Like every year, the Entrance exams of Engineering will start from April (next year). As a father of an aspiring student, the question of choosing the correct branch of engineering becomes utmost important.
My son likes Physics and Maths (Physics being the most favourite). His personal choice is electronics. But while going through prospectus of some colleges I found there are number of branches which are new and not known to me about their prospects and scopes.
As an example, the branches related to Electronics are:
- Electrical & Electronics Engineering
- Electronics & Communication Engineering
- Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering
- Instrumentation & Control engineering
- Mechatronics
- NanoTechnology
In addition there are:
- Computer Science & Engineering
- Information Technology
- Information & Telecommunication Engineering
My son has not taken IT/ Computer Science as 4th subject, so probably the last three branches will not be relevant for him.
As this esteemed forum has memebers from various fields with contemporary knowledges, can you please suggest which branches will be worth for my son?
Regards
Speaking from personal experience, I would make the following observations:
- It would be worthwhile finding out why your son likes physics to begin with (which was my favourite subject as well) as well as maths. If he likes the solving abstract problems in a structured way, computer engineering is the way to go. If he likes the way physics models and explains the real world, a more "concrete" branch like mechanical might actually be more to his liking. If he likes both aspects, electrical or electronic engineering might be more his cup of tea.
- If he is undecided which unfortunately is the case with most Indian students, I would strongly suggest focusing on the college much more than the course. A college and the quality of one's peer group in college plays an irrationally large part in helping us become what we eventually become. Due to the pathetic nature of our high school education system of "rote learning" rather than experiential learning, our 4 years in engineering college becomes our period of discovery. Most students actually end up developing a more confident viewpoint about what they like/dislike only at the end of their college tenure (if they're lucky). Here, a good college and a good peer group plays the single most important role in helping develop these viewpoints. Or to put it another way, if you are forced to choose, a bad course in a good college is far far better than a good course in a bad college. The probability of getting sidetracked or sucked into the useless and pointless sh*t that happens in bad colleges is extremely high. Most good students in bad colleges just want to survive the four years.
- A good college also helps tremendously in going to the US for a graduate program.
- If your son really doesn't have a strong opinion (physics/maths is too generic), you might as well go for a course that has the best job prospects and the best chances of going to the US for education or for work. This would clearly be computer engineering with electronics probably coming second. I reiterate the US angle only for one practical reason - a US citizenship allows one to become a truly global citizen and live/work/travel in any country including India. An Indian citizenship and education degree on the other hand curtails one's ability and independence. Note that where one decides to work and settle down are personal choices, I'm only talking about the *ability* to make those choices.
By the way, computer engineering also has a significant overlap with electronics, and a computer engineer can easily choose to get into hardware (I mean chip/system design, not computer maintenance) instead of software. The same is not true for electronics or other branches. They don't teach enough about programming which is why you often see people from non-computer branches often complete their engineering, work for a couple of years in a factory, get dissatisfied, spend a year in computer training and join back as an entry level programmer in a software company. I've also seen, for what it is worth, that most non-computer engineering students have this big mental block in college about programming and often have an irrational level of fear of programming. The same is not true the other way around. My theory on this is that computer science is truly abstract (like calculus) and most abstract subjects scare people very easily because they cannot develop a strong mental model or mental correlation as they cannot readily see physical equivalents. This is also why the more abstract the subject, the better the job prospects usually are. The flip side is that abstract subjects become increasingly harder to grasp and learn in life as we grow older. Truly learning computer science after finishing college and when one has started working is extremely hard. For this reason alone, I suggest computer science at the undergrad level and not any other course.
Your son also doesn't need to know programming beforehand, that is what the course teaches. He probably doesn't know how to design a circuit or build a bridge either.
The other newer courses are mish-mash, they will probably interchange a few subjects here and there, mostly in 3rd and 4th year, and call it another name. Information Technology will be more software and less hardware so will not allow one to move into a hardware (chip) design job. I would avoid mechatronics and nanotechnology as this is too much specialization this early on - this level of specialization should be done at the graduate level, not at the undergrad level.
Finally, if you are looking at monetary aspects of one's career, the field of finance is the way to go. If we spend the waking hours of our entire life in the sole pursuit of making money, what better professional than money itself? Although money has next to zero overlap level with engineering, computer engineering is probably the closest, because both fields (in their modern day avatar) are highly abstract and learning one helps one become better prepared for the other. Most modern day financial models, financial tools, and even trading decisions are implemented as computer programs anyway. There are some interesting graduate courses offered today in the field of finance such as
financial engineering that have a heavy overlap between finance and computer programming.
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