It is not a significant asset to know a programming language. It is a significant asset to know how to program. Don’t confuse the two: If you know how to program, then you can pick up the essentials of any programming language you might need very easily. But if you don’t know how to program, no number of programming languages will help you.
I’m an EE by training (but I’m working in statistical analysis-oh the paths our lives take when you’re not paying attention 
)and it’s incredibly formula driven. EEs frequently don’t ‘see’ the results of our work in the same way that say Mechies do. You’re not really ‘seeing’ an electromagnetic field. You know it exists. You can measure it, but frequently what you’re doing is relying on the calculations to tell you what it should be and going from there or sometimes you’re seeing the results of what is happening, but not really seeing what’s actually causing any of it. In my opinion, EE is less intuitive than Mechanical or Civil (though they might disagree with me.) A resistor is of a certain resistance because someone told you that it was and it looks like every other resistor in the box only with some different colors on it. A lot of components are similarly just black boxes. You can certainly measure them to see what they are and what they do, but the measurements just come back as numbers. A 1 ohm resistor is a 1 ohm resistor and that is a valuable thing to know, but I’m not sure that it’s an intuitive thing to understand. When you’re designing a motor, you’re not really seeing what’s happening the same way that you do with say an Internal Combustion Engine (you cause a microexplosion which pushes against a piston.) You’re wrapping wire and sending a current through it and it ‘magically’ moves. You may know (or hopefully know if you’re an EE) that it’s creating a magnetic field which is pushing against another magnetic field, but it’s not something that you really observe. You calculate it - which is essentially just running formulas.
That said, if you’re bad at physics, being an EE is probably not for you. If you’re bad at math, then being an EE is definitely not for you. Math is really where it’s at for EEs. If you’re uncomfortable with basic calculus, you’re not going to stand a chance when it’s advanced calculus and rest assured, you’ll be using it in every single class for four years, so muddling through Calc 4 for a grade ain’t gonna cut it.
I have a dual degree in Computer Engineering and it’s a little better for people scared of physics. There are doping levels and signals analysis that get math and physics heavy, but a lot of it is dealing with logic where you’re not really creating -as an example - npn transistors, but using them to produce outcomes.
I’m a civil engineer and I don’t have the formulas memorized – that’s why we have books. But you do need to know how the formulas are used and when to apply them.
The key, I think, is you need to clarify to yourself what type of engineer you want to be. Not all engineering is spent with formulas and tables cranking out page after page of calculations.
I used to design highways. I did a lot of drafting and designing to the limits proscribed in our design manuals. There was no new design concepts which required a lot of calculations and research – it was all done on the manuals we used.
I’ve never had to use Calculus, and really, until I got into my current position I wasn’t even using physics. Statics, dynamics, circuit design, geotech… all classes I had to take, and all classes I’ve never had to use. Hell, the last time I used most of the stuff I learned in college was for the PE exam.
Now, there are areas of engineering where you are going to be dealing with those concepts, and need to have a good grasp of the principles. Thankfully, there is a wide range of engineering fields out there, even under the label of a civil engineer.
You need to determine what you like doing, and see how you would fit into that. You don’t want to hate the background material, get into the field anyway, and discover 10 years later you hate everything about your job.
My college offered a “Shadow an Engineer” day. For a week, students would visit various engineering firms and see just what they did for a day. It helps give students a better idea of where their degree can lead, and helps shape what you want to do. Try and get a summer job with a firm, or even a public works agency, and learn what they do. Even short unpaid internships can be helpful. You may find that yes, you can see a career in engineering even with your own difficulties, or it may clarify that this world isn’t for you.
I don’t want this to seem like a hijack, but I can’t miss the opportunity to toss in a comment re this timely thread.
I am not an engineer. Last Saturday evening, I spent about five hours with six accident reconstruction engineers (MSMEs, PEs, and even a PhD). We were checking in-cab camera systems by simulating vehicle traffic in a large truck depot.
When I showed up, the first thing they asked me was, “Do you happen to have a notebook or pad?” Of course, I did, but nobody else had thought about bringing one. Next, they couldn’t figure out how to hold a cardboard target with test lines and colors in place. I happened to have a portable dry erase board in my car (I teach classes every so often), so we used that and it was ideal as a support. Again, it never occurred to any of them that we would need to put it up in a fixed location. Turns out that I was the only one to bring a camera tripod, a power source to recharge their equipment, pens, bottled water (it was hot and sunny in the lot), and a good-quality DSLR camera. They also hadn’t figured out how to test the reliability of the timing on the cameras. I had a laptop with a (free) stop-watch display application that worked great for this purpose. We just placed it on the hood of the truck.
They are great people and I really like working with them, but I plan my trips to the grocery store better than they planned this testing session.
(My apologies to all engineers who DO plan better for such things.)
If you decide to get an engineering degree, the odds are actually quite slim that you’ll ever need to use anything that you learned in your undergraduate physics coursework for your job, ever.
Same goes for calculus and nearly all of the other subjects you studied as well.
It’s good to hear from a STEMy person that not everyone started life as a wiz. While raw talent is, of course, important in some fields, I do think many people with cultivatible maths/sciences aptitude are stopped from succeeding by really poor teaching and weeding practices.
It goes the other way as well. A stereotype amongst humanities academia is that engineers are poor writers; the stereotype exists because it is often true. I’ve long lobbied to offer undergrad comp-lit courses geared toward engineering majors – I think teaching writing skills in a manner that engages “engineering think” could work. (An aside: roughly 75% of serious plagiarism cases I’ve had to report are students majoring in engineering. I’ve fairly good ideas why this is, but will cease further highjacking).
Academics themselves propagate deep divides. STEM professors think their humanities counterparts work in imaginary fields; Humanities views STEMmers as having no intellectual imagination. These are silly and damaging binary attitudes that get handed down to our students.
At any rate, in addition to teaching I now handle learning standard assessment and statistical reporting to state and Federal accreditors. I’m really good at it despite failing college stats twice. 8 )
I have to disagree. You may not need to recall how to do integrals by hand, but the concepts taught in those classes are vital for most fields of engineering.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Engineering, all types, is basically applied math and science. Physics is pretty much the basic, baseline course in using math and science concepts and applying them to “solve” things. If you want to be an engineer, I highly suggest you learn to love physics, or at least become competent in it.
So did the engineers who built the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I’m thinking. LOL
What physics do you actually use at work? What calculus problems do you solve? Which differential equations? What thermodynamics?
Engineers typically use commercial software to design things, not formulas from college textbooks.
Now this is strange. I know most engineering problems can be solved by simple algebra and a handful of constants. But challenging the need for physics and more advanced math? What commercial software will you tap to tell you how much rock ballast you need to dump into a collapsed drain tunnel in order to keep river water from flowing into people’s basements?
What program will tell you the fastest way to block a breach in the dam?
St. Patrick, save us from the ‘engineers’ who rely upon “commercial software” to do their thinking for them.
Analysis codes can do some very impressive simulations of problems far too complex for hand calculation, but they require correct inputs and critical assessment of results to be validated, and that often mean running and assessing test cases against basic scientific and engineering principles to assure that we are getting reasonable results. The people who rely on “commercial software” to give them unquestionably correct results without validation are begging for failure. And yes, I’ve used calculus, differential equations, and fundamental thermodynamics in work. That these were all done with the aid of simulation tools (Matlab/Simulink and Python/NumPy/SciPy) does not excuse me from understanding how the underlying code works, and what assumptions and limitations it has in producing accurate results.
Stranger
Not just that, but you need a very intuitive understanding of physics to know how to apply that algebra and constants. The math isn’t the hard part. The hard part is reducing the engineering problem down to a physics problem (i.e. knowing what laws are applicable and how), and then reducing that down to a math problem.
Naval engineers design, build, and maintain the ships. As far as I know a ship’s captain is another entirely different line of work, but I am always open to being corrected by those in the know.
Maybe the engineer gets to act as captain while the captain and first officer beam down to the planet?
Responding to the bolded bit. I agree. The physics of electricity were completely unintuitive to me. My vague remembrance of the electricity portion of my physics course is mostly struggling to understand the right hand rule. Which, I reiterate, is so much bullshit.
As a chemical engineer, our professors gave us some strategy for taking the Fundamentals Exam for engineering, which includes questions from the entire range of engineering fields. When we got to an electrical question, it’s anything more complicated than V=IR, pick an answer and move on. Our time would be better spent thinking about literally any other field of engineering. My EE friends got the same advice about any chemistry questions. Neither field is one you have a good chance of guessing at without a decent background.
Oddly enough, I use government developed software more than commercial packages. Which brings me to another quirk of the field: the computer language I encounter most is FORTRAN. Java is a very distant second. You won’t know which languages you might encounter in college, so developing an understanding of how computer languages work is more important than learning a language. Even then, Java and FORTRAN are very different beasts.
Engineer without physics? Drive a train.
See, that’s the part that I’d like OP to return to discuss. I’m reasonably convinced at this point that he has a ship’s engineer confused with a naval engineer and is all wrapped around the axle about nothing.
Of course you need to know physics. Take Patch’s example of designing highways, for instance. His design manual probably included a table for how much bank angle to put in for a turn of a given radius of curvature at a given speed. OK, so you see what the speed limit is in the state you’re working in, you measure the radius of curvature, and you find your bank angle, no problem.
Except that now the state legislature goes and increases all the speed limits, and when your book was published, the highest speed limits were 65, so all the tables go up to 75, but now you have to find the bank for an 85 MPH road. Did the manual include a formula for you, too? Even if they did, you have to understand the formula well enough to be able to use it, and if they didn’t, you have to re-derive it.
Except also, this isn’t a section of freeway you’re designing; this is an entrance ramp. Different cars will accelerate at different rates, so now you need your curve to accommodate a range of speeds. Which means you need to know the friction between the tires and the road, under the worst conditions.
And maybe the curvature and range of possible speeds are such that there is no one safe bank angle: In low-friction conditions like a rainstorm, maybe the slow cars are sliding out of control inward, while the fast cars are sliding out of control outward. So now you’ve got to make some other change to the design. Increasing the radius of curvature? That might work, but now you’ve got to consider the price of land there, which you’re definitely not going to find in your printed tables in your manual. Or maybe there’s something you can do to the roadway surface that will increase friction: How much will that cost, compared to the cost of buying more land? How well will it hold up: Will it need to be re-surfaced every year to continue to work?
And let’s say that you want to mitigate the increased cost of the larger-radius ramp. You could look into ways to use that circle of land inside the ramp, so it’s not a complete waste. And you could also notice that, while speeds vary, people are still going to be going faster on the freeway end than on the street end, and design it with a varying radius of curvature. Now you’re definitely going to be using calculus.