scale of 1-10 how hard is aerospace engineering
>>8066813
about as hard as vanilla mechanical engineering. the difficulty is in getting a job in your field.
>>8066816
This. Even finding a school that offers it can be tough.
So, since the hiring pool is relatively small, you can pretty much count on your competition coming from the most prestigious schools in the country.
>>8066813
2nd year aero engineer at a world top 10 uni in both the field and in general rankings here.
The other anons' posts about difficulty being comparable to Mech Eng is correct-that is don't expect a smooth easy ride through university.
As for jobs, the prospects are bright and aero engineers are consistently among the best paid majors out there. If you can't find an aerospace job, you can do literally any other mechanical engineering job.
>>8066849
thank you
>>8066813
what the other anon said is true anon, but at the same time, you could just major in mechanical engineering instead and still take aero classes and have a better experience
unless you are going to a school with a particularly well developed aero program like UMich, Mechanical is definitely the better major
>>8066813
>dat angle of attack
I am hoping that that is not for a turbojet
>>8067063
what do you mean by better experience?
>>8066813
>scale of 1-10 how hard is aerospace engineering
Here's what you do. You do your undergrad in physics and mathematics or chemical/mechanical engineering. Just choose the best of those programs.
Then you apply to Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech Berkeley and Michigan. If you don't get into any of those, don't bother because you're not going to get a job in aero anyway.
Worst case scenario: you have an undergrad degree you can get a real job with or still go to grad school in something else.
>>8067182
>Georgia Tech
>>8067182
>Implying Berkeley even HAS Aero
Protip, it doesn't.
People who want to work in Aero from Berkeley get a MechE degree.
>>8067182
I'm sorry but for studying physics/math is useless to become an engineer. You have to have an accredited undergraduate engineering degree to be an engineer.
As for that little uni list, if you get into those in the US, you can study aero in undergrad. Add Imperial and Cambridge to that list for "viable" aero institutions for UK.
>>8067206
this 100%
Aerospace engineer reporting in.
Experience is more important than a degree in aerospace - I'd happily have a man that started as an assembler and worked his way to engineer than the fresh-out-of-uni PhD graduate.
A good school and grade may get you the interview, but that's it. Often large airframers will hire local aerospace engineering graduates regardless of school. If there is such a plant in your area, you're in luck. Most of the graduates that started at the same time as me settled into a life of comfort - arrive anytime between 7 and 9, relax, write part of a report, have 4 coffee breaks and 1 lunch, and then head home about 4. It's a comfy life. If you actually want to get ahead, you have to rise to it. You are competing against engineers who think they deserve to move up after twenty years of said coffee breaks. Regardless of which, they have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and the ownership is on you to achieve. Most graduates will never achieve this.
Also be aware that aerospace is cyclical. We have just come out of design phase and are ramping into the manufacturing stage. This stage will continue for another 10-15 years. Design bureaus all over the world are laying off designers. Stress engineers are being moved from design to concessions and manufacturing. This is an important decision for when you plan on graduating.
Regardless of the above, outside of academia, specialist subjects that many would consider interesting and complex - vibration analysis, aerodynamics, etc. are for senior engineers. They won't even consider someone under the age of 40 in that office.
I deviate - aerospace engineering in uni is the same as mechanical engineering. We study a lot of the same subjects and often you will find said mech (and biomedical) engineers in your lectures. It's not hugely difficult if you put your mind to it, but that goes for anything. 95% of what you learn in uni will not be used anyway.
aerospace jobs where youre on the floor all day are kind of a pain in the ass DESU
>>8067241
>We have just come out of design phase and are ramping into the manufacturing stage. This stage will continue for another 10-15 years.
Why? Don't they continually design new planes and stuff?
First year aeronautical engineering student here. I go to the 3rd best university in the region. Pretty sure it doesn't even make it to the top 100 universities worldwide. How fucked am I?
I just want to work on airplanes :(
> Getting an Aerospace Bachelors instead of a Mechanical Bachelors
Why would you do this
>>8067345
Not really. There are no plans for new A320s, 747s, 380s, etc. C-series is the last of the latest batch. Only military programs will be going ahead, and the majority of the big ones, eurofighter, f35, f22, ospreys, A400 are in production. You'll see new variants of all these, but not full scale design.
>>8067408
i know the chances of you having knowledge on this is minimal, but do you know how many engineers get jobs in area 51? what kinda stuff should i do in undergrad to prepare for getting a job there
working on experimental classified top secret military aircraft would be cool as fuck
>>8066813
it's shit you will spend countless hours staring at excel sheet and matlab trying to optimize some irrelevant part.
And you will cry yourself to sleep every night about how your company is being fucked by FAA.
Because of regulation that was passed in 2025 that requires to rigorously test every image loaded to FPGAs
Don't senpai.
>>8066849
You're also starting at 300k right?
Get the fuck outta here you fucking shmuck.
>>8067357
should've gone into power engineering. So few EEs go into power because muh digital circuits are cooler. There's no competition for those jobs at all. And you get to work on aircraft power systems (which are fucking dope).
>>8067416
you don't want to work at area 51. They design all the futuristic stealth shit for the CIA at Skunk Works.
>>8067416
Be an Natural American citizen
Get a security clearance.
The better labs (even in your school) get DoD contracts and this low level clearance could lead to others.
Have friends with clearances.
Join professional organizations and network.
ROTC can hurt
>>8067566
>make 6 figures
>design cutting edge technology
>have a ridiculously bloated research budget
>help country deal with upcoming threats to national security
Yeah sounds awful.
>>8067574
*can't
I blame autocorrect.
>>8067580
I'm not saying he doesn't want to work on badass spy planes, I'm saying they don't do that at area 51. They design and test all the CIA's spy shit at Skunk Works in Burbank, CA. At least that's where they designed a lot of crazy shit like the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the X-15 (actually all the X units), and the first stealth planes, among other crazy shit we don't even know about.
>>8067416
>how many engineers get jobs in area 51?
No, and if I did I wouldn't tell you either.
I work on mid size and up [civilian] experimental aircraft. It's frustrating at best, incredibly stressful and a political minefield. Anything can go wrong at any stage - an unchecked drawing, revised drawings not matching, wrong configuration on the aircraft, no parts for the aircraft, someone fucked up and put a hole in the aircraft - and you're accountable for all. I have at nearly all times operators beneath the floor, above the floor, heads in wings, behind bulkheads, everywhere I can fit them. It's gritty work and not the fantasy most people think it is.
Military? Even worse - especially if ITAR comes into it. Navigating access to a simple drawing can take months depending on who supplies it.
It's not cutting edge technology either. You will work on a small portion of the a/c and won't have access to all the sensitive items. If you work design, you won't deal much with materials, and materials won't deal with design. Manufacturing will deal with both, but only need to know how to work it. It's incredibly decentralized.
Not OP, but I'm interested in being an aerospace engineer too. What do you suggest I do besides majoring in Mechanical engineering, as in, what were the first jobs you did before your current one? Did you make connections with professors?
>>8067625
true. everything is on a need to know basis at that level of clearance
>>8067416
>area 51
working on the x-43 etc. would be cooler at this point. the military kind of tapered off groom lake ops after the clingons started settling and basically turned it into a district 9 dump.
>>8067206
>>8067216
you're both retarded. there are junior research engineering positions available to people who aren't accredited. also most engineering graduates aren't accredited. there's only one Professional Engineer for every hundred glorified technicians/cad monkeys. a physicist/mathematician would at least show foresight of utilizing various theories for solid state/condensed matter shit that most industrial sectors are fawning over for applications.
>>8066813
its easy. i got an aerospace engineering degree about a year ago and half the concepts are too difficult to turn into homework and tests. so all the aero stuff is applied to simple objects and everything is an estimate.
>>8067644
whichever major you choose, start working asap. wherever you work, experience matters
my jobs progressed the following
start college
grocery bagger (1yr)
warehouse picker (3 years)
Manufacturing intern (2 years)
graduate college
quality engineer (1 year)
>>8067836
thanks dude
bout tree fitty
>>8067812
What really pays is that PEng senpai
OP, just get your mech/aero engineering diploma, become a PEng (CEng in UK) and get an MBA from a good school and you'll win at life
>>8067563
>power engineering. So few EEs go into power because muh digital circuits are cooler
it's funny because you're more likely to rake 6 figures when you work as "power engineer" than as classical EE
>>8067078
It's a wind tunnel
>>8068562
i don't think so because it's hard as fuck
>>8066849
>implying mechanical engineering is at all difficult
It's MechE plus aerospace things, so the you're more likely to be hired than a plain MechE. Fluid mechanics are hard, tho.
>>8067596
>Skunk Works in Burbank, CA
skunkworks is in palmdale my man
>>8068707
It's really not. You deal with more three-phase signals because that's how we generate and transmit electricity. Most digital/computer engineers only ever deal with DC. Some of the Communications people do a lot with AC filtering, but they still deal with really low voltages (3.3, 5, 12 etc.). For power you need to understand Delta-Wye transforms, understand how a low pass filter works because you're always gonna be filtering out the high frequency noise and 60 Hz is low as fuck in the grand scheme of things. You should also understand some really basic power triangle stuff to figure out power factor correction. Generally the load that's drawing current from the power supply is highly inductive (motors are inductive, that's mostly what we use electricity for), so dropping a big capacitor bank to ground outside the factory (or whatever the load is) will correct the power factor and make everything more efficient. Hope that was helpful.
>>8069050
I stand corrected. It's in Palmdale out past Burbank on the North side of LA.
