Cyrus Majebi's wall answer on TwoCents

I’d still be happy with Mech. I’m super glad that I studied mechanical engineering as a first and second degree. It has given me the foundation needed to pursue an academic career in Robotics, which has been my passion since childhood.Robotics combines stuff from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science.Though one can study CS and go into robotics professionally or academically, you’d have a more robust all-round foundation if you have a mechanical engineering or electrical engineering background. Besides, it’s easier to add the CS part of robotics informally (without a degree) - I picked up coding 8 years ago so that has given me the CS skills a roboticist would need. Having said that, it’s entirely possible to go into robotics without any degree at all- you can become a very capable roboticist by being self taught. If one’s goals are academic, then degrees would be necessarily.But that’s it basically, I won’t change my mech background if I had to do it all again. Just one last thing, some would argue that the most important part of robotics right now, is the CS  part, and they would be right…the part of robots that would make them fully useful and functional in society is their brain…their ability to understand the physical world, natural language, reason appropriately and take actions rapidly …all those are things being brought about by the breakthroughs in the CS part of robotics. The mechanical and electrical parts of robotics have been all but figured out, even though there’s always research being done to improve those areas…..the key breakthroughs are in the CS parts, where end-to-end neural networks and robot foundation models are replacing hard-coded C++ modules etc.Anyway, gist is, I’m happy with my mechanical engineering background. My MS, coding skills and online courses have helped me develop a very strong foundation in robotics, so maybe at the end, where you start out doesn’t matter much.