Careers in Engineering
Engineering: Your Future
Thinking of embarking upon a degree? What do these people have in common?
- Neil Armstrong – Astronaut and first person to set foot on the moon
- Yasser Arafat – Palestinian Leader and Nobel Peace prize Laureate
- Jimmy Carter – 39th President of the United States
- Herbert Hoover – 31st President of the United States
- John Sununu – former White House Chief of Staff for President George Bush
- Boris Yeltsin – Former President of Russia
- Leonardo Da Vinci – Renaissance innovator, scientist, and artist
- Scott Adams – cartoonist and creator of ‘Dilbert’
- Bill Koch – yachtsman and captain of America’s Cup team
- Alexander Graham Bell – inventor of the telephone
- Ray Dolby – audio system innovator and founder of Dolby Laboratories (his technical expertise won him both an Academy award and a Grammy)
- William Hewlett and Dave Packard – co-founders of Hewlett-Packard
- Bonnie Dunbar – shuttle astronaut
Though they each chose a multitude of different careers, they all started with an engineering education.
Why Engineering?
More than 1.2 million engineers work in the US today, making engineering the nation’s second largest profession. An engineering degree also opens doors to other careers such as medicine, law and business, where you can use your analytical and technological expertise to develop as an engineering student. An engineering education will ‘exercise’ your brain, developing your ability to think logically and solve problems – these are skills that will be valuable throughout your life.
If you like challenges, engineering could be for you, as there would be no shortage of challenging problems! Generally, ‘real world’ engineering problems are quite different from the problems you solved in school – those usually had a single, correct answer. When you get into the engineering world, virtually all problems will be open-ended. There will be no single answer, no answer in the back of the book, no professor to tell you that you are right or wrong. You will be required to devise a solution and persuade others that your solution is the best one.
Careers in engineering span the alphabet. The five largest traditional academic fields of study are chemical, civil, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineering. There are also more specialized engineering fields, from aerospace to nuclear to biomedical engineering - no other career field offers young men and women such a wide choice of options.
Within the practice of engineering, there are also an enormous variety of job functions:
- If you are imaginative and creative, design engineering may be for you;
- If you like laboratories and conducting experiments, you might consider test engineering;
- If you like to organize and expedite projects, look into being a development engineer;
- If you are persuasive and like working with people, consider a career in sales or field service engineering;
- If you enjoy your science and mathematics classes, then these are most strongly resembled by the work of analytical engineers.
Studies show that by far the number-one cause of unhappiness among people in the United States is job dissatisfaction. Thus, it is important to find a career that provides you with enjoyment and satisfaction. After all, you might spend around forty years working eight hours or more a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Do you want to dislike every minute of that time, or would you rather do something that you enjoy? For numerous reasons, some of which are listed below, engineering provides a satisfying field of work:
- Variety of career options;
- Challenging work;
- Intellectual development;
- Benefit Society;
- Financial security;
- Prestige;
- Professional environment;
- Technological and scientific environment;
- Creative thinking.
How do I become an engineer?
You will need a bachelor’s degree in engineering. This will take takes four to five years, and should be taken in a solid engineering school which is known for its accomplished faculty members, and often conducts important engineering research.
Good engineering programs are ABET-accredited, meaning that they meet the minimum education standards set by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Currently, more than 300 colleges and universities offer ABET-accredited engineering programs, as graduate schools (and also employers in industry and federal government) all attach great weight to ABET accreditation. It is important to note that ABET accredits disciplines, not schools; within an emerging school, some field may be accredited while others are not.
Engineering is a demanding major that requires good grades, particularly in mathematics and science, but you do not need to be a ‘genius.’ Ideally you should rank in your top one-third of your high school class and certainly in the top half. Because engineers spend much of their time solving problems, a strong engineering candidate should enjoy problem-solving and excel at it. Enrich your skills by taking as many mathematics courses as your school offers, as well as laboratory science courses such as chemistry and physics. Because engineers convey ideas graphically and may need to visualize products or processes in three dimensions, courses in graphics, drafting or design are also helpful.
ASEE does have information about different engineering and engineering technology schools, what programs they offer, and grade requirements for domestic and international students at www.academic.asee.org. This information is provided by individual universities, so some schools may have pages of information and others only a few listings.
While you can work as an engineer in industry or government without a graduate degree, many engineers have found investing in a master’s degree to be worthwhile. In addition to gain more knowledge, you become qualified for positions of greater depth, prestige and earning capacity. There is no reason, however, to decide immediately upon graduation; only 20% of engineering students go straight into graduate school from undergraduate school. A master’s degree usually requires an additional year of study.
A doctorate usually requires a total of seven years of undergraduate and graduate study, and is necessary for research and teaching positions. If you cannot go to the United States to study engineering, check out ASEE’s continuing engineering website: www.learnon.org. This searchable web contains distance learning courses from America’s top colleges and universities.
Fancy being the next Neil Armstrong or Leonardo Da Vinci? Then look at our website to gain some more valuable information.
American Society for Engineering Education
1818 N Street
NW, Suite 600
Washington DC
20036
Tel: 001 202 331 3500
www.asee.org/precollege
Author
Bob Black
ASEE
Science / Engineering courses / colleges
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