Engineering offers a rewarding and lucrative
career—one in which you can use your mind to find creative solutions to the
challenges facing our society. It’s a well-paid profession, on par with
business management or law. Electrical engineers with bachelor’s degrees start
out earning around $50,000 annually.
In his book Studying Engineering
(Discovery Press, 1995), Raymond Landis, dean of engineering and technology at
California State University–Los Angeles, lists the following "top 10"
rewards and opportunities that an engineering career offers.
- Job
Satisfaction
Studies show that, by far, the No. 1 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 40 or so years
working eight hours or more a day, five days a week, 50 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 Opportunities
What do Neil Armstrong, Jimmy Carter, and Alfred Hitchcock have in common?
Though they eventually chose very different careers - one as an astronaut, one
as a president, and one as a filmmaker - they all started with an engineering
education.
An engineering degree offers a wide range of career possibilities. Within the
practice of engineering, there is 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.
The analytical skills and technological
expertise you develop as an engineering student can also be put to use in many
other fields. The majority of today’s college graduates will have more than one
career during their work life, and engineering can provide a strong foundation
for almost any one of them.
3.Challenging Work
In the engineering work world, there is no shortage of challenging problems.
Any engineering manager will tell you that he or she has a huge backlog of
problems that need to be solved. Generally, "real world" engineering
problems are quite different from most of the problems you will solve in
school. In school, most problems have a single, correct answer. When you get
into the engineering work 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.
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· 4.Intellectual
Development
An engineering education will "exercise" your brain, developing your
ability to think logically and to solve problems. These are skills that will be
valuable throughout your life—and not only when you are solving engineering
problems. For example, your problem-solving skills can help you undertake tasks
such as planning a vacation, finding a job, organizing a fund-raiser,
purchasing a house, or writing a book.
· 5.Potential to Benefit
Society
Depending upon your value system, you may not view all things that engineers do
as benefiting people. For example, engineers design military equipment like
missiles, tanks, bombs, artillery, and fighter airplanes. Engineers are also
involved in the production of pesticides, cigarettes, liquor, fluorocarbons,
and asbestos.
As an engineer, however, you can choose to work on projects that clearly
benefit society, such as cleaning up the environment, developing prosthetic
aids for disabled persons, developing clean and efficient transportation
systems, finding new sources of energy, alleviating the world's hunger problems,
and increasing the standard of living in underdeveloped countries.
· 6.Financial Security
While financial security should not be your only reason for choosing a career
in engineering, if you decide to become an engineer you will be well paid. Engineering
graduates receive the highest starting salary of any discipline.
· 7.Prestige
Engineers play a primary role in sustaining our nation's international
competitiveness, maintaining our standard of living, ensuring a strong national
security, and protecting public safety. Furthermore, most people know that
engineering requires hard work and strong technical skills. As a member of such
a respected profession, you will receive a high amount of prestige.
· 8.Professional
Environment
As an engineer, you will work in a professional environment in which you will
be treated with respect and have a certain amount of freedom in choosing your
work. You will also be in a position to influence what happens at your company.
You will have the opportunity to learn and grow through both on-the-job
training and formal training. Often, your immediate supervisor will closely
mentor you and help you tackle progressively more challenging tasks. You will
learn from experienced engineers in your organization and will be offered
seminars and short courses to increase your knowledge. Most likely, your
employer will have an educational reimbursement program that will pay for you
to take classes toward a graduate degree or for professional development.
As a professional, you will receive liberal benefits, which will typically
include a retirement plan, life insurance, health insurance, sick leave, paid
vacation, holidays, and savings or profit-sharing plans.
· 9.Technological and
Scientific Discovery
Do you know why golf balls have
dimples on them? Do you understand how the loads are transmitted to the
supports on a suspension bridge? Do you know what a laser is or how a computer
works? When you drive on a mountain road, do you look at the guard rails and
understand why they were designed the way they were? Do you know why
split-level houses experience more damage in earthquakes? An engineering
education can help you understand how these, and many other things in the
world, work.
Furthermore, an understanding of technology will provide you with a better
understanding of many issues facing our society. For example: Why don't we have
zero-emission electric vehicles rather than highly polluting cars powered by
internal combustion engines? Should we have stopped building nuclear reactors?
What will we
use for energy when oil runs out? Is it technically feasible to develop a
"Star Wars" defense system that will protect us against nuclear
attack? Can we produce enough food to eliminate world hunger? Do high-voltage
power lines cause cancer in people who live or play near them?
· 10.Creative Thinking
Engineering is by its very nature a creative profession. When practicing
engineers develop solutions to open-ended, real-world problems, they must
employ conscious and subconscious mental processing as well as divergent and
convergent thinking.
Because we are in a time of rapid social and technological changes, the need
for engineers to think creatively is greater now than ever before. Only through
creativity can we cope with and adapt to these changes. If you like to
question, explore, invent, discover, and create, then engineering could be the
ideal profession for you.
