dear student,

The first thoughts that come to an engineering aspirant by the name metallurgy - chemistry(needs to be mugged up,so I might end up hating it) , working with metals(oh no, I don't want to rub metal surfaces like a labour), placements (they are doubtful), research (no scope all done,no big names).

After having such appalling opinion about metallurgy, everyone finds difficult to accept that it is engineering.
Thus it is undesirable to the generalized engineers , nevertheless the anomalous ppl who opt to love it somehow can make wonders with collaboration with other streams like materials, biotechnology, nanotechnology etc, which will definitely sound more interesting to inquisitive engineers than the typical mechanical engineering like Automobile, Heat engines and even better than some of the streams in Electronics and Programming.

So nominally Metallurgy is mental allergy, but actually it is better than its name suggests

hope it helps!!