Originally Posted by
Cubdriver
Not to thread drift here, but if you haven't had a position somewhere as an aerospace engineer you don't have a clue how different the real experience is from the school experience. It's far easier and simpler than they will tell you in AE school.
Perhaps 85% of real aerospace engineering work is so simple a good high school student could do it. College is academically challenging and the equations fly faster than a jet sometimes, but routine engineering is the other way around. It is good to know how the math works, but at the design and performance evaluation level you can get by with some calculus, trig, a little bit of linear algebra and a 5 dollar calculator.
That doesn't mean that routine engineering work isn't boring at times. But if you don't like finding eigenvalues or working flight dynamics equations is no reason to avoid a job in this occupation. There is an immense amount of CAD modeling. They usually do not teach CAD in college and I had to pick up Catia V5 in my spare time when I was a student.
The summer internships were enough to see what day to day life was. My uncle also works as an engineer for a company that handles a lot government military projects and he can't wait to get out of it either.
There is complex math in normal AE work. Granted most math is given and the formulas are almost always the same whatever project it is. A lot of it (from my short experience in the work side) would be just your understanding of physics, chemistry, fluids, thermo, etc applied to whatever you are doing.
I'm just saying that compared to flying, engineering is boring in my opinion.. the only reason I did the degree was to get better handle how an airplane flies.... most of which you can read in a few good books (some books are just wrong in descriptions)...whatever...just rather be flying.