Color Blind Engineer

What effect will red-green color blindness have on a career in engineering? My dream is to work at NASA (as an electrical engineer, not an astronaut) and I was wondering would passing a color blindness test be a requirement to be hired? Do any engineering positions at any company screen for color blindness? I appreciate any feedback!

I can’t imagine a scenario where colorblindness would hold you back at all in this regard. I have a number of colorbline colleagues.

Cut the red wire!
boom
Ooops.
J/k

Red-green colorblindness is not uncommon, and unless you were aiming to be an astronaut it’s not an issue. You should inform your professors if it seems likely to come up (color coded charts etc)

You might not be able to tell when your computer monitor goes into power saving mode based on the LED.

Probably about 10% of engineers have color vision anomalies.

Ya’ gotta organize the resistors real good.

I thought there were special glasses now that could compensate for color blindness?

I googled and they just came out. You can take an online test to see if they will work for you:

http://enchroma.com/

You could also email NASA looking for career advice. Someone should be able to say if you can get hired. There are other companies that build and launch rockets and satellites. You could research some of these employers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_manufacturers

Good luck!

You could get them 30 years ago. There were contact lenses, too. Unfortunately, wearing them made you look like a cyborg.

The glasses you can get these days just look like regular glasses–no one would be able to tell, as far as I know. They also work much better than they did in the old days, but there are still some people with severe red-green colorblindness that may not be helped by these glasses. I’m not sure anyone can know for sure until they try them themselves! My younger son tests as having “severe” colorblindness but I’d like to get him a pair of those glasses, just to see what happens. (They have a 30-day return policy.)