<p>Apparently the skills needed to be a successful engineering student are not the same as the skills needed to be a leading financial services company executive. I quite agree.</p>
<p>"I say that people should study engineering because it provides a strong backup career"</p>
<p>So you're suggesting that people should i) go into a specialized college ii) Completely sacrifice their undergraduate education towards taking a bunch of very difficult specialized vocational courses in subjects like electromagnetic waves and advanced thermodynamics, or whatever;
iii) thereby sacrificing courses that would perhaps better enrich their liberal education and match their actual interests ; </p>
<p>all to have a good backup plan?</p>
<p>This is only a good backup plan if you really want to be an engineer in the first place. And then it isn't a backup plan it is a primary plan.
Because otherwise: i) you receive training that is completely suboptimal and deficient in many ways for your primary plan, either initially or down the road as I ve already described; ii) you are stuck in a career you are not interested in. You wash out as an engineer in two years, because you hate it. Then you have a worse foundation based on your narrow education to compete in liberal-arts land with all the well-rounded people who were writing, thinking, socializing and broadening their perspectives their entire undergraduate careers instead of doing an endless series of math problems.</p>
<p>This may be a plan for a small group of people but generally I disagree.</p>
<p>As a tangent comment, I would like to comment that while I'm in favor of being well-rounded and support that, it is not generally a quality that helps people get into college in the first place. Apparently narrowly focused superstars are preferred.</p>
<p>It is very important for a person to be well rounded. However, in today's society, specialization is needed to succeed in any profession. The problem for liberal art education is that there are too many students who graduate from top universities without any tangible skills. People often argue that a liberal art education will provide the best communication skill that's needed to succeed in the real world. From what I have observed, the engineering students might have done more in presentations and technical writings than the sociology major at my school. It's really unfortunate that there's such a stereotype on engineers.</p>
<p>Indeed, many narrow-minded people entertain such a stereotype, and it is grossly unfair. In fact, I have come across far more science and engineering majors who have read Shakespeare in depth, can play an instrument, and are fluent in a foreign language than I have come across "liberal arts" majors who can follow an abstract mathematical proof or come anywhere close to real physics (or, sometimes, even know the basics of another part of "liberal arts").</p>
<p>It is quite ridiculous that many people confuse the "liberal arts" with just "humanities", when in fact a true liberal arts education should attach equal importance to the arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and technology. ALL of them are needed for critical thinking and effective communciation skills.</p>
<p>I think anybody that disagrees with monydad is being foolish. Whatever he has said has been the plain honest truth. Writing a 100 line counter-argument to mdads 5 line argument doesn't make the 100-liner more accurate or insightful.</p>
<p>Engineers in the silcon valley better be as good a salesman as they are engineers!! Why? Because most of them will work for 15-25 companies in their 30 year career, if they decide to remain an engineer. Every time they switch jobs, they'll need to "sell" their skills to the next employer in job interviews. The savviest engineers/salesmen will get the best jobs (requiring shooting their mouths off on daily basis), leaving the mathematically inclined engineers to pick up the grunt jobs after them (to do the actual work).</p>
<p>Someone mentioned a wierd phenomenon where top school grad are getting high salaries right out of school in engineering positions....well, that may be true but how good is a high starting salary if you're going to be job hunting in the next 2-3 years....which will subject you to market pay conditions and get you knocked down to what you should be making? </p>
<p>Engineering has a glass ceiling which you get to very quickly. In about 5 years, you'll max out at 110k. After which, you'll hear from your boss daily about how highly you get paid and wants to know what you're doing to earn it!! At 110, you're not a junior anymore....you'll be expected to give presentations in front of several customers, use your contacts to pull in more work for your department, shine as bright as the olympic torch in meetings and so forth. If you happen to make it to $120k, watch out!! That's the lay-off point nowadays.....if you ain't got major support from higher-ups, you can't last long at that salary.</p>
<p>So you see, making a higher salary is almost a BAD thing in engineering...in some fields, making a higher salary comes with more perks (respect, more time-off etc,), but in engineering a higher salary means exponentially more work and more risk!! It's almost better to demand $90k and then sit back, relax, and watch the $110k engineers sweat it out!!</p>
<p>I don't think people disagree with monydad on his views of engineering. We all know that engineering jobs can top out pretty easily and banking jobs can go all the way up to 7 figures. I think lately we have been arguing about the differences between liberal art majors and engineering majors. I have stressed from the very beginning that engineering firms and banks look for different types of people. Also that top engineering students are trained in communication as well. Personally, I believe that most of the engineering students are well-rounded enough to succeed in business fields.</p>
<p>Rowan Atkinson (British comedy actor)
Alexander Calder (mobiles)
Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life)
Roberto Goizueta (Coca Cola)
Jack Welch (GE)
Alfred Hitchcock
Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter
Tom Landry (Dallas Cowboys)
Hedy Lamarr (40's actress)
Leonid Brezhnev, Boris Yeltsin
Motel Williams (TV personality)
Mike Bloomberg (Mayor of New York City)
a whole bunch of CEOs of technology companies,</p>
<p>and, hm, Yassir Arafat.</p>
<p>And in addition to that, as has been frequently pointed out, a large proportion of the top business schools are filled with engineers. If these engineers are so poor at communicacting and writing, then I do not know why they would be in business schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
This is only a good backup plan if you really want to be an engineer in the first place. And then it isn't a backup plan it is a primary plan.
Because otherwise: i) you receive training that is completely suboptimal and deficient in many ways for your primary plan, either initially or down the road as I ve already described; ii) you are stuck in a career you are not interested in. You wash out as an engineer in two years, because you hate it. Then you have a worse foundation based on your narrow education to compete in liberal-arts land with all the well-rounded people who were writing, thinking, socializing and broadening their perspectives their entire undergraduate careers instead of doing an endless series of math problems.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>See, there you go again, equating liberal arts education with a good solid 'broad' education. Like I've said before many times, plenty of liberal arts students basically get no education at all. Your perennial assumption is that if somebody isn't studying something technical, then he is instead studying something that will help his communication skills or his leadership or something else that will be useful in his future career.. That is FAR from the truth. Plenty of liberal arts students basically trade tech studying for simple laziness and lounging around. So they trade something for nothing. Which is worse? </p>
<p>You might say that technical training is suboptimal. Maybe. But it's a lot better than no training at all, which is what a lot of liberal arts students end up with.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think anybody that disagrees with monydad is being foolish. Whatever he has said has been the plain honest truth. Writing a 100 line counter-argument to mdads 5 line argument doesn't make the 100-liner more accurate or insightful.</p>
<p>Engineers in the silcon valley better be as good a salesman as they are engineers!! Why? Because most of them will work for 15-25 companies in their 30 year career, if they decide to remain an engineer. Every time they switch jobs, they'll need to "sell" their skills to the next employer in job interviews. The savviest engineers/salesmen will get the best jobs (requiring shooting their mouths off on daily basis), leaving the mathematically inclined engineers to pick up the grunt jobs after them (to do the actual work).</p>
<p>Someone mentioned a wierd phenomenon where top school grad are getting high salaries right out of school in engineering positions....well, that may be true but how good is a high starting salary if you're going to be job hunting in the next 2-3 years....which will subject you to market pay conditions and get you knocked down to what you should be making? </p>
<p>Engineering has a glass ceiling which you get to very quickly. In about 5 years, you'll max out at 110k. After which, you'll hear from your boss daily about how highly you get paid and wants to know what you're doing to earn it!! At 110, you're not a junior anymore....you'll be expected to give presentations in front of several customers, use your contacts to pull in more work for your department, shine as bright as the olympic torch in meetings and so forth. If you happen to make it to $120k, watch out!! That's the lay-off point nowadays.....if you ain't got major support from higher-ups, you can't last long at that salary.</p>
<p>So you see, making a higher salary is almost a BAD thing in engineering...in some fields, making a higher salary comes with more perks (respect, more time-off etc,), but in engineering a higher salary means exponentially more work and more risk!! It's almost better to demand $90k and then sit back, relax, and watch the $110k engineers sweat it out!!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But once again, aehmo, you've still refused to answer the question of what else are you going to study as an undergrad? </p>
<p>In fact, I seem to recall you saying that people should not study the liberal arts like English or history. I think you said something to the effect that it is not sad when you see a liberal arts student hit a rut in their career. Yet here is monydad, your new hero, saying that studying the liberal arts is a good thing. Maybe you two should get together and work out whether liberal arts is a good or bad thing, and then come back here and tell us what you have decided.</p>
<p>I think studying liberal art is a wonderful thing. I really admire people who have gone through a rigorous core like the one at Chicago. However, I have to say that an engineering degree is more flexible nowadays. It's much easier for any engineering major to enter the business sector than for a liberal art major to enter it because people know that engineers have the quantitative skill that's needed. So if you major in liberal art, you better take more quantitative courses to make youself stand out.<br>
Regarding to other industrial sectors, engineers (at least from top engineering programs) start off at higher level in companies like GE or P&G than their hard-science peers. So if you ask me, I would say that an engineering degree is probably one of the most practical and useful degrees you can get as an undergrad. The catch is that you will have to study much harder than your liberal art friends and might end up with a lower GPA.</p>
<p>A lot of what you study depends on what you're good at. If you've always been the class math genius it stands to reason you may study engineering (though as a high school senior you have no idea what an engineer really does). You may find translating Latin or writing a paper to be much more difficult than doing discreet (sp?) math. </p>
<p>BUT as a general rule I agree with Sakky in that liberal arts is just plain easier. I was good at math but as undergrad when i switched from engineering (after about 2 years) into premed I couldn't believe how "easy" even premed was compared to engineering. And a big drop after premed was lib arts...they were by far the easiest courses, and I don't think that's changed.</p>
<p>Also go over to the law boards. What gets you into the best law schools? Highest gpa you can muster plus high lsats. What do they study to get those high gpa's? History, English, government. The attitude there is don't major in something like engineering, it's too much work and the grades won't be there.</p>
<p>I'd think the best training for ibanking and the like besides business would be engineering, computer science, if lib arts I'd consider the philosophy major...in other words subjects where you have to think logically, where you can't fake it, you have to know your stuff.</p>
<p>aehmo do you find that 110K glass ceiling even for engineers trained at MIT, Stanford? I'd think they'd move up into management and make bigger bucks, they are smarter and more likely to get further dgrees, whereas the San Jose to use the earlier example might be the one stuck below the ceiling.</p>
<p>Yeah, law school is pretty messed up. One of my friends who is an engineer and a top debater at my school, he is having a hard time applying to top 30 law school because his GPA is around 3.5. At least medical schools give some bonus point to engineering students to even up the scale.<br>
About engineers making big bucks, just look at the list of richest people under 40. You will find that many of them are engineers. In order to really make it big, you need to invent something or start a company on your own. Great engineering students do that. Just take a look at how many profitable small companies started by MIT and Stanford alumni. IB and consulting are great, you will make millions when you are in your 50s while working 80 hours a week. On the other hand you can be millionaires when you are in your 30s if you work in the high tech business. Best example, see Larry Page and Sergey Brin, billionaires at the age of 32.</p>
<p>I would point out that even if the 110k glass ceiling is true, that's still FAR FAR better than what most liberal arts majors get. Most of them can't even dream of making that kind of money. </p>
<p>Look, I'm not out to overly bash the liberal arts. Indeed, for somebody who is good at liberal arts and not good in quant, they should definitely major in the liberal arts. However, we need to move away from the false trope that all liberal arts classes are going to teach you communications skills or leadership skills, or that all students who take such classes are doing so because they want to improve those skills. That is nothing more than a utopian fantasy. The fact is, many liberal arts classes basically teach you very little, and often times, nothing at all, for the simple reason that they are just extremely easy and don't demand that their students develop themselves in any way. Many don't even require that you go to class or that you've done decent work. And plenty of students take those classes PRECISELY because they are so easy. So it's really a match made in heaven. These students don't want to improve themselves, and these classes allow them to not improve themselves.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But once again, aehmo, you've still refused to answer the question of what else are you going to study as an undergrad?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>i can answer for him, nursing.</p>
<p>if you mock the veracity (truthfulness) of my answer, sakky, i shall give you a 7 page retort on why nursing is a good undergraduate major.</p>
<p>Can we just make a nursing board so that unggio does not need to feel the need to tout nursing on every engineering thread.</p>
<p>For the record, I have nothing whatsoever against engineering as a profession. Most engineers don't get rich, but actually I've known some who did. More importantly they are doing well enough financially, and hopefully those who stay in it like their work. That's really more important than anything else, at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Most engineers I know don't work the kind of hours that most bankers I know work. This can be important in maintaining a healthy and stable family life. I'd bet that the divorce rate among Investment bankers dwarfs that of engineers, based on what I've seen working in each of these fields.</p>
<p>In the end, you're working at something 40- 80 hours a week, so you'd better like it. A lot. Don't lose sight of that, please.</p>
<p>Nursing is best for you if you love nursing more than anything else you can be doing. Etc.</p>
<p>unggio83, do nurses get paid more than engineers in normal cases, and will just having an undergraduate degree be enough for somebody to be a nurse?</p>
<p>Agreed. In the end of the day you should just work for something you love. Life is too short to make getting rich your only goal. Personally, I really don't see a big difference between making 110K and 250K. It's not like you will starve making 110K when you are 50. I would be satisfied to drive a Lexus instead of a Ferrari.</p>