First, an apology to Jason K. and the rest of the industrial design majors for leaving you guys out last week. I didn’t realize that was a major; I thought industrial design only served to provide engineers with humanities electives.
Now, onto the College of Engineering, because without it Georgia Tech would just be UGA-Atlanta.
Electrical Engineering: Electrical engineers all dream of becoming the next Nikola Tesla. While neither a death ray gun nor a time machine has yet to be successfully built, electrical engineers have produced the Hello Kitty Pop-Up Toaster (with removable crumb tray, six shade settings and a design that toasts Hello Kitty’s face on every bread slice), Extreme Tickle Me Elmo and Baby Alive Wets ‘N Wiggles Boy Doll (anatomically correct).
How’s that flux capacitor coming along, guys?
Mechanical Engineering: After successfully winning the egg drop competition in middle school, engineering-inclined students enroll in mechanical engineering at Tech, where, during a grueling four to five years, they spend approximately 2,700 hours staring at CAD drawings of air ducts and throw exactly zero egg parachutes out of fifth floor windows.
Mechanical engineers are considered the workhorses of the engineers—not because of their versatility—their dim, horse-like intellect doesn’t allow them to specialize in anything.
Computer Engineering: Design the next wave of Apple® products to keep all the iTards happy. Computer engineers are like electrical engineers with more computer science classes. Why anyone would want to spend more time with CS majors is beyond me.
Material Science Engineering: Instead of explaining what exactly it is these engineers do, I’m going to spend this section bitching about MSE 2001.
Why does every engineer have to take MSE 2001? Not even Jeopardy contestants need to know the names of the three thousand different phases of steel. Do the material science engineers really need to take a class in order to distinguish between polymers and metals?
Nuclear Engineering: Since the US hasn’t constructed a new nuclear plant in 11 years, nuclear engineers devote their time to devising Godzilla defense strategies.
Chemical Engineering: The difference between chemistry and chemical engineering is a roughly $20,000 starting salary gap in favor of the engineer, but it doesn’t matter to chemists because they can’t count that high anyway. Other than higher incomes, chemical engineers are identical to chemists except that chemical engineers are smarter, more attractive, live happier lives, will go on to marry better looking spouses, have more fulfilling careers, are more resistant to disease, have lower cholesterol levels and are generally better than chemists in every conceivable way. In reality, they are only plumbers using calculus.
Biomedical Engineering: RoboCop.
Aerospace Engineering: For thousands of years, things like heavy chunks of metal and human beings have remained safely on the ground.
Aerospace engineers do their best to see how long they can keep normally non-flight capable objects airborne before they come crashing back down. This is done through the study of “aerodynamics,“ which is a Latin term that means “dropping junk off a tall cliff.“ In the last century air travel has developed to the point that people can safely fly from one point to another so, naturally, aerospace engineers had to go and start launching things into outer space.
Polymer and Fiber Engineering: The science of carpet. Hard to believe something that exciting has trouble recruiting students, huh?
Civil Engineering: Design the nation’s infrastructure with toothpicks and Popsicle sticks, which explains why some of our bridges have a tendency to fall down.
While planned obsolescence has worked great as a business plan for the automotive industry, perhaps we should think of a more reliable solution for our nation’s buildings and bridges. Unfortunately, civil engineers are not able to understand simple mathematics, so the only thing they know about structural integrity is what they’ve learned from playing Jenga.
Industrial Engineering: Industrial engineers don’t do any actual engineering; they just run around fetching coffee while waiting to be promoted to CEO.
While most Tech students will go on to be engineers, the ones with severe mental defects will enroll in a professional degree program, and are here as either pre-med or pre-law students.
Pre-med: The standard pre-med track at Tech is to start out as a biomedical engineer, then fail and switch into biology, then fail biology and switch into STAC. Pre-meds that can’t hack it as STAC majors transfer to UGA to earn a degree in nursing.
Here’s a fun way to spend the afternoon: sit in the back of an organic chemistry lecture and watch the pre-meds struggle to answer even the simplest questions on chirality. You’ll never feel safe about a prescription from a doctor again.
Pre-law: Ever watch one of those documentaries where stomach parasites leech the life out of some helpless victim and thought to yourself, “Gee, I’d like to do that for a living“? Lawyers—the intestinal tape worms of society. Future lawyers are easy to identify because their over-achieving personalities cause them to constantly run for Student Government Positions. Future lousy lawyers can be found in the Resident Hall Association. After getting their law degrees, lawyers will spend the rest of their lives assigning a monetary value to every aspect of the human life.
Where’s a death ray gun when you need one?