HS Engineering Prep Course

[TheFourth]

My school offers a 4 year “engineering academy” which is supposed to mirror the first 2 years of college engineering spread out over four years of high school. Each year focuses on a different aspect(CAD and Engineering Design, public speaking, computer science, and a service project) and through it I am certified in SolidWorks(common CAD). I was wondering how this course would look to the academy, and also how the certification would look on my resume. Also, junior year is completely focused on coding, we learn MatLab and Python, and I know USAFA looks for atleast one year of a computer science class. Would this count for that aspect?

Lastly, on the leadership side of things there is a Leadership Panel for this course, and I plan to be involved as soon as they open up applications.

So in short, how would this course and certification look on my resume to USAFA? Thank you all so much!

 

[MCA]

This looks like an excellent opportunity to gain experience but you shouldn't be doing it because you think the academy will like it. You should be doing it because you are interested in this field of study and it will offer you exposure to something you will enjoy doing. If you are looking at this as a "resume filler" then I wouldn't bother taking the course.

In terms of how the academy will look at it, they will look at it as another activity and extra-curricular that you are apart of. While the academy is STEM focused, they are not going to be looking for candidates who specifically took this pathway. It's not going to be a golden ticket, but it will help provide depth as to who you are as a candidate and what you are interested in. If there's a leadership position available then I would encourage you to take it.

When thinking about partaking in any extra-curricular or pathway, I encourage you to think about the experience and exposure you will get. Not the "how will it look on my resume?" question. This pathway sounds awesome and I hope you learn a lot about engineering. It definitely is an interesting field of work.

Good luck!

 

[TheFourth]

Thank you so much! I’ve actually been in the program for three years so far and love it! I applied to the program waaayyy before I was interested in the academies, I enjoy most anything stem related so this program was perfect for me, academy or not

 

[USAFA10s]

I can't comment on how the academy will see that, but I can tell you as a Physicist/scientist for the Air Force (I am a 61D), that is an AMAZING opportunity. Having those skills in my world is incredibly valuable. And Matlab/Python coding definitely counts as computer science. It is probably the most useful set of skills you can have if you want to work in STEM, but not necessarily be a computer scientist, as we do almost everything in one of those languages.

I code in MATLAB daily for my job, I can only imagine how much better at it I would be if I started earlier...alas, in high school I learned....pascal

 

[Don't Give Up the Ship]

My school offers a 4 year “engineering academy” which is supposed to mirror the first 2 years of college engineering spread out over four years of high school. Each year focuses on a different aspect(CAD and Engineering Design, public speaking, computer science, and a service project) and through it I am certified in SolidWorks(common CAD). I was wondering how this course would look to the academy, and also how the certification would look on my resume. Also, junior year is completely focused on coding, we learn MatLab and Python, and I know USAFA looks for atleast one year of a computer science class. Would this count for that aspect?

Lastly, on the leadership side of things there is a Leadership Panel for this course, and I plan to be involved as soon as they open up applications.

So in short, how would this course and certification look on my resume to USAFA? Thank you all so much!

Our HS had something like this. One DS took it and one did not. The one that took it suffered a bit in his class rank as the Engineer track was not AP (upper end of Class Rank was people that took almost 100% AP classes). Personally, if I think it best to just take tougher/more math (AP Calc BC, Statistics). Just one set of expiernces to be aware of. Again, academics is only one factor for a SA, but a big one.