How did you decide before college that mechanical engineering was what you wanted to go into?

Hi Farah,
My circumstances were a little bit different. They kind of steered me towards Mechanical Engineering. Here is what I mean: I come from a country where college education is free provided you have good grades during high school and good grades for the final exam which is the equivalent of SAT. The downside to that is that you don't quite get to choose what you want to do. For example, my first choice on the university application form was for an Electrical Engineering degree, my second was Mechanical Engineering followed by Materials Science Engineering. But for EE there were only a handful of spaces available that were cost-free (there were more seats available provided I wanted to pay for my college education). Those spaces filled up by students with higher grades than mine. So I ended up being accepted for the Mechanical Engineering program which was my second option.

So, my answer is probably not applicable to your situation. Let me try to be a little more helpful. If I were to answer a different question such as: "why would one choose Mechanical Engineering from all fields of engineering studies?" I would tell you that it is a good option because it is very broad. As an ME you can get hired for manufacturing jobs, consulting, biomedical, automotive, design, etc. However, if you are looking for higher pay it seems like Computer Science is the way to go. The engineering field in general offers students a good starting pay. But then there is not much salary growth unless you start advancing on the career ladder. For Computer science, however, particularly for the software developers things seem to look better as far as salary increases. But they also seem to have a lot on their plate. I was reading that lots of developers have to continuously learn new programming languages in order to give them an edge and keep them competitive in the workforce.  This can be stressful once you have a family and other things to worry about outside work. Hope this helps.