The Engineering Place (K-20 Outreach)
Bringing engineering to life across North Carolina through outreach, mentoring and education
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Once you have identified engineering as a potential course of study, you may be wondering how to choose a specific discipline. With 18 disciplines at NC State, and many other specialized disciplines represented at other institutions throughout the country, narrowing down to just one can be a difficult choice!
Almost half of students who consider studying engineering in college don't know in which kind of engineering they will major. Understanding engineering requires a little digging. If you look at a university web site, you will usually see a list of different kinds of engineering degrees that you can get. How do you decipher the differences between them? How do you know which of them will let you have the kind of career that you can be passionate about and enjoy? Read on, here is our prescription:
- Explore Your Motivations and Interests – What interests you? What are your passions? What makes you get out of bed in the morning? Understanding your preferences, interests and motivations is the first piece to determining which discipline is best for you. Take some time and write these things down — maybe you love to learn about how foods are processed and packaged, or the environment really motivates you. Or perhaps you constantly find yourself trying to make any task or process more efficient. Whatever your interests, write them down and understand them.
(n) Engineering involves the application of creativity in partnership with math, science, social studies, language arts and fine arts to search for quicker, better and less expensive ways to use the forces and materials of nature to meet today's challenges. Engineers are problem solvers who use every resource possible to bring into existence things and ideas that they imagine.
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