and if I am good at problems in class dealing with energy or electricity or relativity or kinematics or heat; which type of engineering I'd be best suited for.  Also, I am looking at schools such as Rensselaer Polytech, Rose-Hulman Tech, Illinois Tech, California Polytechnic.  I read in Fiske's guide about all of them, I think, and while the academics and etc at Rose-Hulman sound the most pleasing to me, the environment, as in Terre Haute, IN; isn't.  Do you know of any schools I should also look at?  Living in Vegas I'm used to a fun night life in a city...I'm not a country/wilderness person.

Answer
Hello Beth,

last December I graduated Illinois Tech, so I may my able to answer even on the college subject. I'll come back to that.
As you may be already aware of, there are many types of engineering and the fields partly overlap in focus and VERY MUCH overlap in the scholarly demands. The way you laid out your strengths I can say that you would be suited for most of the engineering fields (and scientific as well). You will need to evaluate not only your strengths, but also your weaknesses - or rather things that do not interest you so much. And of course, if you feel any internal pull toward certain professions. That may narrow down your search. Let me summarize the Engineerings fields for you.
Electrical engineering concerns electricity in all aspects, from power plants and power grid to precision electronic devices, magnetic memory media etc. Electrical safety belongs here, which concerns properties of insulators, power backup systems, emergency response systems etc. Computer Engineering is a subset of EE focusing at digital electronic devices and communication between them. Your high skills in Physics classes would make you well suited for all these. You can drop the Computer eng., if you are not so fond of computers and programing.
Then there is Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering, where it is all about mechanical properties (hardness, elasticity, plasticity, forming, fatigue,...) of materials and their motion in viscous gaseous or liquid environments. Airplane and spacecraft technologies belong here as well. Again, you will use physics here a lot, but remember that there is a lot more to physics than one learns at a high school.
A rather new field is the Biomedical Engineering, which focuses on medicine technology, medical devices, implants, and also administrative and legal aspects of biomedical industry. BME descended from Chemical and Biological Engineering, which encompass all technology for manufacturing chemical compounds (all possible from pure gases to drugs, ceramics, explosives...) and biological cultures (viruses,cells,test-tube-made tissues,cloning). For all this you really need to be enthusiastic about either chemistry or biology, and possibly both.
Finally, Civil Engineering encompasses technology of civil structures (buildings, roads, plumbing networks, bridges,...) and ground and marine vehicle technology. Here, more than anything, one learns and uses static mechanics, tensions in model structures and the databases of materials with standardized properties. In this field good calculus, computer abilities and sense of 3D perspective are more important than Physics.
This is about it. As I said above, you seem suited for most of the Engineering fields, so I cannot help you more at the moment. When it comes to what college to attend, I'd say you make a list of schools with programs you think you'll like, find information on salaries of the target professions and then choose the most famous one you can afford financially. A good source for this would be the annual nation-wide rating of educational institutions. It may seem crude, but the fact is that the college programs at the top schools are largely equal in quality. It is good to choose by location, because it narrows the list down again. So, MIT and Caltech are both top of the list, and I would add IIT in Chicago, because it is (by US standards) a beautiful city and one gets a lot of night-life fun, when one wants to :-). Rensselaer Polytech in Troy sounds fine, but it's not Manhattan of course. California Polytech in San Luis Obispo is also a bit away from downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco, but it's the coastal area, which may have enough night life as well.
Let me finish now, I wish you the best in your SAT2 and your academic progress overall. You still have a lot of time to think about the college and for your opinions to evolve.
Cheers,
Daniel