Sidequest
Get started

General engineering

At most universities this is not a degree you finish. It is the two years every engineering student shares, and then you name a kind of engineering and move into that degree instead.

Written by the Sidequest team. Reviewed 2026-09-06.

Try the career before you pick the major

Whichever kind you end up naming, the work has one shape: decide what a real thing has to survive, then find out whether you were right. Five minutes of that beats a year of wondering.

Marlow · the stools coming back

One page, and the moulds get cut in three weeks

  • •about forty thousand stools out there, four years of them
  • •about one in forty comes back cracked at the hinge
  • •nothing written down about what one is meant to survive

the blank page, before you start

Here is the bit that embarrasses me. In four years nobody here ever wrote down what one of these is supposed to survive. So start there.

In four years nobody at Marlow has written down what one of their step stools is supposed to cope with: how heavy, how often, how rough. So nobody can say whether the cracked ones are failing or just wearing out. You write it down now. What do you make it about?

The heaviest person who will stand on itHow many times it gets folded and stood on

Try a day as an engineer

A short, playful taste of the real work.

Try it out
Where it leads

Engineering work, but usually under a different name. Most people who start here move into one named kind of engineering and finish in that degree instead.

The week

Sixteen credits a term, and it is the same two years every engineering student does: calculus three times, physics, chemistry, and foundation classes with a design project running under them.

What people earn four years after they finish
WEAKEST PROGRAMS$78,159TYPICAL$88,063TOP PROGRAMS$108,882

Where people end up

Most people who start here finish somewhere else, in a named kind of engineering, and what the first two years bought them was the right to choose late.

The government keeps a bucket for engineers whose work does not sit inside one named kind. About 154,070 people are in it and the middle of them earns $122,930, so it is a real place to land rather than a hole in the list.

Three in ten general engineering graduates are in work that did not need an engineering degree at all, the second highest share in the engineering family.

Top ways to become an engineer.

What a week is like

You take four to six classes at once, which comes out to about 15 credit hours a semester. It is that same load every semester for four years: 120 credits, eight semesters, done.

About 15 of those hours are spent sitting in class. The other 30 are work you do on your own, two hours behind every hour you spend in a room. Call it 45 hours a week.

It is spread across seven days rather than stacked into five, so you can keep your evenings or you can keep your weekends, not usually both. What it does not leave is much slack in the weeks when two big things land on the same day.

A waking week is about 112 hours. This is the share of it the degree takes.

  • In class15 hours
  • Work on your own30 hours
  • Yours67 hours

What those 45 hours are spent on.

  • with other people

    Electrical fundamentals, mechanics, materials and how things get manufactured, and modelling a system on a computer. These are the pieces every kind of engineer needs before anybody asks which kind you are.

  • with other people

    Three terms of calculus, then a maths class about how things change as time passes. One term of chemistry with a lab and one of physics with a lab. It is most of your first year and about a third of your second.

  • with other people

    An open problem, a few other people, and something at the end that either works or does not. It runs beside the classes from your first term and there is a new one every year.

  • on your ownthe hard part

    Six to ten problems a class a week, every one of them a physical situation with numbers attached and a single right answer. Nothing else here takes as many hours and nothing else decides as much.

  • with other people

    Making the thing, measuring it, and finding the exact place where your calculation and the world disagree. Then explaining that gap to people whose questions are better than yours.

  • on your own

    Composition twice over, a humanities class, a social science and a civics one. Engineering plans stack these into the early terms so the later ones can be nothing but engineering.

  • Engineering classes and projects19%
  • Maths, physics and chemistry31%
  • Everything else you still have to take50%
  • Classes you pick yourself0%

Half of the first year is not engineering at all: writing, a humanities class, a social science, a civics one. You pick none of it, and the engineering you do get is one design class a term.

How much do you make?

General engineering pays $89,359 four years out, which is real engineering money. Seven of the nine named engineering degrees pay more, and computer engineering pays $19,656 more.

  1. Right out of college

    $89,359

    Four years out, the average general engineering graduate earns $89,359, and it holds only the ones in work, not back in school.

  2. Midway through

    $105,000

    Between 35 and 45, the average general engineering graduate earns $105,000.

  3. At the height of it

    $189,950

    The best paid one in ten of the engineers who never named a speciality earn $189,950.

The reason so few of these degrees exist is that most engineering schools do not award one. General engineering is the first year or two, and then you pick: automotive, electrical, mechanical, robotics. The degree you finish carries that name, and the plan you were following simply stops.

Three in ten general engineering graduates end up in work that did not need an engineering degree. For mechanical engineering it is two in ten, and the only engineering degree with a worse rate than this one is industrial.

Every engineering degree, and what each one pays four years after finishing.

  • Computer engineering$109,015
  • Electrical engineering$100,647
  • Industrial engineering$98,442
  • Aerospace engineering$98,207
  • Chemical engineering$98,158
  • Medical engineering$93,451
  • Mechanical engineering$92,135
  • General engineering$89,359
  • Manufacturing engineering$88,451
  • Civil engineering$86,517

General engineering is also the rarest of them by a mile. Universities hand out about thirteen mechanical engineering degrees for every one of these.

The average money still owed on student loans

$25,494

The standard repayment clears it in fifteen years.

Is this you?

Before anything else, work out which of the two things in front of you this is. At most universities general engineering is the shared opening stretch of an engineering degree: everybody takes it, and somewhere around the end of second year you name your kind of engineering and finish inside that degree instead. At a small number of colleges it is a real four-year degree with no speciality attached, and those places usually offer no other kind of engineering at all. The week looks nearly the same either way. What is different is what is written on the certificate and whether anyone reading it knows what you can do.

Tap any that sound like you.

This is probably you if

Probably not you if

What people who did it say

  • Kronopath

    Hacker News, May 2014

    "during the generalist part of the program I took everything from thermodynamics, to civil engineering, to quantum mechanics, to fluid dynamics, to vector calculus, to molecular biology, to electromagnetics, to material science, to statistics, to electrical circuits, to... you get the picture. I was not prepared for this in the least."

  • RustyTrowel

    College Confidential, June 2023

    "A general engineering degree alone is not sufficient in the market for engineers, so your plan has to be to obtain a graduate engineering degree as well."

  • alchemist007

    College Confidential, August 2010

    "Engineering is incredibly diverse and can be very specialized depending on the discipline. Mechanical Engineering is almost completely different than electrical engineering."

  • PrdMomto1, describing a general engineering graduate

    College Confidential, June 2023

    "He felt it was sort of a cross between mechanical and industrial. He minored in marketing and later got his MBA."

Questions people ask

Is general engineering a real degree?
At a small number of colleges, yes, and it is properly accredited. At most universities it is the name for the first year or two of engineering, and the milestone at the end of it is choosing which kind of engineer you are going to be.
Is a general engineering degree worth it?
It pays $89,359 four years out, which is real engineering money, and it carries $25,494 of debt, the highest in the engineering family. The cost is on the other side: three in ten graduates are in work that did not need the degree, and only industrial engineering does worse.
Is it harder to get hired with a general engineering degree?
The people who work in the field say so, and the numbers point the same way. The advice you hear over and over is to specialise as an undergraduate, or to treat general engineering as something you do at masters level once you already have experience behind you.
Can you switch into a named kind of engineering later?
At most universities that is not a switch, it is the plan. The first two years are shared, and you move into automotive, electrical, mechanical or robotics at the end of them. Walking away from engineering entirely is the expensive move, since barely any of these two years is worth credit outside it.
Do a lot of engineering students drop out?
Fewer than the story suggests. Engineering keeps more of the students it starts with than any other group of majors. Nine in ten of the people studying it in their final year started there, and almost nobody switches in.

Where these numbers come from

See the other majors