<p>Do you regret not going to med school or majoring in business? Is there a high job satisfaction in engineering? I'm very math and science oriented but not convinced that engineering is the career for me.</p>
<p>I never wanted to major in business and I never wanted to enter the field of medicine, so no, I don't regret it. It was never even a consideration for me.</p>
<p>My field is actually a mix between business and engineering, heavier on the engineering, and I'd say I'm very satisfied. Construction management is nice in that I'm not stuck in a cubicle all day long. Every day is different and exciting (sometimes that can be good, sometimes that can be bad), so there's rarely a dull moment. There's a lot of teamwork, and there's a lot of interaction; you're not going to sit by yourself. Even though companies can get pretty big, you work in small project teams, so it doesn't have that big company feel where you're only a cog in the machine. Teams with more than 40 people are considered extremely big and this only occurs on ridiculously complex projects. A typical size would probably be 10-20 people.</p>
<p>And the best part of all... I get to see the progress of my projects everyday, and I know I'm a part of that.</p>
<p>You really shouldn't be asking us what we think though... you should be asking yourself what you want in a career, and see if engineering will help you meet those goals.</p>
<p>As a de-facto CS engineer (the skin says E&EE) I've always felt fortunate that people pay me (well!) to play with toys (computers) all day long, like I felt as a kid with Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys and Erector Set, albeit stuck in a cubicle. I can imagine other fun jobs, but this one definitely has been fun. Knowing that millions have used my contribution to products is satisfying.</p>
<p>I considered all kinds of careers, medicine and law included, before I went to college. I really liked architecture, though, and I'd wanted to be an architect for a long while as I was growing up. At some point, someone very misguided told me that there weren't a lot of avenues into architecture, and that if you wanted to be an architect, you'd need to either major in engineering or interior design. (This is, of course, entirely incorrect, but they were an adult and I believed them at the time.) I recall thinking that the interior design avenue seemed awfully candy-arsed, so I started down the more hard-core path of engineering pursuits. For a brief while, I became enthralled with NASA and shifted gears towards mechanical engineering, and entered college as a MechE, but then I suddenly remembered that my greatest desire was to build skyscrapers, and in the middle of my freshman year, I switched majors to CivE.</p>
<p>Yadda yadda yadda, I'm backchecking my first high-rise hospital right now. So what do I think about my choices?</p>
<p>I definitely underestimated how difficult my day-to-day job would actually be. In school, I knew that learning was hard and reviewing was relatively easy, and I think I somehow thought that once I got to my job, I'd know what I needed to know and that my job would be easy. No dice. It's a challenging, fast-paced profession, and the best engineers accept that they'll never know everything and that they must keep learning difficult stuff for the rest of their engineering lives. Okay, that's not so bad, I really liked the challenge of learning things in the first place, so I can live with that. It's a little exhausting at the end of some days, when I feel like my brains are bleeding out my ears, but I'm still hitting the steep parts of the learning curve-- I'm only in my third year out of grad school.</p>
<p>I <em>am</em> stuck in a cubicle, all day long. It's not really a cubicle, it's an open floor plan and I have my own office. I have my music, and my school pennants, and various photos, and I post to CC a couple of times a day to break the monotony, and sometimes my neighbor and I go downstairs for a Starbucks run. But yeah, it's a lot of thinking-very-hard-all-day-long, and projects last a very long time. The days of instant gratification and eight hours on a problem set and you're done are long gone. College is a sprint, and real life is a marathon. In that regard, it's harder than I thought it'd be.</p>
<p>The gender ratio is highly skewed, and some guys can be real jerks to women. I've been in some really lousy workplaces before. That's one really uncool part of the gig. Most guys are really nice, thankfully.</p>
<p>The pay and prestige is lower than what it ought to be, given the criticality of our services, and the road to licensure is kind of long and grueling. I see my doctor and lawyer friends making a lot more money than I do down the line, and sure, that irritates me sometimes. I was used to being top of the heap in high school, and I see some people who struggled back then making a lot more than I do now, and as I'm trying to pay back loans and scrape together enough to buy a new couch, it irritates me a little bit that they can afford the adorable sporty convertible that I'd really love to buy, but then again, they don't have a twenty-mile radius in Houston where they can see a building on the horizon and point to it and say "I made that last year." That's just really the ultimate in awesome, for me. And my car is sporty and adorable enough right now, so I'd probably just stick with it anyhow. I get paid just fine.</p>
<p>Our teams are smaller than Ken's. We have six people on our team. This actually surprised me; I thought that for something like the, what, billion dollar Dallas Cowboys Stadium, there'd be thirty, forty people on a team. Nope! Ten. Twelve, tops. We're consequently all as busy as you'd expect that few people on that big of a project to be. It's kind of insane, but you reeeeeally get a sense of ownership when you work that hard on a project. The end result is just amazing.</p>
<p>So yeah… It's harder than what I thought it'd be. It takes a lot more out of me, and I don't think I'll be able to keep up this sort of pace for the rest of my life. But it's just a total trip, designing buildings. I can imagine myself doing a lot of other things, and some bad days, I wish I were doing other things, but… I just don't want to leave quite yet. The end result is too cool.</p>
<p>Aibarr, great job! That is awesome to read what you have done/are doing. I am pursuing a CHE degree now. I am thinking about an MBA, law school, or the PE. Frankly, I want to be able to start my own business or be a consultant so I do not feel I am subject to my boss whim. I know that lawyers and doctors will make more than me but they also stay in school longer. And I think they say doctors have higher divorce rates and lower life expectations (I think I read a while back that dentists have high suicide rates?). I say it all balances out. God Bless!</p>
<p>aibarr, do you work with architects or does the engineering team have any decision-making authority in building design?</p>
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aibarr, do you work with architects or does the engineering team have any decision-making authority in building design?
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<p>If something is physically <em>impossible</em>... then physics and reality have decision-making authority in building design.</p>
<p>One architecture team once asked me if they could have windows all around the perimeter of the building, do away with the majority of the columns, and still plant live trees on the roof. I think that's the only time when I've truly become sarcastic with a design team... I told them that we could bring in a crane and hang the upper half of the building from that, and then we could do away with <em>all</em> the columns! =D ...they determined that this was not a viable solution.</p>
<p>But no, in a general sense, we don't get to dictate the vision of the building. We work with architecture firms who do that. (But sometimes their visions are really cool, and it's a ton of fun to be a part of those visions.)</p>
<p>Architects are waaaaaay out there on a different planet, where physics is the devil. I think that's a good thing though, because they really push the boundaries. If they didn't have crazy ideas, the job of a structural engineer can be quite boring. </p>
<p>I see the A-E relationship as a check and balance of power. There's physics and efficiency on one side battling with aesthetics and design on the other. Going to either extreme would be bad, so the two together have to find the right balance.</p>
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If they didn't have crazy ideas, the job of a structural engineer can be quite boring.
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<p>Having designed Starbucks and maintenance buildings, seconding this. ;)</p>
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I see the A-E relationship as a check and balance of power. There's physics and efficiency on one side battling with aesthetics and design on the other. Going to either extreme would be bad, so the two together have to find the right balance.
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<p>Boy, does that sound familiar! Sometimes I feel like we're a total killjoy, taking these beautiful ideas and being like, "Nooo, that's going to be too expensive," or "Noooo, we can't control deflection enough on that cantilever for you to have pretty seamless lines on your building facade. You can't have both! Choose <em>one</em>." It seems mildly parental. </p>
<p>(Sometimes I just wish we could bring out all of the amazing ideas and make 'em <em>all</em> actually work. Life's pretty darned cool when all the awesome dreams make their way into reality.)</p>
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Boy, does that sound familiar! Sometimes I feel like we're a total killjoy, taking these beautiful ideas and being like, "Nooo, that's going to be too expensive," or "Noooo, we can't control deflection enough on that cantilever for you to have pretty seamless lines on your building facade. You can't have both! Choose <em>one</em>." It seems mildly parental.</p>
<p>(Sometimes I just wish we could bring out all of the amazing ideas and make 'em <em>all</em> actually work. Life's pretty darned cool when all the awesome dreams make their way into reality.)
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<p>Can't you just use carbon nanotubes? They're supposed to do everything. just sprinkle a handful in your admixture</p>
<p>I studied Chem E in Canada and was very very disappointed. Despite good school and good grades, no "real" job. Switched to law and am much happier.</p>
<p>What type of law do you practice, toronto_guy?</p>
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Can't you just use carbon nanotubes? They're supposed to do everything. just sprinkle a handful in your admixture
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<p>Pretty sure you intended that as a joke, but there's actually research on doing this to halt concrete crack propagation!</p>
<p>There's research on it because if you put "carbon nanotubes" on any research proposal you'll get $$$$$$$$$$.</p>
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There's research on it because if you put "carbon nanotubes" on any research proposal you'll get $$$$$$$$$$.
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<p>Pretty true. Weird thing is that it had fairly convincingly positive results.</p>