I suggest picking a university that has a good engineering college to start. Your freshman year is spent in general engineering courses and university courses. During that first year, look at the different engineering disciplines and speak with the different professors. See where your interest lies and make the choice your sophomore year.
For alternative energy, electrical engineering would be a good start. Perhaps studying power systems, then maybe a masters in something that might aid your goal. For fuel efficiency, perhaps chemical engineering. In the end, except for fuels, alternative energy is about different ways to generate electricity. Fuel is about chemical reactions and generating the most power from the reaction or minimizing the resultant byproducts.
Check around different schools. Some colleges have unique degrees outside the normal engineering degrees you can get. An example is petroleum engineering. There could be other degrees in something closer to what you want.
In addition to researching good engineering schools, I suggest you also consider you start working on your own projects to get an idea of what types of things you might like to work on. There are lots of websites that provide examples of projects in many different fields. You might decide on working in a different field than that which you think you like at this moment.
Here are some good sites and resources:
Instructables,
Make - the magazine and website, makezine.com,
Arduino,
Processing,
Parallax,
Sparkfun,
WISC-ONLINE for lots of tutorials,
Hackaday,
Raspberry Pi,
Nuts and Volts,
MIDI,
BYOC guitar pedals (for which you might consider as signal processors instead of just music devices),
the Evil Genius series of books, one of which is on solar energy projects,
your local maker group or hackerspace, and
Linux.
Once you start looking you can find many more. Be sure to look into the maker and hacker groups in your area as a lot of those people like to do DIY alternative energy projects. Instructables has a large number of all kinds of projects.
In my opinion, learning about electronics could help you greatly as there are a lot of projects that require sensors to help measure data that is later used for various purposes. Not only that, but such projects as these as well as other projects, say for example making your own solar heated water heating system, will show those schools that your are one step ahead of a lot of the other students. The projects can also help to keep you motivated as they are a lot of fun in the creation.
Biomedical Engineering is a field with a great future !
Hello,
Im a junior in high school and I'm interested into going into engineering. Is there a field of engineering I could study in college which would allow me to work with alternative energy and/or fuel efficiency as a career?
