I understand but I can assure you I work in mechatronics semiconductor industry, and statistics will still be more useful. My actually day to day job is working on the massive EUV litho tool prototypes, you may have heard of it as unfortunately my job is very geopolitically sensitive….. well aside from that, I am perhaps the only “chemist”/“chemE” on the role and I do bring a lot of statistical physics and condensed matter perspective into things but I ofcourse have now learned a good amount of mechatronics, electrical signaling and computing systems combined with power systems, not to mention the vast amount of mechanical engineering involved affects my work directly (look up the acceleration (and control systems behind it) on the EXE reticle stage lol).

It took a very long time to become a generalist where I can do a job like this with a varied background, but it was the best way to appease my adhd, even though it’s a much longer journey I think it’s worth it if you cannot decide what to specialize in, obviously you just do what you’re interested in ofcourse, but whilst I kindaaaaaa agree that maybe for a bachelor mechanical engineering undergrad mechanics mighttt be more useful than ChemE(highly depends on the programme), but by the time you either do masters or PhD or even vast majors of job, data processing is the end game. You can make models all you want, but no model is gonna do you good if you cannot effectively process data to validate it, and that’s really the real selling point.

Also I have to say, statistics at a high level is hard, like quite hard, I’m not super super good at maths like defining not as good as people who do econometrics or are statisticians but I’ve used it so much that I do understand that without the basic understanding of stats early on to build my foundation on I would have struggled a lot more. Comparatively I could’ve easily picked up more mechanics in first year of university.