blog.wired.com— For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. Here are our biggest complaints about the educational rite of passage.
Mar 24, 2008View in Crawl 4
I got my engineering undergrad in 1994, since then I have been working in the engineering job I wanted and have grown in that capacity for the last 13 years. I have also accumulated an engineering graduate degree, and am working on my post grad.I truly empathize with the post and several other posts here. Engineering sucks at a social and respect level. The education requires a caliber of person that you don't normally find in society. Here is my guide as to the type of personality that you need to be a succeful engineer:1. Deeply logical. You need to mental ability to tune into a deeply technical or mathematical problem and feel compelled not to do anything until the problem is solve. 2. Highly disciplined. If you need a TA or for that matter your boss micro-managing you, then you are ripe for early termination. You need to self manage.3. Copy and cheat. In real life you aren't going to solve every problem yourself. No matter how college trains you about academic honesty - in real life you copy the code or schematic from the guy sitting in the next cube over.4. Along with copying and cheating - you must know where to give credit where credit is due. If you use someone else's idea or design in real life and do not acknowledge that person - you will be found out and called out. Great career limiter there.5. Unlike you clumsy TA's and [professors who may not possess and sort of communication abilities or have social graces - you need that in today's society.Most importantly: If you want to be an engineer you need to have the "knack" early in life. I truly hate people that floundered through high school and ended up at a college and then decided to "be" and engineer. They do not have the motivation for what it takes to be a successful engineer. You need to start early - very early. Y
My biggest peeve of being an engineer:Having my investment proposals rejected by chumps that dropped out of engineering because it was too hard and enrolled in business school! Or having to rewrite a proposal and include several illustrated pages with visual graphs just so those same morons will sign off on it.
You can argue it all you want, but it's a capitalist society and all jobs suck. Why not whore yourself out to make the most you can, so you can reach financial freedom that much sooner.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
- Courses taught by Eng PhDs who have NEVER SPENT TIME AS AN ENGINEER! They have gone right on through academia and landed a job at a university without ever having worked in the real world. How are they supposed to help create the engineers of the future if they don't know what one is?- It takes 5 to 6 years, full-time, to get a 4-year degree.- An uncertain future: no one has any idea what engineering employment will look like in 5 years. If I were starting university today, I don't think I'd go into electrical engineering. Engineers are seen by the current business elite as commodities to bought, sold, traded, and discarded as needed.
I feel the level of calculation depends on what type of engineering you are doing. I have tried my hand in almost everything offered under electrical computer engineering (everything except power including sliding mode controls) and level of computation i needed in controls and communication [needed matlab] was very different compared to solid state devices and photonics [basic calculator if that].
I got my master's in chemical engineering abt 20 years ago. I'd have to agree that engineering jobs [at least in the US] suck. Reason is that we're not a manufacturing or research society.
Once you graduate and get a job in engineering you'll find that all the high level decisions are made by business majors or other non-scientific disciplines. Those decisions include outsourcing engineering work to India/ China where advanced degree engineers can be had for abt $3/ hr and the people are dying to get the work. Thus there are always far too many US engineers trying for a small number of low paid jobs. The salaries in those firms that still employ US engineers also reflect this reality and are often 1/2 to 1/4 of what even incompetent business majors earn.
boottraxMar 24, 2008
I got my engineering undergrad in 1994, since then I have been working in the engineering job I wanted and have grown in that capacity for the last 13 years. I have also accumulated an engineering graduate degree, and am working on my post grad.I truly empathize with the post and several other posts here. Engineering sucks at a social and respect level. The education requires a caliber of person that you don't normally find in society. Here is my guide as to the type of personality that you need to be a succeful engineer:1. Deeply logical. You need to mental ability to tune into a deeply technical or mathematical problem and feel compelled not to do anything until the problem is solve. 2. Highly disciplined. If you need a TA or for that matter your boss micro-managing you, then you are ripe for early termination. You need to self manage.3. Copy and cheat. In real life you aren't going to solve every problem yourself. No matter how college trains you about academic honesty - in real life you copy the code or schematic from the guy sitting in the next cube over.4. Along with copying and cheating - you must know where to give credit where credit is due. If you use someone else's idea or design in real life and do not acknowledge that person - you will be found out and called out. Great career limiter there.5. Unlike you clumsy TA's and [professors who may not possess and sort of communication abilities or have social graces - you need that in today's society.Most importantly: If you want to be an engineer you need to have the "knack" early in life. I truly hate people that floundered through high school and ended up at a college and then decided to "be" and engineer. They do not have the motivation for what it takes to be a successful engineer. You need to start early - very early. Y
wishninjaMar 24, 2008
My biggest peeve of being an engineer:Having my investment proposals rejected by chumps that dropped out of engineering because it was too hard and enrolled in business school! Or having to rewrite a proposal and include several illustrated pages with visual graphs just so those same morons will sign off on it.
rockefeller2Mar 25, 2008
You can argue it all you want, but it's a capitalist society and all jobs suck. Why not whore yourself out to make the most you can, so you can reach financial freedom that much sooner.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
zubbMar 25, 2008
I hate my Math Instructor!
badger1492Mar 27, 2008
- Courses taught by Eng PhDs who have NEVER SPENT TIME AS AN ENGINEER! They have gone right on through academia and landed a job at a university without ever having worked in the real world. How are they supposed to help create the engineers of the future if they don't know what one is?- It takes 5 to 6 years, full-time, to get a 4-year degree.- An uncertain future: no one has any idea what engineering employment will look like in 5 years. If I were starting university today, I don't think I'd go into electrical engineering. Engineers are seen by the current business elite as commodities to bought, sold, traded, and discarded as needed.
bolrayApr 3, 2008
I feel the level of calculation depends on what type of engineering you are doing. I have tried my hand in almost everything offered under electrical computer engineering (everything except power including sliding mode controls) and level of computation i needed in controls and communication [needed matlab] was very different compared to solid state devices and photonics [basic calculator if that].
btrainaApr 26, 2008
agreed. f**k matlab too.
Gallienus53Oct 13, 2010
I got my master's in chemical engineering abt 20 years ago. I'd have to agree that engineering jobs [at least in the US] suck. Reason is that we're not a manufacturing or research society.
Once you graduate and get a job in engineering you'll find that all the high level decisions are made by business majors or other non-scientific disciplines. Those decisions include outsourcing engineering work to India/ China where advanced degree engineers can be had for abt $3/ hr and the people are dying to get the work. Thus there are always far too many US engineers trying for a small number of low paid jobs. The salaries in those firms that still employ US engineers also reflect this reality and are often 1/2 to 1/4 of what even incompetent business majors earn.