Choosing your college is a big decision. So is choosing your major. We want to help you future engineers find your fit. Recently, we hosted Explore Engineering- a day devoted to giving prospective students a taste of specific majors at Engineering at Illinois.

Professor Toussaint kicked off the event with an inspiring speech about finding your career path, because even he didn’t know where his road led when he was an undergrad.

 

To help answer common questions about Engineering at Illinois, we asked some students to share what it’s really like. Hadiya Harris, Melanie Daugherty and Val Laguna led the student Q&A panel. Check out below for some of their standout responses.

 

Q&A

Q: How do you decide which major to pick in engineering?

A: “For me it was a matter of  deciding where I saw myself in the long run and from there picking what major actually fit that.” –Val

Q:How many hours a week do you study?

A: “Well it depends on the week; how much you do the first week versus before a test changes and it’s a fluctuating schedule. I was told that you should treat engineering like a job and put in 40 hours a week of studying, which sounds crazy but when you realize you have weekends, classes and a few hours every weekday, it’s not hard to knock out 40 hours a week.” –Melanie

” If you think about it you’re not working a 9-5 structured schedule, you can organize your time however you want. Also, one of the things that I’ve found is that all of my study groups are with friends at this point, so for me studying isn’t a miserable time, it’s more of a discussion than a struggle.” –Val

Q: How flexible are the engineering course loads in terms of taking electives outside of your major?

A: “There’s a lot of flexibility. I know that in Materials Science and Engineering  we have a set of concentrations-a choice of different materials to focus on- and within your concentration different options on classes you can take.  You have other requirements too, like the technical elective for example, which motivate you to take classes in a whole different engineering major.” –Melanie

” For industrial engineering we have something called track options, and mine is in economics and finance, but you can also create your own track options so within that you can take other classes that you wouldn’t ordinarily take.” –Hadiya

 

Q: What research opportunities are there on campus?

A: ” Getting involved with research on campus is pretty easy, professors are really flexible, they love having undergrads in their labs. If you have a class with a certain professor or know of one in your department doing really cool research, you can email them and say ‘hey I want to be a part of your lab, I see that you do x,y, and z, and I’m interested in doing that as a concentration or going to grad school for that.’ Usually you’re working on a real project, so you’re not just standing there cleaning test tubes the whole time. You do actual hands on research and can end up getting credit in research papers, which is great for a resume.”-Melanie

Q: What social activities are there for engineers?

A: “All the professional societies for engineering as well as others on campus have social events. I was the social coordinator for my society for a year (SWE) and it was my job to get members involved in fun things outside of engineering. Plus, both the University and College of Engineering hosts events open to everyone, like last night was salsa dancing night at the Illini Union. It’s an advantage of going to a big school that there’s always something to do. Also, I lived in a Living-Learning Community my freshman year, one specifically for math, science, and engineering, and we would have events like watching a movie, painting nails, etc. Also Krannert and State Farm Center (formerly the Assembly Hall) have a bunch of shows and events always going on, like Jim Gaffigan’s this month, and we have a Broadway series come every year.” – Val

” Also we’re a D1 school home of the Fighting Illini, so there’s always a game to go to, and you only need to pay for basketball and football.  Our women’s volleyball team is free and really good so a lot of people go to those games and other sports. Sometimes engineering can stress you out but there are tons of ways to have fun outside the classroom.” –Melanie