<p>If I am thinking about majoring in electrical engineering, how would a BA rather than a BS affect my career aspects. I want to get into alternative energy but not necessarily in research (I also plan on minoring in business). Can anyone help me?</p>
<p>Is there a BS for ee?</p>
<p>Is it even possible to get a BA in engineering?</p>
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<p>Im with you on this one.</p>
<p>Yes, Rice offers it.</p>
<p>The BA and BS degrees are different. The BS degree is the “real” engineering degree, that prepares you for work in an engineering position. Companies looking to hire an electrical engineer will hire from the BS pool.</p>
<p>The BA degree is like a survey of engineering degree, where someone is exposed to the general fundamentals of engineering, but not all of the technical aspects. This degree is for those who want to study engineering but not practice it. An example is someone interested in law or medical school after graduation.</p>
<p>At Rice, the BS degree is ABET accredited, the BA degree is not, so only the BS degree can lead to licensure in most states. The BS is also about a semester longer than the BA (134 hours vs. 120 hours). </p>
<p>Rice BA: [Bachelor</a> of Arts (Electrical Engineering Major)](<a href=“http://www.ece.rice.edu/academics/undergrad/badegreqs]Bachelor”>http://www.ece.rice.edu/academics/undergrad/badegreqs)
Rice BS: [Bachelor</a> of Science in Electrical Engineering 2008-2009](<a href=“http://www.ece.rice.edu/academics/undergrad/bsdegreq]Bachelor”>http://www.ece.rice.edu/academics/undergrad/bsdegreq)</p>
<p>So unless I want to go to law school or med school, I should try to get a B.S. Even if I am leaning towards a career in business (If it isn’t obvious I am going to Rice next semester and they only offer a business minor)?</p>
<p>^ Why don’t you just go to a school that offers a business major? A B.A. seems pointless.</p>
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<p>That’s up to you. The nice thing about the BS is that when you graduate, you have a fall-back career in case you can’t find a business job or aren’t accepted directly to an MBA (which is another can of worms). You can make very good money as an engineer for a few years while you build up experience for an MBA. The BA is a faster degree, though, and less difficult, so you’ll likely have a higher GPA with less effort. Also, the BA is easier to double major and is more flexible.</p>
<p>The best thing to do is to go to Rice and ask some existing students. But in my experience, the BA students will all be pre-med or pre-law.</p>
<p>edit: I actually just reread their site and it explicitly says that the BA is “appropriate for students planning further study in law, business, or medicine”.</p>
<p>Personally, as an engineer, I wouldn’t place a person with a BA at the same “level” as someone with a BS, so far as their engineering skills go. That being said, if they were a manager or a marketing/business development type person in an engineering or industrial related industry I would give the BA more credibility than someone with a BA in marketing or business.</p>
<p>The more indebth you go into your field the harder it becomes to explain what you do to someone who doesn’t understand. If a business person doesn’t know how to do what I do, but understands what it is I am doing, I’m happy enough. Having just spent a month “dumbing down” a technical analysis and review of a commercial scale manufacturing facility I can feel the pain of how hard this is. There have been plenty of times that I have been asked, by people in my company, “what do you do?” Especially by non-science types, and when my position involves process improvements and troubleshooting, since this is never visible to them.</p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t know how much easier business would be with a BS vs. a BA. Though I have found that knowing is better than dealing with ambiguity, if possible. Regardless, if you want a job selling or marketing the products there is really no need for you to know the details on how it’s made.</p>
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<p>I’ve never found licensure or ABET accreditation to be particularly important for EE’s. Most companies don’t care. Only a tiny minority of EE’s ever bother to get licensed. </p>
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<p>I highly doubt that most engineering companies would even notice the difference. What really matters is that you have sufficient work experience, obtained through internships or coops, and that you can display a solid grasp of the material in your interview, rather than the specific name of your degree. It is for this reason that many companies will hire for engineering positions those people don’t even have engineering degrees at all. For example, I know one girl who was hired by Intel as a wafer fab engineer whose degree was in chemistry. Intel didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t really an ‘engineer’. In fact, she did well enough to be quickly promoted to the senior engineering ranks despite not even having an engineering degree. </p>
<p>Besides, Rice is a highly ranked engineering school. Whatever ‘deficiencies’ the BA degree in EE might have, it’s still going to be better than the BSEE degree from most other engineering programs, yet those people get hired for engineering jobs.</p>
<p>The reason I knew that the BA discussion involved Rice (without being told) was because, as a hiring manager, I was aware of that degree. I wouldn’t even interview BA engineering students right out of college. Why would I? There are students with BS degrees that are more qualified coming out of the same exact school, not to mention all of the other schools in the area that are ranked higher in engineering.</p>
<p>I, too, have seen people without engineering degrees, or any degree at all, end up in engineering positions after demonstrating competency and with experience. But the fact remains, that’s the exception not the rule. The extra 12-15 hours to get the BS makes it worth it, unless you are certain to not go into an engineering field (e.g. law, medicine, business). Go to Rice and ask. Pre-law (especially pre-patent law) and pre-med are basically the only reasons that degree exists. </p>
<p>Even if you could get an engineering job with a BA, unless it’s in a support position (sales, management, etc), you’d be starting off with a weaker skill set than your peers. That’s not a good starting point for a successful career.</p>
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<p>Well… I’m a Rice engineering alumna, and the only person I know of who got a BA in engineering at Rice got that degree because he was a bit of a slacker and decided halfway through his senior year that he wasn’t really interested in pursuing engineering anymore, but still wanted a degree in something. Very few people go in with the intent of getting a BA in engineering at Rice; it was pretty rare.</p>
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<p>Yeah, well, how many people are like you? Seriously. I’ve known hiring engineering managers who didn’t even know that Berkeley offered engineering at all. Think about that - Berkeley. {In fairness, this was overseas, but still.} I know a girl who graduated from MIT and who works as an engineer at Harley Davidson (in Milwaukee) who to this day still encounters coworkers who think that MIT stands for the “Milwaukee Institute of Technology”. </p>
<p>Plenty of people just don’t know what we on CC might consider to be obvious. And, yes, that includes those with hiring power. I think you said it yourself on a prior thread - many (probably most) companies generally hire people who graduated from the local schools and therefore those are the only schools whose degree programs that they may know in detail. Outside of Texas, most people have never heard of Rice U at all, and they certainly won’t know that Rice offers alternative engineering degrees. </p>
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<p>And plenty of other schools ranked far lower. Again, Rice is one of the top ranked engineering schools in the world. I would consider somebody with a BA in EE from Rice to be a better job candidate than somebody with a BSEE from a no-name, low tier school. And most schools are no-name low-tier schools. </p>
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<p>I’m sure that Rice would agree with you, if for no other reason, possibly an extra semester’s worth of tuition for them. </p>
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<p>I would say that it’s as least as strong of a starting point as getting a BS engineering degree from a lower-tier school, which the vast majority of engineers out there do. Let’s face it. Most engineers in the country did not go to top schools. You’re no worse off than them.</p>
<p>So, these graduate non engineers from highly ranked schools are equally as competent in engineering as engineering grads from lesser ranked schools. </p>
<p>Wow. Just wow.</p>
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<p>I’ve started ignoring Sakky. </p>
<p>The fact is, a BA in engineering doesn’t take all of the requisite engineering courses to have a full knowledge of the field. For example, a BA in Chemical Engineering doesn’t take process control (among other courses). Just because someone went to Rice doesn’t mean they’ll magically “figure it out”. That doesn’t mean I’ll take a Devry graduate over a Rice graduate (there’s some signaling about the person’s quality, at least in high school, in the fact that the person was accepted to Rice), but I’ll take anyone from any 1st or 2nd tier who has learned the material over a Rice grad any day. </p>
<p>Besides, Rice isn’t that highly ranked in engineering. It’s not like we’re talking about MIT grads where the person had to be superhuman just to be admitted…</p>
<p>The recruiters that visit Rice know about the BS / BA distinction. Career Services even points it out when you request resumes for interviews. If you’re hiring someone for technical sales, it’s probably not an issue. But if you’re hiring someone for a technical role, it will be a problem.</p>
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<p>Uh, really? If so, then why did you reply? </p>
<p>I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you don’t like my posts, then just don’t read them. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. </p>
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<p>I’m not saying that they would ‘magically’ figure it out. If they wanted to learn it, it would take some time. But they could do it. Let’s be perfectly honest. It’s not that hard for somebody with a BA from Rice to just pick up a process control textbook and read it himself in his own time, and then you could ask him questions during the interview to make sure that he really knows the material. Perhaps more succintly, if somebody with a BA from Rice impresses everybody in the interview and can present strong work experience (i.e. internships and co-ops), then he’s probably going to get hired even though he doesn’t have a BS. No employer is going to say “You did fantastic in the interview, your experience is solid, but because you don’t actually have a BS, we’re not going to hire you.” Never happen. </p>
<p>Besides, even having a full BS hardly means that you have “full knowledge” of the field either. Nobody has that. I know people with PhD’s in ChemE from schools such as MIT, and even they would never claim to have “full knowledge” of the field. You can study your whole life and never have full knowledge of the field. </p>
<p>What really matters is not that you have “full knowledge” but that you have sufficient knowledge for the job in question. Let’s be perfectly honest - many (probably most) engineering jobs really aren’t that broad. You don’t really need to have taken a broad range of engineering coursework in order to do those jobs. </p>
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<p>Really? I don’t think I would take a 2nd tier graduate over a Rice BA grad. After all, you said it yourself, the difference between the BA and the BS is only 14 credit hours or so. Hence, it wouldn’t be that hard for that Rice BA guy to learn the material in those ‘missing’ credit hours in his spare time, if he does in fact actually need to know it. Rice is a highly selective school - certainly more selective than the vast majority of 2nd, or frankly, even 1st tier engineering schools out there, which means that a Rice BA grad should be able to learn new material quite quickly. </p>
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<p>And the first thing you should learn as a prospective engineer (or in any career for that matter) is to not rely solely on your school’s Career Services office to find a job. Throughout your entire career, the most reliable way of finding a job, by far, is through networking. Your school’s career office should therefore be seen only as an adjunct tool. </p>
<p>Besides, look at it this way. Out of all of the engineering recruiters in the country - or even in the Houston region - how many of them actually recruit through the Career Services Office at Rice? Probably only a small minority. The vast majority of them will therefore probably not know anything about the BA/BS distinction. And certainly once you leave the Houston area, hardly any employers will know about that distinction at all. Like I said, most employers know next to nothing about any schools that are not local to them. Heck, even many local employers don’t know that much about their own local schools {For example, I continually encounter people in high-level jobs, even in Massachusetts, who don’t know that MIT even has a business school.} </p>
<p>You continually ascribe a level of knowledge about schools to people that they don’t actually have. CC is a highly circumscribed community of people who actually possess an unusually high level of knowledge of schools, and yet even most people on CC were probably surprised to know that Rice offers a BA in engineering until this thread was created. </p>
<p>But I’ll leave that question up to the readers. Of all of you out there who are actual engineers right now, how many of you actually knew that Rice offered a BA in engineering before this thread was started?</p>
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But do all entry-level engineering positions actually require a full knowledge of the field, as it is taught in undergraduate BS programs? </p>
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Or, for that matter, about the BA engineering degree programs at [Harvard[/url</a>], [url=<a href=“http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/index.html]Dartmouth[/url”>http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate/index.html]Dartmouth[/url</a>], or [url=<a href=“http://engineering.jhu.edu/undergraduate-majors-minors/]Johns”>http://engineering.jhu.edu/undergraduate-majors-minors/]Johns</a> Hopkins](<a href=“http://www.seas.harvard.edu/academic/undergradstudy/engineeringsciences/index.html]Harvard[/url”>http://www.seas.harvard.edu/academic/undergradstudy/engineeringsciences/index.html) ?</p>
<p>I actually knew about the BA at Harvard and Dartmouth, but I’m sure in the minority.</p>
<p>The VP at one engineering firm I worked for said he’s used about 5% of what he learned in school during his career (and he had a Bachelor’s of Engineering). This is probably an extreme case, since this field isn’t usually heavily emphasized in school. In any case, it’s probably not too much different for other fields. Most of what you use in work, you learn at work.</p>
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<p>You say “learned the material.” It’s quite simple – that is the key phrase, because from what I know, employers care less about what you majored in, and more about how well they perceive you can do the job. This is why, for instance, a math major with a strong interest in computers actually can be more successful in the job market than a CS major. Now I am as of now with no interest in such things, and probably would only pick up such skills if I had to, but there are people out there who prepare themselves for careers very well independent of school training. I don’t think it makes sense to judge people based on a marginal difference of a few courses. Most people don’t even remember exactly what they learned in classes even one or two semesters after the courses, only the general ideas. The important thing is having worked with the right things enough to be able to look them up + use them as necessary in the future.</p>
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<p>You place WAY too much value on name, it seems. People in college learn to think in a certain framework, and self-training often is the best kind for career goals. Employers at my dad’s place have been frustrated enough with an MIT grad’s ability to focus on the task at hand (though he’s very smart) that they let him go. And there are plenty of workers from lower tier schools who seem to be doing better than this guy career-wise. Maybe in academia, name actually matters in the sense you say it does, but
it’s kind of odd that you would distinguish MIT and Rice, but not Rice and lower ranked schools as much.</p>
<p>I was once going to force myself to do engineering, and Rice was one school I was accepted to, and I certainly had no idea about the BA.</p>
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<p>One of the saddest and most inefficient practices I’ve seen in engineering programs is to weed people out via topics that they don’t actually need to know to do the job. If you’re going to flunk people out of the program, it should be because they failed to understand how to perform tasks that engineers actually need to know for the job. If an EE student can’t understand basic circuit analysis, or a chemical engineering student can’t understand a simple process flow diagram, then fine, kick him out. But who really cares if a ChemE student can’t, say, actually derive out the Maxwell Relations from thermodynamic first principles? Nobody actually does that on the job.</p>