<p>Booted, you are clueless. Actually, if you want to be an engineer, you do need an engineering degree. (This is why it is called an engineering degree). At some companies there might be some veterans without a traditional engineering degree working in an engineering type setting, but this is becoming a thing of the past. Good luck interviewing for an engineering job and saying that you don’t have an engineering degree but you would fit into the team.</p>
<p>I’m guessing you have no engineering experience and probably no degree. You might want to think a little harder before you post this nonsense.</p>
<p>I think he is making an intriguing point, though. In a sense, all technical majors are easier - at least conceptually - than nontechnical majors. We talk about answering hard problems, but at least our problems might have answers. This isn’t always the case in the liberal arts, I imagine… whether that makes it easier or harder I can’t say for certain.</p>
<p>Another interesting thing he brings up is the difference between major and profession. As far as I know, there is no law which says all companies must hire engineering majors for engineering roles (well, outside of jobs which require licensure, but most engineering jobs in the US don’t require licensure, or at least such is my understanding). Restricting job openings to engineering students is a choice.</p>
<p>It seems like these professional fields have trended away from hiring non-major students as the disciplines have become more mature professionally and academically. Student body sizes have grown and professional societies have flourished. This hypothesis also has the benefit of explaining the situation with software engineering… in a sense, software engineering is today what aerospace engineering might have been 50 or 100 years ago. Jeez, the Wright brothers made bicycles. Specialization is the limiting behavior in technical fields. If there is a new branch of engineering that crops up, my hypothesis is that they will hire anybody who can demonstrate ability, regardless of their background. They’ll continue this in a diminishing capacity until they expect practioners to have studied the material and restrict job openings accordingly.</p>
<p>Of course, supply and demand could have more to do with the situation than I’m letting on, but I feel like the above is for the most part correct. If anything I think there’s probably a shortage of engineering students. (There’s an incredible shortage of computing students, and this may help explain why job requirements aren’t as stringent. If you want a goose but there are only 100 geese in the world, you might settle for turkey.)</p>
<p>Yes AMT, restricting job openings to engineering students is a choice. It is a choice that 99% of companies make. They choose to hire engineering graduates for engineering jobs. There is a difference between major and profession. An engineering major prepares you for the engineering profession. Look, if someone was asking me for advice and told me they wanted to become an engineer, I would tell them you absolutely need an engineering degree (or at the very least a physics or mathematics degree or something like this). I don’t think this is an earth shaking revalation. If you want to be an engineer you need a degree, plain and simple. Are there some people out there without a degree working in an engineering role, probably, but this is becoming more and more rare.</p>
<p>This is not true if you are anywhere beyond undergrad. Undergrads are taught all the problems that are solvable, but a lot of the classes stop short of delving into the deeper material that remains unsolved. There are many problems that have no arbitrary analytical solution, such as the Navier-Stokes equations or Maxwell’s equation. The accuracy of solution is not a solid answer either, as it all depends on an individual’s assumptions and methods.</p>
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<p>What you are missing here is that these new fields don’t just spring up out of nowhere. They spring up out of some other field and then grow into their own. Aerospace engineering sprung out of mechanical engineering and physics and grew into its own. Many of the early aerospace engineers were either physicists or mechanical engineers. Your Wright brothers example is more of an example of entrepreneurship. Of course you can have whatever degree you want if you are the one doing the decision making and hiring. What you do with your own money is your own choice, so if you want to use it to build a plane even if you are a bicycle maker, then so be it. A large company is not going to take such a chance with their money.</p>
<p>The first computers were created to answer scientific problems. Scientists of various backgrounds used the logic skills they had due to their scientific background to form the basis of computer science. As that science grew into a field of its own, it stopped being advanced by scientists from other fields and started spawning scientists of its own. The key thing here is that it still grew out of other technical fields. Except in a few rare cases, the founders of new sciences had some sort of formal technical education, as did their successors. The exceptions are almost always examples of people who are working on their own with their own money, not with somebody else’s money.</p>
<p>For the most part, while I agree with the last sentence in that quote, the vast majority of those people companies hire “regardless of their background” are at least coming from other technical degrees. A company with lots of money invested in something wants to have some sort of guarantee that an employed is technically competent in turning that money into more money. In the case of engineering, a degree in engineering (or something closely related) is that guarantee.</p>
<p>ME 76:
I agree that you should major in something that resembles what you want to do with your life. I don’t think I ever made any representation that this was not my point of view. Even in my first post, I said this was possible, but I doubted that it was advisable. Note that 1% is still a chance, and that’s what the OP was asking about. I guess my first post might have been less ironic, but the point stands.</p>
<p>bonh3ad:
Well, I understand what you’re saying, but I think you misunderstood <em>my</em> point. Answers to questions in STEM fields are usually - perhaps not universally, but a part of me wants to say universally - at least answerable in principle. That doesn’t mean that we can get the answers easily, or even exactly, or even within our lifetime. For instance, the question P=NP? at least has a clear answer, in theory, although some of the best minds of the last century have tried to answer it to no avail. I agree there might be degrees of “answerability”, but at the same time I would argue that - for the most part - the interesting questions in the humanities are less “answerable” than correspondingly interesting questions in technical fields. But that’s a debate for another thread.</p>
<p>“What you are missing here is that these new fields don’t just spring up out of nowhere.”
Yes and no. There are revolutions that occur from time to time, and I would argue that computer science (and software engineering) basically sprung up fairly quickly out of nothing. Aerospace engineering, it is true, was largely a specialization of mechanical engineering at the time. Computer science can similarly be viewed as a specialization of mathematics. Software engineering, though, is sort of unique in that there never was really an engineering of mathematics… systems engineering might have been the closest thing to it, and in fact software and systems engineering aren’t so very different. Still, the things that software engineers do now, nobody really did before them. Software engineering still has a long way to go before it begins influencing the scientists and engineers who write software today, and there is a large and influential movement in CSSE to raise the level of SoftE in such applications. It’s really a fascinating time to be alive and watching how all of this is playing out. Again, a topic for another thread.</p>
<p>BOTTOM LINE:
I guess the bottom line is that I more or less agree with everybody in saying that you should have a technical background to get a technical job. The importance of a specific “degree” can be debated, but a degree is probably the best way to show that you have such a background. Engineering as a discipline doesn’t promise to get any more lax about requiring degrees, and if anything, engineering might become more stringent about degrees. I wouldn’t be surprised if graduate training eventually becomes the norm for all engineering disciplines… it’s very technical work that engineers do, after all. I know this is forecasted for software, but as for more traditional engineering fields… perhaps economic factors will suppress that tendency.</p>
<p>You can aquire the skills but you will never really get the respect for free, and this will make changing jobs difficult. So, you may get to an “engineer” position within a specific company, but switching to another company into an engineer position will be tough.</p>
<p>I personally know quite a few electrical and mechanical and engineers who are my father friends, who work as engineers in NY state. The former started as machinists and the latter as Electricians as their respective companies. </p>
<p>@rocketDA
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<p>I graduated from a pretty good school and spent a year at Columbia. I cant say any of it was actually hard. A lot of people complaining, but hard no.</p>
<p>If you read what I wrote, I said specifically “engineering education”, I made no such claim about the entire discipline being easy. But getting an Engineering degree is not very hard. Engineers deal with closed systems, imagine dealing with the human body, a system which has no solid domain, where abnormalities are common. Or dealing with Theoretical Physics, where we deal with the unknown. It all makes working in a bubble a bit easier. </p>
<p>@ME 76
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<p>Yes, how nice of you to call names. I personally know people who are engineers who do not hold engineering degrees. I also know people with Math, Physics and Chemistry degree’s who are hired as engineers. Even better some of my EE professors, did not even have EE degree’s, they instead had physics backgrounds. You even contradict yourself later on by saying “Look, if someone was asking me for advice and told me they wanted to become an engineer, I would tell them you absolutely need an engineering degree (or at the very least a physics or mathematics degree or something like this)”.</p>
<p>Just having an engineering degree doesn’t make you an engineer, it makes you a guy with an engineering degree. Once your title says “engineer”, you are an engineer. Engineering is not professional degree.</p>
<p>BTW I already have a degree in CS&CE. Ive been through it already, have had the internships and jobs. All in all, I would say engineering is relatively easy in comparison to other disciplines. I found the Cs aspect of my education much harder to truly understand than the engineering side of things, which is why I usually just say I have a CS degree. </p>
<p>To note, im not saying everybody can become an engineer without a degree. I just know people who don’t have one and are engineers. So it is possible and saying is it impossible is naive.</p>
<p>^ I wouldn’t call it naive, just a simplification. Of course it’s possible to get an engineering job without an engineering degree… nobody’s disputing that. I can start a company tomorrow that does engineering work and hire anybody I want. It doesn’t mean it’s a good idea*, but I can do it. The point is that specific hiring trends at most companies probably favor certain formal training. I think this is reasonable. </p>
<p>I guess it’s kind of funny how the two CS guys in the audience read the question “is it possible to be an engineer without an engineering degree” more literally than the engineering types… I guess we’re just used to doing these funny proofs by counterexample while they assume solutions exist and give the best answer that works, or perhaps worded better, they decide what the OP really meant and answer that question instead.</p>
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<li>It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea either.</li>
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<p>Somebody at your undergraduate institution did you a great disservice to leave you with this notion. Engineering is a continually changing field solely because of the fact that it is not a discipline full of bounded problems. There is as much cutting edge, theoretical research going on in engineering as there is for theoretical physics. In an undergraduate program, you learn all about the easily solvable problems and problems with close-form solutions, and only a little bit beyond that.</p>
<p>Some of the greatest unsolved mathematical/physical problems ever come across exist within the realm of engineering. For example, P=NP or proving that solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations always exist in three dimensions.</p>
<p>Engineering is not a closed system any more than theoretical physics is a closed system. Your own example of the human body is closer to being a closed system than is engineering. Things go wrong all the time and there are abnormalities, but except in a few special cases, the problems have been seen before and the only question is whether science has the capability of fixing said problems. Becoming a doctor is really more like a cross between becoming a walking encyclopedia while also becoming a detective. You learn a whole bunch of facts and learn the way to apply those facts to deductively determine what the problem is. All of the real medical advances are made by engineers and scientists.</p>
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<p>This is common, and doesn’t conflict with the advice many of us have given. The question was about becoming an engineer without any technical degree, including engineering, hard sciences, or math. Math, physics, and chemistry all fall into this “technical degree” category, so they are all covered. However, you would have a very difficult time becoming an engineer without a technical degree of some sort. Even these electricians and machinists you cite have some practical knowledge and certification in a technical area.</p>
<p>“I graduated from a pretty good school and spent a year at Columbia. I cant say any of it was actually hard. A lot of people complaining, but hard no.”-Booted</p>
<p>Where do you hail from? I went to a “pretty good” school too. Turns out it is one of the best in the country. It was hard…and people didn’t even complain that much!</p>
<p>In order for some of us to perform to such a level (such as my rocket example) we need pretty tough educations to rev us up to that operating point. There is no way around that. I think that you just had a half-as$ exposure.</p>
<p>Also, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about “closed systems”.</p>
<p>That was kind of the way I was leaning too based on his comment about engineering being a “closed-system” but I wasn’t going to jump to conclusions without details.</p>
<p>OK, think what you want. I have no real need to argue with guys who have no actual experience of what they are reiterating. You can continue to live in your self approved shell, where you somehow feel better about yourself by calling what you study hard. You then try and question my education, just to defend your self promoting feelings when confronted.</p>
<p>That is an awfully big assumption to make. I can assure you that many of the people on here do indeed have plenty of experience.</p>
<p>The fact is, engineering is not a closed science. Real engineering is one open-ended problem after another, resulting in real, theoretical research and breakthroughs that advance our fundamental understanding of the world around us.</p>
Engineering is not a science, it’s a discipline which utilizes science and works within the bounds set by scientific theory to solve real world problems. That by definition is a closed system.</p>
<p>“Engineering is not a science, it’s a discipline which utilizes science and works within the bounds set by scientific theory to solve real world problems. That by definition is a closed system.”</p>
<p>You’re right that engineering is not science. It uses science to solve problems. Sometimes engineering even pushes back on science.</p>
<p>Please, by all means, tell me how to design a nuclear-electric power source for application to a variable specific impulse plasma rocket engine on a Mars transfer orbit. Tell me how to best design “living” spacecraft that are able to respond to their environment and fix themselves. Please tell me a closed form solution to any unstable flow, even something as simple as Von Karman shedding. If you have any contributions to these fields, please step forward for your Millennium Prize.</p>
<p>Again, I am sorry that your university left you with such a closed-minded view of what engineering is. Engineering does work within the bounds of scientific theory, but it is also one of the primary forces behind expanding the boundaries of scientific theory.</p>
<p>Using your definition, are PhD engineers scientists? They most certainly expand the boundaries of science via research.</p>
<p>Likely a Physicists, where Physicists are known to be capable implementors. </p>
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<p>I am no expert in any field that would answer such questions, in fact I really dont understand half of what you said. But I do know what I have been taught over and over again by my engineering professors. Which is that we work within the bounds of known physical science. We are not out solving open ended problems. Engineers are only capable of solving problems up to and never past the current limit of scientific theory. That Bound allows engineers to work in a closed system, where a solution only exists if we can understand all the variables of the problem/system. </p>
<p>Engineers are practical, not theoretical. They put things into motion, within the bounds of current scientific ability.</p>
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<p>Again you keep on with the silly remarks, without actually providing any useful information. Engineering doesn’t push science. Science pulls engineering, by allowing engineers to taste the future. Most scientists could care less about the implementation of their theory. </p>
<p>Engineering PHD’s mainly work on engineering processes, or work as proxy scientists. The two need not be mutually exclusive, but in most cases they are. No sane engineer would attempt what is not within the current realm of scientific theory, as there is zero objective reasoning behind it. The objective truth finding is not the job of the engineer.</p>
<p>Have you even graduated yet and had a real job? You are way to idealistic.</p>
<p>Booted I have a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from a top 20 research institutuion and I can tell you that every company that I have experience with requires an engineering degree for engineering positions (or at the least as I stated already, a degree in physics or math or something like that). Stop lecturing people about experience and qualifictions when you have no idea what they are. Based on your comments it seems that you are the one lacking when it comes to experience. I don’t think clueless qualifies as calling you names either. Your insinuation that you don’t need a degree and that it is about fitting in with the team is just wrong. I’m just pointing that out. Also, if you read my post again, you will see that I don’t deny that there are people without engineering degrees and years of experience that work in an engineering type role. However, this is becoming more and more rare. For a machinist to get to that point it will take lots and lots of work experience. Keep in mind also that lots of people claim to be engineers when in reality they are not. From everything that I have seen, it would be very rare to find a machinist in a design engineering type of job, even with years of experience.</p>
<p>You claimed that a degree is not a magic pass to becoming an engineer. I hate to say it but it pretty much is, especially these days. By the way engineering is a professional degree that qualifies you for professional jobs. And how does saying that I would recommend someone get an engineering degree if they want to be an engineer contradict myself?</p>
<p>“Likely a Physicists, where Physicists are known to be capable implementors.”</p>
<p>Aerospace engineer.</p>
<p>“I am no expert in any field that would answer such questions, in fact I really dont understand half of what you said. But I do know what I have been taught over and over again by my engineering professors. Which is that we work within the bounds of known physical science. We are not out solving open ended problems.”</p>
<p>Some of the problems we wish to solve as practicing engineers are open ended. Many are not, however.</p>
<p>I think you have been taught “nuts and bolts” engineering. I assure you that this is only half of the equation. Those who pursue research as a PhD could attest to the degree of new insight into physical phenomena. In aerospace there is a lot of research going on in understanding shock boundary layer interactions… and the methodology is being adopted by astrophysicists to analyze plasma shocks in the Cosmos. This is only one (of many) example where engineering is pushing our understanding of the physical world.</p>
<p>Things are not as black and white as you think. Physicists can sometimes be engineers and engineers can sometimes be physicists.</p>