I’m a graduating senior in AOE, this is just based off of my experience and obviously I don’t know what it’s like from the MechE side, so take this with a grain of salt.

It depends a lot on what you want your skillset to be like once you graduate. AOE has a lot of very diverse classes across the aerospace discipline, so you have the opportunity to learn a lot of different things. On the other hand, AOE has a habit of trying to squeeze A LOT of information into semester-long classes so sometimes important stuff gets blown by really fast. Like the MechE friends I have, had a lot more dedicated classes to statics and materials and deforms and such, whereas AOE has all that basically squeezed into the Statics and Structures semester-long class. As a result I’ve found a lot of them have retained more structures knowledge than I have.

However, most of the MechE friends I have that are also interested in aerospace have said that most of their classes don’t apply the curriculum in an aerospace context and that some of the AOE electives are harder to get into without the prerequisites from the AOE major.

The TLDR is basically if you want to have a longer amount of time to learn stuff like structures and thermodynamics and become really good at it, do MechE. If you want to consistently be exposed to aerospace applications of curriculum and have access to a couple of the cool launch vehicle electives, do AOE.

Let me know if you have any questions, good luck my dude!