Engineering is a complex and fascinating field.
Engineers use math and physics to solve problems in our everyday lives.
There are tens of different specializations in engineering.
You can pick between many engineering majors.
In that case, you’d do well by picking a major in civil engineering.
Or maybe you want to design software, in that case, you should pick a major in software engineering.
In this article, you are going to learn which engineering majors are the hardest, and why they are so hard.
Don’t just pick a major because you think it’s easy or not.
You could pick the easiest major in the world and fail because you don’t care about the subject.
You can complete a hard program even as a mediocre student if you put in the required effort.
What Makes a Major Harder than Others?
But there are objective factors we can analyze to decide which majors are harder than others.
There are also factors that aren’t 100% objective, but give us great insight on how hard the major is.
For example, how many people actually graduate from each major.
With abstraction we are referring to things that aren’t grasped naturally by our brains.
Advanced math and physics are usually the courses that prove to be the most challenging for aspiring engineers.
There’s a lot to learn, and it’s something most people don’t understand at all.
When picking the hardest majors, we analyzed how many courses deal with abstract concepts.
Generally, the more advanced math and physics courses are required, the more difficult the major will be.
Another thing with abstraction is that you can’t easily visualize what will happen when you work.
Take something a bit easier like civil engineering: you know how your project will turn out through your inputs.
Now consider an electrical engineer.
You’ll have to rely on your theoretical knowledge and a lot of creative thinking to solve problems as an electrical engineer.
This is partially related to the above point about levels of abstraction.
The materials and environments you are going to work with impact how hard your job will be.
I’ll take the civil engineering example again to explain what I mean.
A civil engineer works for the most part with common materials.
Now consider a chemical engineer.
Your mind might conjure up the image of a mad scientist creating a hellish mixture amidst fuming alembics.
Or maybe you might think about an extremely popular TV series about a certain chemistry professor using his chemical knowledge to cook meth.
Mixing chemical elements like that requires a lot of knowledge about advanced math and chemistry.
It’s way more complex than figuring out how to build a house.
Where the Work will be Used
Where the Work will be Used
Let’s mix things up, civil engineering is overused.
It’s not easy to be a good environmental engineer, but they are dealing with known quantities.
They know what happens with pollution or waste disposal, and they have a general idea about what to do to improve the situation.
Now compare them with an aerospace engineer.
Flying rockets in space is cool, but you can imagine it’s something infinitely more complex than what an environmental engineer is dealing with.
Space is completely different from the earth, and physics get even harder when the atmosphere starts thinning (or is completely absent).
It’s an objective fact.
If you don’t care about the engineering major you picked, you are going to struggle completing it.
But for most people out there, making this kind of choice isn’t as easy.
Pick a major that interests you.
If you are passionate about the course material, you’ll do fine.
Pick a field you hate, and you’re going to hate every day of your life while you study.
The 5 Hardest Engineering Major
Making this list was hard.
It’s not that there are no hard engineering majors, it’s that they are all pretty damn hard.
Even those perceived as easiest by the general public will still challenge anyone who enrolls in them.
All of these majors are extremely hard.
They require hard work and dedication.
Most people agree that electrical engineering is easily among the hardest majors.
Electrical engineers deal with a lot of abstract concepts, and electricity in itself is not something we understand in a natural way.
This major prepares you with extremely advanced math and physics courses.
You’ll also require creative thinking to succeed in the field.
What makes EE so hard is its level of abstraction.
You don’t really see electricity, and you can’t easily visualize what’s going to happen through your inputs.
You don’t see magnetic fields and how they react, you can’t see radio signals, and you can’t see how electricity travels through cables.
You have to learn these things on a theoretical level, and then apply that knowledge to your work.
If you want, you can go even deeper, and specialize in a subcategory of electrical engineering, like radio-frequency engineering.
One thing is certain: electrical engineering is a complex topic, and it’ll take a lot of hard work and study to get a degree.
But it’s worth it if you have an interest in the field.
Electrical engineers are sought after, and with electricity becoming the world’s biggest energy source, you can expect the demand to go up in the future.
Computer engineering is related to electrical engineering, but it focuses on developing computer hardware and software and make sure they communicate correctly.
Personal computers are only a part of what a computer engineer works on.
You might work on exciting projects such as creating computer circuitry, motherboards, or processors.
Or maybe you might even work on supercomputers.
That’s the kind of projects you can work on with a computer engineering degree.
But hardware is only part of what you can do as a computer engineer.
You also create firmware and software for computers and other electronics.
You make sure what you create works in the intended way.
This major is hard because it requires excellent math knowledge, and also a knack for working with computers and electrical components.
Aerospace engineers specialize in creating stuff that flies.
The more advanced ones concern themselves with making things that go into space (and that hopefully come back intact).
The potential is there, but of course you can choose not to work with a military organization if you don’t like war.
What makes aerospace engineering so hard?
The vast amount of information you must know to perform your job.
You’ll see this point applying to every major on this list.
There is a lot of stuff to know, and most of it is obscure and complex for our brain to grasp.
As an aerospace engineer, you’ll learn a lot about how fluids interact with certain materials.
Chemical engineering might be the hardest major on this list, purely because it combines engineering’s most complex knowledge with chemistry.
Chemistry is a vast field.
We suggest specializing in a category that interests you.
Perhaps you want to work on developing new medicine, then you should focus on pharmaceuticals.
If that’s the case, you could specialize in plastic and other materials.
Chemical engineers will become more important in the food industry, especially with things like vegan burgers entering the mainstream.
Chemical engineers make a huge impact on our everyday lives, and they’ll become progressively more essential with time.
What makes chemical engineering hard is the combination of abstraction and theoretical knowledge required to perform your job.
You need a strong grasp on the typical engineering fundamentals such as math and physics, and compound them with chemistry.
Biomedical engineers are a weird mix of engineer and medic.
They specialize in biology and how to create stuff that cures patients.
When you see those weird machines in hospitals that save so many lives, they are the work of a biomedical engineer.
You can imagine how complicated making that stuff is.
But biomedical engineers also design things like artificial limbs and organs.
They are extremely important because they save lives and improve them greatly.
Biomedical engineering is hard because you are mixing complex math with biology.
You’re also creating something that seems to defy the laws of nature.
You need to know how the human body works, and what happens when it doesn’t.
You must then design systems that get it back to working normally.
It’s even harder, because you are working directly with humans.
Getting things wrong as a chemical engineer is no biggie (unless you blow up your laboratory, but that’s another story).
But you can’t make mistakes as a biomedical engineer designing an artificial organ.
Much like chemical engineers, biomedical engineering is hard precisely because you are studying so many different things together.
It’s not as focused as, say, an electrical engineering degree.
You’ll be more of a jack-of-all-trades, since you must take classes on many different engineering topics.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects biomedical engineers and bioengineers’ employment to grow by 5% in the next 10 years, the highest value on this list.
The other majors on this list have a three or four percent growth projected for the next 10 years.
The majors on this list are by far the hardest ones you can enroll to.
They combine advanced engineering topic like complex math and physics with unrelated subjects.
If learning the advanced math and physics by themselves was already hard, imagine applying them to another complex field.
You’ll learn so much you’ll most likely be able to find work even in fields that are only tangentially related to your field.
You’ll have such a high level of understandings of complex topics that you’ll succeed in most other fields purely because of your advanced education.
What do you need to succeed as a major in these fields?
Hard work is the baseline, but hard work can only come if you are passionate about the topics you are studying.
If you pick a major in a field you don’t care about, you’ll end up becoming miserable and hating your life.
Now that you know what engineering majors are the hardest and why, you can plan your future career more easily.
You know that by signing up for these majors you’ll acquire a rare skillset.
Naturally, the major’s difficulty also depends on what school you decide to attend.
Graduating from a college like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or Stanford is harder than, say, graduating from Virginia Tech.
It’s also way harder to get into the former.
Some employers don’t care where you graduated from, but many do.
However, since the professions linked to these degrees are in such huge demand, you’ll be fine regardless of where you study.
As long as your degree comes from an accredited school, you’ll be fine.
Pick your major today, and set yourself up for a lifetime of success.
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In an online survey, we asked 1000 engineers from different engineering backgrounds a series of questions to determine which is the hardest engineering major.
Yes, we asked 1000 engineers from different engineering backgrounds to rank engineering majors from the easiest to the most difficult.
The results showed what the hardest engineering majors are and what are the most difficult engineering degrees that you can do today.
Our online survey showed that 320 engineers considered Chemical Engineering the most difficult engineering major, followed by Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Industrial Engineering.
The 5 major engineering fields have many subfields.
The 5 Engineering Majors Explained1- Chemical Engineering:2- Electrical Engineering:3- Mechanical Engineering:4- Civil Engineering:5- Industrial Engineering The 9 Hardest Engineering DegreesThe 9 Easiest Engineering DegreesHow To Choice An Engineering Degree?More Interesting Engineering Surveys:
The 5 Engineering Majors Explained
If you want to do an engineering degree, you must understand what each engineering major can offer, which will help you choose the best engineering course.
1- Chemical Engineering:
1- Chemical Engineering:
Chemical engineering is the hardest engineering major that deals with designing and maintaining chemical plans and converting raw materials into usable products.
In addition, it deals with biotechnology and material science.
There are many subfields in chemical engineering:
Material Science Engineering
Pharmaceutical Engineering
Electrical engineering is the most innovative engineering field that builds systems and devices that use electricity, electronics or electromagnetism, such as power grids, telecommunication systems or microchips.
Software engineering and computer science are the biggest subfields of electrical engineering that have grown on a massive scale and deal with software design and data analysis.
Telecommunication Engineering
Data Engineering
Electronics Engineering
Power Engineering
3- Mechanical Engineering:
Mechanical engineers design and build systems and physical machines that do specific tasks, such as car engines.
This is one of the oldest branches of engineering but one of the most popular fields in engineering.
4- Civil Engineering:
This is the oldest known engineering major that deals with designing, building and maintaining physical structures such as bridges, buildings, airports, railways and sewerage systems.
Hydraulic Engineering
Wind Engineering
Geotechnical Engineering
Transport Engineering
Geological Engineering
This is the most versatile engineering major and also the easiest to study.
Industrial engineers can work in different industries due to their understanding of the supply chain, finance and manufacturing.
Component Engineering
Manufacturing Engineering
Manufacturing Engineering
Systems Engineering
Supply Chain Engineering
Financial Engineering
Fire Protection Engineering
Now that we explained the major engineering branches, it is time to answer the question that everyone wants to know what the most challenging engineering degree to do is.
The 9 Hardest Engineering Degrees
We asked 1000 engineers to rank the most difficult engineering degrees to do.
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Software Engineering
Software Engineering
Biotechnology Engineering
Biotechnology Engineering
Structural Engineering
Structural Engineering
The 9 Easiest Engineering Degrees
We asked 1000 engineers to rank the easiest engineering degrees to do.
Industrial Engineering
Industrial Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Construction Engineering
Architectural Engineering
Architectural Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Information Technology Engineering
Information Technology Engineering
How To Choice An Engineering Degree?
Choosing an engineering degree depends mainly on your preference and what you want to become.
Because 1000 professional engineers ranked some degrees as the easiest, you should not choose those fields or avoid the most difficult ones.
In general, all engineering fields are challenging.
Just because engineers have ranked a degree as easy, it might be difficult for you because you are not interested in it.
If doing engineering is something you want to do, you should check our guide on Which Engineering Degree To Do?
Make A Choice Now. More Interesting Engineering Surveys:
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