What to study in college to become...

[E r y k]

Hey

I was wondering what kind of classes/courses people take to become designers/engineers in the paintball field. No neccessarily for AGD, but like building/designing guns etc?

Mechanical engineering? Are there anythings I should look into specifically?

thanks

eryk

[cphilip]

Poverty law...

[abarnhar]

LOL

Loved that one Cphillip... especially good during this holiday season. Ahhh, materialism.

If you want a two-year degree, CAD/CAM would be a good idea. Machining parts is always a necessary evil.

[cphilip]

Hey I was gonna say EE but I don't think Smart Parts is hiring!

[felony]

im in aeronuatical engineering right now, but have hopes to work in the paintball field sometime, since I probably won't make it through AE

dan

[Sir_Brass]

Originally posted by cphilip
Hey I was gonna say EE but I don't think Smart Parts is hiring!

Go EE. Then you can make $$ solving all of SP's board problems for people, and designing your own boards that can actually hold inventory spread sheets and have several modes of fire, and have USB and bluetooth support .

EE rocks!!

Ok, so that's biased (I'm an EE [edit]major. not an Electrical Engineer yet, just an electrical engineering major[/edit]. but I want to have a career not in the pball industry, but in national defense).


Now, in all seriousness, a degree in either AE (aerospace engineering) or ME (mechanical engineering) or both if you're anal retentive and insane AND a genius, will serve you well. Also, both are degrees that you can use to fall back on for another career just in case you're offered a nice engineering job in a firm outside of the pball industry.

Just be ready to do ALOT of math, ALOT of cad, ALOT of drawing, and ALOT of vector algebra. You'll be so sick of cross products, right hand rule, dot products, direction vectors, gradients, Tangential and normal components of acceleration, curvature, etc. by the time you're through that you'll not want to look at any surface ever again for fear of automatically starting to calculate the forces affecting it at that moment .

[Barfly]

you could prob do mech eng. It is the broadest engineering field you can get into. That is what I am doing anyways

[BlackVCG]

As already stated, ME will give you a broad background in what you're looking at going into. You can work anywhere in the world with an ME degree and you have a lot of different career paths to choose from.

If you want to center on pneumatic weapon development, you can probably take some engineering elective classes focused on fluid dynamics, compressible flow, CNC Manufacturing, etc.

[Kevmaster]

What nobody has asked yet, "hey Tom! Should I get into working in paintball? Should I start a company?"

[AGD]

I'm not touching this one....

AGD

[Fred]

Industrial Design or mechanical engineering...

[Barfly]

what did you do Tom?

[Automaggin2]

Go EE! Develop a board with built in WiFi 802.11g and Blutetooth so you can send real time stats about your gun to your laptop, and your gun can double as a cell phone!

[Pacifist_Farmer]

oh man thats perfect, except wont my bluetooth mouse clicks start firing my gun?

ME Design is the only major which will put you in everyone elses shoes.

The problem with all the other majors is they have too much depth, ME means you can learn the whole major and then branch out and do work in everybody elses field, EE Materials, Bio, you name it.

ME will never go out of fashion

besides the government will always need some one to build better bombs

[vf-xx]

It's all about ME baby.....


At least until August when I graduate.....

Everybody else has pretty well hit on doing ME to get into paintball design.

However you really need to get into what's right for you. I'm in ME and I love paintball and I'm even doing my senior design project on paintball equipment. Do I plan on getting into the paintball industry? No. It's really up to whatever fits you best.