Choosing major

One of the goals of the EN1 courses is to help first-year students like you choose a major. I also hear, "Should I go to graduate school in [some field]?" pretty often. Here are a few thoughts that might help make your decisions easier.

• There is a lot of overlap across the engineering majors in the first two years, so it doesn't matter too much which you choose, at least at first.
• You'll take 6-8 required classes in your junior and senior years, but only a few of those will be memorable, and a few years after graduation, that will drop to one or two.
• If you ask a group of people who all decided to go to graduate school for at least 5 years and then went on to teaching careers based on those credentials,(let's call them "professors") whether going to graduate school is a good idea, most of them will say yes. But around 40% of engineering graduate students leave school before graduating. The view of engineering PhDs from outside of academia is considerably dimmer than from within.
• For all the hiring I've been involved with at different engineering firms, across hundreds of applicants for a variety of engineering positions, majors and GPA's were on the edge of irrelevant. (This is definitely not the case for other pursuits, like medical school, where GPA's are crucial.) I once asked Nathan Seidle, the founder of Sparkfun whether he ever looked at GPA's in hiring. His response was, "No, I don't care about that. I want to see what they've built."