<p>Those who don’t want to participate on revived threads are free to ignore them. I don’t participate in the overwhelming majority of threads on CC. But those who want to participate in them should be allowed to do so. </p>
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<p>I wouldn’t portray it as a binary statement (like vs. don’t like), but rather as a continuum: what do you like more? For example, many of us enjoy participating on CC, but we had the opportunity to play professional baseball instead, many of us would be doing that instead - I know I certainly would be. But I never had that opportunity. </p>
<p>Hence, it’s not a matter of disliking engineering, but rather a matter of selecting from whatever your choice set happens to contain. Let’s face it: the vast majority of people in the world don’t get to do what they really want to do. Most of us would rather be movie stars, pro athletes, runway models, or President of the United States. But most of us will never have those choices. On the other hand, many MIT students do have the choice to be consultants or financiers, and hence they will take that choice. I suspect that many engineering students from lower-ranked schools would similarly also prefer to be consultants/financiers, but were never provided that choice.</p>
<p>What if you switched the perspective? I mean, yes you could say lots of MIT students want to go and be i-bankers but you could also say that they’re ‘forced’ to because of the higher pay. To them, engineering doesn’t pay enough for what they think they should deserve from going through the toughest major out there (this is all hypothetical by the way).</p>
<p>I mean, say you could be a really good professional golfer versus whatever you really like, let’s say designing satellites and probes for NASA. One clearly pays a hell of a lot more than the other, but which is more logical, and what’s more important to you? It would be a damn good investment to be a pro golfer, but golf sucks man.</p>
<p>You only mentioned MIT graduates which in a sense are an outlier. Is the situation the same at other schools? Do 1/3 of engineering grads go into i-banking/consulting at every other school in the US?</p>
<p>I actually think that golf is interesting. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, I agree with your sentiment that this nation places far too much emphasis on sports and pop culture. To quote Thomas Friedman:</p>
<p>“In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears and that is our problem.”</p>
<p>Similarly, engineering companies don’t really provide the type of pay and opportunities that industries such as consulting and finance do. </p>
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<p>Precisely, and I use that outlier to demonstrate the point. MIT is arguably the best technical school in the world, that has deliberately fostered a highly technocentric image that both attracts certain applicants while repelling others. {I can think of many people who would never dream of applying to MIT and others for which MIT is their clear #1 dream school.} If you would expect any school to exhibit a student body that is enthralled with technology, it would be MIT. Yet if even MIT has many students who don’t choose technical careers, instead opting for consulting or finance, then what does that imply about the engineering students at other schools? </p>
<p>I suspect that many (perhaps most) engineering students at lower-ranked schools are rather unenthusiastic about the discipline. Surely we’ve all seen those students who - while strong enough to survive the coursework - don’t really care about engineering. They’re doing it just because it’s the highest paying career they could readily enter. If they had the opportunity to enter consulting or finance, they would surely take it. But they simply don’t have that opportunity, because their schools are not on the recruitment lists for those industries. Let’s face it: if you’re at Arkansas State University, you’re not going to be recruited by McKinsey. Fair or not, that’s how it is. </p>
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<p>As well as social status. Let’s face it, in this country, nobody is particularly impressed if you say that you’re an engineer, in contrast to other nations such as Germany where the engineering categorization curries significant professional respect akin to physicians in this country. Lest anybody think the pursuit of social status is immature, I would say that much of what we do as human beings is pursue social status, to the point that the entire luxury goods industry is devoted to providing that status. Let’s face it, a Mercedes Benz is not really that much better of a car than a Hyundai and is arguably worse (the Hyundai is arguably more reliable), nevertheless people buy Mercedes to enjoy the status of saying that they drive a Mercedes. </p>
<p>But perhaps even more important are the future career opportunities. A 2-year stint in consulting or banking opens the door to numerous careers. But a 2-year stint in engineering, frankly, doesn’t really prepare you for much other than just being an engineer (or perhaps an engineering manager). Engineering companies are notorious for taking new engineering graduates and sequestering them to a cubicle in a basement where they never really get to learn what is happening in the rest of the company and never develop new skills. </p>
<p>To be clear, I hope that engineering companies will become more desirable employers, and some - notably Google and Facebook - have indeed become so, to the point that I know many MIT engineering students actually decline consulting or finance offers to become engineers at Google or Facebook. Yet the fact remains that there are too many companies that don’t really provide attractive opportunities for their engineers.</p>
<p>Well actually I was trying to make the analogy with golf vs. a really cool job that pays average people wages with the comparison of finance vs. engineering, finance being the super star profession but isn’t really liked by people who like engineering or are otherwise technically oriented. I myself find economics and business to be easy but extremely boring and I would pass up the opportunity to do so even if it made tons of money for me.</p>
<p>Now I’m not saying any of this is true, simply suggesting that it might be the case. Some people value making lots of money over having a job they enjoy… which may have been something of what you were saying earlier… oh well.</p>