How did I pick my engineering major?

this video was sponsored by Wix a platform that makes it possible for anyone to build their own unique website for free now when it comes to all the typical subjects we learned in school whether it be math history English science and so on math and science were definitely the ones I excel at the most by the time I was a sophomore in high school I took my first calculus class which was calculus a B my junior year I took the second calculus course or calculus BC and by my senior year my school didn't offer any more math classes besides AP Stat which I really didn't want to take so I went to a community college and took multivariable calculus and then differential equations because I really enjoyed math and did not want to take a whole year off since I know I'd be studying a STEM related subject in college but also during my junior I took AP Physics II which was my first ever physics class that I really enjoyed and had a big influence of what I ended up studying now for anyone who doesn't know what that is AP Physics C is a calculus based physics class as opposed to the other AP physics class at my high school which was algebra based but I also took that class during my senior just because I wanted to and honestly that was all the STEM related experience I had before going into college I had never built a circuit before I had never written a program I'd never worked on cars nothing like that so for anyone who has virtually no hands-on experience before going into a STEM related college major I hope this at least gives you some motivation because when I was growing up there wasn't anything specific I knew I wanted to do in terms of a career I was always just focused on getting good grades at school because that's why I was told to do and so that's why I took subjects such as calculus and physics as early as possible because I knew I want to do something STEM related but specifically I had no idea so I never looked for extracurriculars to work on or hands-on projects outside of anything that was required in my classes so when I was a junior it was quite intimidating when my mom told me you know you need to start thinking about what you want to study in college and what you want to do for the rest of your life when I really had no idea it was something I had never thought of and I even told her I was like mom you know I like math and physics and that's it I have no clue what I can do with those and I didn't really want to be a teacher so I kind of ruled out math and physics even though I learned while making this channel honestly that's not even remotely all you can do with those degrees so my mom who's a film major by the way told me well there's engineering because that's kind of a combination of math and actually design stuff I said okay that sounds interesting what types are there and she said well I know there's civil because that's what my grandpa used to do and I said okay I'll look into that and I did some Google searches and it seemed pretty interesting to me and I said okay maybe I'll do that just as kind of a way to put it off till later because I really didn't wanna do that much searching at that time but during spring break of my junior year I ended up going on a bunch of college tours and why was that Cal Poly San Luis Obispo which was the school I would end up going to I didn't realize it at the time I went on an engineering tour which was specifically made to take you through all the engineering buildings show you all the labs and more of that because cowboy is a pretty big engineering school during that tour I I learned a lot I learned about engineering disciplines I've never heard of like Industrial Engineering I got to see cool labs like a wind tunnel for the aerospace engineers and I learned about a few majors that did not interest me civil being one of them after I got the tour of the civil engineering lab I think it was like their concrete design lab it just didn't seem like it was right for me so I said you know that's probably not something I would do for the rest of my life so I kind of cross it off my list of majors I would possibly get into but I had a few that I really was considering after going on that tour the main ones were Electrical Engineering mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering and from there it was all just me doing research on my own to figure out which one I kind of wanted to do more the first one I ruled that was aerospace engineering because at least to me it seemed too specific and I wanted to get into a major that could apply to a wide range of applications and I'm not saying aerospace doesn't apply to a wide range of things I'm just saying this was my mindset when I was in high school making this decision then there was a lot of back-and-forth between electrical and mechanical engineering and I was looking at the curriculum for a lot of the colleges I wanted to go to I was looking at Senior Projects I checked out careers and salaries and everything I could possibly imagine but I ended up picking Electrical Engineering and I think one of the big factors was that I had just taken the electricity and magnetism portion of AP Physics II which I really enjoyed I enjoyed the circuits the derivations seeing how calculus can be applied to all these things that we can't even physically see but while I was doing my research I saw that electrical engineering and mechanical and a bunch of others are just one specific field and they have a lot of subfields beneath them so for example electrical I saw wireless communications controls electronics power and so on then mechanical had HVAC mechatronics manufacturing and more and while comparing the two I noticed there were more subfields that interested me in the electrical engineering branch rather than mechanical engineering so it was pretty close but after a lot of thought I said you know I think Electrical Engineering will be the better choice for me now for a lot of colleges at least in the u.s. you don't have to pick your major before applying but for the one school I really wanted to go to which was Cal Poly SLO they required you to have a major declared on your application when you applied so that's why I really had to kind of rush to figure out what I wanted to do but I put electrical engineering down and that is what I ended up graduating with when thinking back I realized there is so much that I did not know when I was making this decision and that's a big reason why I made this channel because I don't want people going into a new career or to a college major or whatever without being fairly well prepared for what they're about to get into but after you finally pick your college major it does not stop there because even while you're in college you often get to pick a concentration you're gonna pick which companies you want to work for what kind of internships you want extra projects and so on and there's a wide range of things you can get into like for example I really thought I was gonna concentrate in Power Engineering which was one of the subfields of electrical but then I took my first Power Engineering class and realized I didn't totally love it in fact I was just having this conversation with my sister who's a fourth year mechanical engineering student right now and she said there's a few classes she just doesn't enjoy and I said you know that's totally normal it was the same with me because for undergrad for pretty much any major you take a broad range of classes as an electrical engineer I took signals I took controls into power systems electronics and so on and there were just some I didn't enjoy in fact it was during my second year that I take my micro processor design class and it was one of my least favorite classes of all time and I thought I was going to love it for those who know this is the first time I learned assembly language and it's also the first time I failed a really big exam I think on the first one I got like a 45 or 50 percent and it was because nothing really clicked with me I didn't want to learn the material I just wanted the class honestly to be over so for anyone who's not liking certain classes in their major I'm at least here to tell you that is normal or it was for me I mean you do need to like some of them or a good out of them but it's okay to not enjoy certain classes within whatever field you're studying then during my first two years I was really doing the same thing I was in high school and focusing on schoolwork and grades and not seeking out extracurriculars and hands-on projects which I do regret but cowboys are really hands on school so I got to work on a lot of cool projects and learn a lot of equipment but at the time my resume definitely would not have look any different than anyone else at that school it was during my third year though that I really wanted to change that so I ended up applying to CubeSat which was a club at the school that made small satellites that would go into space which looked really interesting to me but during my interview there they told me that if I was brought on because it wasn't a guarantee that my job would be debugging one the chips that had to go on the satellites and they showed it to me and said would you be able to handle this out loud I said yeah no problem but in my head I was thinking dude in my hands this thing will be broken so much faster than it's ever fixed that's because I've never done something like that before I never worked with a circuit chip like that I never debug something like that and I was about to in my electronics class coming but I didn't know that at the time in fact after that interview I really feel like I didn't have much to offer to any engineering company or extracurricular club or anything like that because I didn't have the hands-on experience that I thought I would by that point I mean I was doing stuff in my required classes yes but those were all designed for that class specifically and what we were learning at the time so when you hand me something that was for a random project outside of my required classes I really didn't know what to do with those but finally during my third year I took a bunch of classes that made me feel more like a real engineer especially if my electronics and microcontroller classes because I worked on projects that actually had real-world applications I also finally got my first offer for an internship after applying like a hundred companies and not hearing back from any of them I got an offer at HP or hewlett-packard and during that interview by the way for anyone who's going to have an interview anytime soon it was basically a bunch of technical questions about microcontrollers that I had no clue how to answer pretty much the whole interview was him asking me a question and then me saying umm I don't know how to answer that I've even said in a previous video that if you're asked a technical question during an interview you shouldn't just say I don't know you should say I don't know but and then kind of talk your way through the problem explain your reasoning because I'm not always concerned with you getting the right answer they just want to see how you think about the problem but for the ones they were asking me which I don't really remember that well I had no clue what they were even talking about so most of it was me just saying I'm sorry I don't know surprisingly I did get the job offer and maybe for anyone who has had a bad interview recently this might give you some hope but I really enjoy that internship because I got a lot of hands-on experience and I got to learn a lot about how big companies operate plus it gave me a lot of confidence going into my final year school the internship itself was a ten week long project where I got to work with a wireless handheld printing device but I've done an entire video on that if you want more information then during my fourth year I got to work on a senior project that was funded by Northrop Grumman where I work with a group of people all in different majors and we got to make a UAV sense and avoid system which was something I really wanted to be working on because after taking a bunch of classes in college I realized that wireless communications was definitely the concentration that suited me best it was really doing my fourth year that I got to work on some of my favorite projects and that combined with my internship really made me feel more confident as an engineering student that I could be of use to a company when I went out into the real world then during my fourth year I also applied to about a hundred job positions and got three offers so I'd finally secured a position for after I graduated I have a full video on the job offers I got and what I did during that first job and why I quit that first job also on the channel so again I'll link those below for anyone who wants more information but overall that's a pretty good summary of what it was like for me going from high school to college to my career and people have asked me before do I regret the major that I picked and honestly not really I do want to go back to school and it will not be for engineering most likely will be for something applied math related and maybe I could kind of combine the two but again after doing even more research especially for this channel I realized something applied math related is definitely gonna be the best path for me and as you guys could tell I definitely did not have the most impressive resume or anything but I think things worked out pretty well and for those who may be having trouble figuring out what they want to major in hopefully you can see at least for me even though I was able to figure out what I wanted to study it definitely was not a quick process and definitely was not an easy one so if that's the same for you you are definitely not alone but I'm just about done but before I end this I want to thank wicks for sponsoring this video one thing I've talked about in another was held during my first job I actually tried building a business on the side and how during that time I taught myself how to write an HTML CSS PHP and JavaScript so I could build a website and let me tell you that took a lot of time that could have easily been saved with Wix anyone can build their own website for free and no programming experience is required you can start a blog online store a personalized portfolio for business purposes and really anything else you can think of in fact without spending any money let me show you how easy it is to get your website up let's say I want to make a blog to go along with this channel that's of course educational and meant for students I can pick the type of blog I want and after putting in some additional information you get to pick from tons of layouts that offer just the right feel for your site and once you're set up everything is very customizable so it's very easy to edit titles and pictures that give your site the personal touch that you want they actually put this as the default but honestly I think I'll keep it then if I want to maybe make some money on the side by offering some online tutoring it's literally two clicks away I can then design a pricing plan that fits my needs and make the page look exactly how I want a lot of what you'll need is even built into their default settings then buying a domain linking any payment methods creating customized email addresses and everything else you could need is all available on Wiggs if you're trying to go really professional you can even upgrade to a premium plan which is used by professional developers to save time so they can focus on more important business matters to get started right now you can click the link in the description and join over 100 million people who have used Wix to create their own amazing website and with that I'm going to end that video there did you guys enjoy be sure to LIKE and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter and join the main Facebook group for updates on everything hit that bell if you're not being notified I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Zach Star

Views: 135,995

Keywords: majorprep, major prep, how i picked my college major, college major, picking a college major, my college major, major in engineering, engineering major, college engineering, engineering career, why i picked engineering, engineering majors, how to pick a college major, how to pick an engineering major

Id: klrp7pU5o4M

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019