[alireza.razeghi]

Dear All,
I am a M.Sc. graduate in Mechanical Engineering and intended to do a second Master in CFD and Turbulence since my M.Sc. thesis was related to Microfluidics and I want to broaden my research area first and then apply for the PhD.
I have to options, first Aerospace Engineering and second Computational Science and Engineering, Both of them will be with the focus on CFD and Turbulence Modelling.
I would like to know your opinion about the Major to choose.
At the final I want to do my PhD in USA, in your opinion which Major can have the most impression in my CV and mostly can help to broaden my knowledge...
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind Regards

[alireza.razeghi]

I would realy appreciate to hear your opinions.

[t.teschner]

hm, i guess it is one of those questions "what do you really want to learn from cfd" and then choose the major accordingly. generally speaking i would say aerospace related cfd and turbulence modelling is looking at the application (and may focus on RANS or LES modelling) while the computer science approach is more interested at which turbulence model may be best used for which case, how do you implement these models into a cfd solver, a fair bit of algorithm design etc. so you are not really focusing on the application but rather on the coding.
Then, I would also say that code development is probably more appreciated by universities if you look for a PhD position, especially parallel programming is often a plus. You can skim through the PhD offers here on the website and filter for PhDs in the US, you will see what sort of requirements they have (which are as far as I can tell globally very similar).
However, I would give more priority to what you want to do, if coding for example is not what you want to do, then you may find the aerospace major more interesting. Just because you don't have the major in pure cfd coding doesn't mean you will not end up with a chance for a PhD. You can always do an aerospace related PhD which offers the possibility to do some CFD simulations where you utilize either an in-house, open source or commercial code without the need to implement anything. In this case it may be ebst to have a broader understanding of the aerospace engineering aspect, but of course, that all depends on the PhD position and ultimately what you want to do, so that is probably the question you need to answer for yourself first and I hope then the decision will clear to you

[alireza.razeghi]

Dear
Of course I am looking for a PhD after this. In fact I am both interested in Coding, the mathematics, the algorithm, the stability issues and also the application area.
I think with a M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering I will have a more impression in my CV and I can Choose in PhD what to follow rather than Aerospace engineering.
I thank you for your consideration.
I really appreciate you and everyone who may have an idea or opinion, and we can discuss about this issue.

Originally Posted by t.teschner

hm, i guess it is one of those questions "what do you really want to learn from cfd" and then choose the major accordingly. generally speaking i would say aerospace related cfd and turbulence modelling is looking at the application (and may focus on RANS or LES modelling) while the computer science approach is more interested at which turbulence model may be best used for which case, how do you implement these models into a cfd solver, a fair bit of algorithm design etc. so you are not really focusing on the application but rather on the coding.
Then, I would also say that code development is probably more appreciated by universities if you look for a PhD position, especially parallel programming is often a plus. You can skim through the PhD offers here on the website and filter for PhDs in the US, you will see what sort of requirements they have (which are as far as I can tell globally very similar).
However, I would give more priority to what you want to do, if coding for example is not what you want to do, then you may find the aerospace major more interesting. Just because you don't have the major in pure cfd coding doesn't mean you will not end up with a chance for a PhD. You can always do an aerospace related PhD which offers the possibility to do some CFD simulations where you utilize either an in-house, open source or commercial code without the need to implement anything. In this case it may be ebst to have a broader understanding of the aerospace engineering aspect, but of course, that all depends on the PhD position and ultimately what you want to do, so that is probably the question you need to answer for yourself first and I hope then the decision will clear to you

[t.teschner]

in that case, the computational based major does sound more promissing from what i can judge, you will be still able to narrow the application down in the phd