When I was in college, there was a clear progression of engineering majors. ChemE was considered the hardest. IE (Industrial Engineering) the easiest. (Well, actually there was also Packaging Engineering, but they never got any respect at all.) This was never based on anything factual of course. It was just common wisdom passed down from year to year. But pretty entrenched as far as that goes.
Is the order different at other schools? Or maybe the whole concept of an order was unique to the school I went to. (Doubtful!)
Not to limit this to just engineers, how about within other areas, like the sciences?
At Illinois there was a broad range. The harderst were considered to be any that were combined disciplines.
Aeronautical Engineering and Chemical Engineering were the hardest, followed by Mechanical and Civil, with others all bringing up the rear. Industrial, Materials Sciences, Nuclear, and General.
There’s also the Computer Engineers, Computer Sciences, and Electrical Engineers that fell in there bundled together, but they were always their own animal. These were more based upon your affinity for computer concepts, some thought they were teh easiest, other thought they were impossible. From a workload and competition standpoint I’d put them between the Aero/Chem and Mech/Civil teirs.
When I was at Purdue, Nuke Engineers were thought to have it the roughest while “InterDisciplinary Engineers” had the cushiest ride. As I understood it, IDEs took classes from all the engineering schools, but no depth in any of them. They were even mocked by the Industrial Engineers.
I majored in Aero - I’d say it was somewhat demanding.
Im going to have to go with Biochem as up there. At Va Tech, many people come hear thinking “I’ll be an engineer or a comp sci person” 70% of the people that start in those programs, dont end up with a degree in that program. I think they have the highest attrition rates, but I think its because somebody assumes because they can write an email they can do anything. Plus parents are pricks about forcing their kids down a path their not into (another story). So attritian rates IMO arent the best gague. Maybe if you could filter out those who werent cut out for it period from the bozos who know what their doing, you could get a rough gague from attrition.
At my university it was a case of if your department was based in a particular building you deserved any amount of respect and awe. The two departments were Electrical & Electronic Engineering and Chemical & Process Engineering.
I took ChemEng in Germany, and I remember being really jealous when we’d still be working in the labs (woithout Airco!) at 5:00 PM, while all the Architectural students from the building next to us would be spending their afternoons at the University’s swimming pool, checking out the Biology major babes. Even the Electrical Engineers didn’t seem to work as hard as we did.
At the University of Wisconsin, Chemical Engineering was generally accepted to be the hardest of the bunch. I started out on an engineering track there and I remember being presented bar graphs that showed that ChemE’s took the longest to graduate on average. I believe it took nearly seven years for a former roommate of mine to get his Bachlors in ChemE, but that included some semesters off for internships.
However as a Computer Science major (which is a Letters & Science degrees at Wisconsin, not engineering), I found that the EE/Computer Science double majors seemed to be the biggest gluttons for punishments.
ChemE and EE were considered the hardest at UVA. Interestingly, it was also common wisdom that ChemE girls were the second-hottest, right behind the systems engineering department. Coincidentally, sysE was afforded no respect whatsoever.
Ex-CS prof checking in. There has been a tremendous number of people thinking that getting a Computer Science degree is the easy road to riches. The overwhelming majority of people declaring themselves CS majors don’t even know how to program. (It’s like declaring yourself a Math major without knowing how to add.) Giving the large numbers and crappy backgrounds, many CS depts actively try to flush as many out as possible, preferably in the first 2 years. After all, what are you going to do with 1000 incoming students but room for only 400 majors total?
One place I taught at had as a goal a 50% flush rate in the first year and a 60% flush rate on top of that for the 1st 2nd year course.
I don’t know of any discipline that has ever done anything comparable. OTOH, what the students were being asked to do was in no way all that hard for true computer geeks. Just weeding out the posers and wannabes.
(Another fun factoid from my past: another place had 1 in 4 incoming frosh wanting to be CS majors. We didn’t have an undergrad CS degree.)
I majored in math and physics, but most of my friends were engineers. If I recall the pecking order correctly, EE and AE were considered the hardest, closely followed by Chem E, Mech E, and Petroleum Engineering. Civil and Industrial were at the bottom of the heap. Few of my friends could handle the mathematics and abstract thought required in math and physics, but I always thought that was more related to not wanting to waste time with things that weren’t “practical”. My course load was definitely easier than that for most of the engineers. Within the sciences, the perception was that math and physics were the hardest, followed by chemistry and biology. I don’t think most people ever considered sciences like geology. (For whatever reason, biology had way more women than the other sciences, with math a poor second.) Math requirements seemed to determine the orderings. Probably the reason biology was considered easier than chemistry was that biologists took and easier set of calculus courses, which weren’t designed to weed them out.
I think which major is harder is more related to particular talents than anything else. All of the engineers took a maximum course load, and most had to work hard. Is organic chemistry harder than analog to digital conversion? Oddly enough, Chem E’s seem to find the former easier, while EE’s found the latter.
That sounds consistent with my experience. FYI, I majored in math, but I would’ve had a double major in CS if it had been allowed. I wasn’t in the engineering school, so no dice.
The EE’s are usually out of the building by midnight-1am. Not that what they do makes any sence to my humble ChemE self, but my classmates and I put more time in, on average, I think.
They’re the only ones who come close though. So in my mind the pecking order goes: ChemE, EE, BioE, MatSci/Engineering Physics, CompE, MechE, Industrial/Civil/loser bridgebuilder engineering. (Please don’t kill me for that last one, my sister is thinking about doing “loser bridge building engineering” and I have to start teasing her about it now.)
At Penn State, 20+ years ago, all of the engineering schools attempted to flush out 50%-60% of the students. A number that was consistent with other large engineering departments. Mostly it was done through the introductory calculus classes. The CS department did not take those classes, if I remember correctly. Of course, back then, hardly anyone showed up having written a program.
I will say, as a professional programmer and former physicist, that physics is harder. Much of programming involves figuring out what some other bonehead did. Physicis involves figuring out what God did.
Things are still pretty much this way. IE’s (Industrial Engineers) are called “Imaginary Engineers.” I’m in Biomedical Engineering, which sounds scary. However, I get the impression that it’s thought to be a relatively wimpy type of engineering.
As a former computer science major, I can say that this process definitely works. After a semester of struggling with Assembly language (and three semesters before that of struggling with/hating Java), my professor decided that I couldn’t “think like a programmer,” and said so one morning when I went to him for help on some study guide questions. I changed my major that afternoon.
Anyway…for my university, ranking from hardest to easiest:
Nuclear/Aerospace E.
Chemical E.
EE/CS/CE
Mechanical E.
Physics/Mathematics
Biological/Agricultural E.
Textile E.
Industrial/Civil E.
