Is engineering worth it still?

Parents Forum
21

It’s wise to be thinking about WHY study economics, or a STEM major, or anything. @PickOne1 has many good points to consider. I would read his reasoning, and then reread it and think about what he said.

Why STEM? Why economics? Why study art?

Who are you? What do you want to do? Is security important? Creativity? Exploration? Or maybe putting ones mark on the world. Do you want to start something, or will you be content in doing what already has been done. Do you want to travel, or do you like staying in familiar surroundings? Answering the basic questions of who you are and what you love to do is the beginning to understanding what you should study. It may be STEM. Or it could be economics. Or it could be something completely different.

When my son and I were discussing which AP tests to take, he eliminated Physics because it wasn’t something he wanted to pursue beyond H.S. He was well prepared and I’m sure would have scored the needed 5, but he didn’t see a purpose in using his time to study something that he wasn’t going to pursue beyond H.S. Although he has 3 years of calc, he didn’t want to go STEM. Instead, he taught himself statistics and earned a 5 so he could get credit for freshman Stats.

Engineer’s and scientist hit their ceiling very early in their career, and unless one moves into management, that’s where they stay. @PickOne1 said it very well. Nothing wrong with that. It pays the bills and someone has to design the things to work.

When he starts his freshman year in August, he plans on pursuing a dual degree in Economics and Computer Science with a minor in Japanese. He has spent the last year contemplating who he is and what he wants to do in his life. He’s asked many people about what they do, and why they chose the path they chose. But the final answer cames after he sought and received council, and comes from within.

No one but yourself can say what path you should take. It’s easy and predictable to go STEM when one is solid or even exceptional at the math and sciences, but even then, there may be something better than going STEM.

22

Depends on the STEM degree. CS and Math have very good prospects, Civil Engineering and Science majors have poor prospects.

23

What a silly discussion! Studying engineering is worth it if you like and are good at engineering, and it’s not worth it if you don’t like it. Same as anything else.

24

One thing I see in grade school students is the opposite problem from what you are talking about. Students who think they just aren’t good in math and science, because those courses require more time, effort, and practice to master than other courses. Many of them do not seem to understand that this is usually true for even the best students. If it is taking longer to finish math homework than homework for other subjects, the student and often the parents assume the student is, “Just not good at math.”

25

@Much2learn I second that. We put too much stock in natural aptitude in this country. Parents would never say “my kid can’t read” but they have no trouble saying “my kid can’t do math”, or even “I can’t do math”. Some even wear that label like it’s badge of honor, implying their kid (usually daughter) isn’t a nerd, but that they are “popular” or whatever. Really stupid.

Many of the European, Russian and Asian engineers I’ve worked with were appalled by what they perceived as many Americans’ low math aptitude, people who can’t compute 15% of a restaurant bill for tip without a calculator. I don’t think these foreigners are born with better math aptitude. They simply understand that being good in math takes a lot of practice. There is really no substitute for that old drill and kill in math. I remember half of my kids’ 5th grade class still struggled with the multiplication table by mid year. By 7th grade most of these kids are toast, convinced that they can’t do math, and gave up. How far can you go in life if you don’t at least pass Algebra I?

More parents and more kids need to understand that good math skill is not just essential for a STEM degree, it is also essential for a degree in accounting or finance. Public accounting is an excellent field for women. Although it has a cut throat up or out structure, those who make it up the food chain and eventually make partner can make over $500k a year. Since most top LACs incl. the Ivies do not offer accounting as a major, the majority of accountants and accounting firm partners came from public schools, many from unheralded 2nd or 3rd tier public schools, and are making the big bucks after 11 years. The big 4 are also excellent companies that offer lots of perks for their employees, including lots of in house training all over the country, in posh hotels and locations.

But I digress, going back to the OP’s question, of course an engineering degree is still worth it! Many engineers do not even work in engineering. I know of mechanical/chemical/civil/industrial engineers who ended up working in IT. Employers like to hire engineers for a variety of positions because they know it takes lots of hard work to get that degree, unlike art history, sociology, communications or fashion merchandising. A CS or CE grad today fresh out of college can make $70,000 to $120,000, while an English major is lucky to make $40k, and this is the way it has always been. Even MBAs with engineering background are preferred and paid better over MBAs with a LibArt background. Why is that? Employers know what they are getting, they are paying for brainpower and good work ethic.

26

@cmsjmt just because engineers work hard to get their degree does not necessarily translate into them being able to write a cohesive proposal, persuasively present a concept to a group of people, communicate effectively with their peers up and down an organization or possess the interpersonal skills to be effective in a company. I will not argue that engineering isn’t a difficult pursuit (I bailed myself back in the day), but you have written the post as if to belittle the skills gained by obtaining a liberal arts degree. Personally, I’ve always preferred to hire liberal arts undergrads because they can actually write, speak, and think critically, which are skills that are sorely lacking out there in the business world today.

27

Wow…Do companies, say, in Silicon Valley, really need to pay so much to a new college graduate with a CS or CE degree (say, an MS degree)?! It is somehow hard to believe.

No wonder my rent keeps rising.

BTW, when the dinosaur still roamed the Earth, I was graduated with a degree like this. But I guess I am too old to be “liked” by these companies. (Anyone here has heard of or seen a 4-bit microcontroller or AMD bit-slice devices to construct a CPU?! I bet not many here. Somehow whenever I mentioned using assembly language to do something (or what the machine language code a piece of C language code will be compiled into, to most of my coworkers, they likely looked at me as if I came from another planet.)

Maybe the “best” years for such a degree are between 5 to 15 years after graduated from college or graduate school?!

28

I think that CS just about anywhere, if done well, can net close to 50-70 for a BS with still wet ink.

What’s really interesting is that everything you know can be of use. I actually believe some knowledge of literature, art, architecture, and languages can make you a considerably more potent engineer than otherwise.

Similarly, the engineer who knows how to weld, who makes his own intercooler for a vintage Volvo, or understands - at a deep level - the vagaries of sailboat racing is capable of bringing some unique insights to work.

Laughter happens when someone brings two apparently unrelated ideas close enough together for the open circuit between them to short closed. Engineering is roughly the same thing - recognizing aspects of several apparently unrelated concepts, and exploiting them to make a new idea out of the collision.

29

[QUOTE=""]

Engineers and scientists hit their ceilings very early in their career, and unless one moves into management, that’s where they stay

[/QUOTE]

Sort of. It helps to think of it as a skilled trade. An apprentice carpenter and a master carpenter have roughly the same job descriptions. The master tradesperson can do all the apprentice level work in about half the time, and is willing to attempt things that the apprentice or journeyman never should.

Success depends on the master tradesman’s willingness to share knowledge and above all, take risks.

30

I did not say engineers do not make good money, just that if still engaged in actual engineering, you need to be a very good engineer to make good or very good money … and work hard through your career. There are people making big bucks with engineering degrees.

Someone mentioned creativity, I think engineering design can be very creative, in sort of an ultra-nerdy way. Some of the items below really involve creative out of the box thinking, even if it moving something a few inches or adding a few features to a design.

Oddly, I have met more analysts than designers in my career.

Taking risks as a master tradesman / engineer includes :

Taking on problems with no previous solution
Taking on problems others have tried and not solved
Fixing broken things or designs that don’t work
Convincing a customer that it is better to buy a decent piece of furniture for $500 than something for $5 from IKEA
Doing something for less money and in less time than previous people, and pulling it off
Making something better
Laying out a plan for a complex task that gets things done

Also obviously

selling your project, etc as someone put above. Even selling yourself as opposed to that new grad starting next week or someone much lower skilled and slightly cheaper.

Likely to get in the top 25% of pay, you need to have the social and communications skills that someone above seems to think is somehow lacking in ALL engineers

AND be a really good engineer

At that point, you can also be a consultant or take on short term assignments, either working for yourself or within your organization.

Master craftsman could also take on say a whole household of furniture with 3 month delivery and have apprentices and middle level people do the more mundane work while master makes it all fit together.

Obviously, I like that analogy …

31

My D just graduated from CoE UCB last May with a BS in CS and decided to go on to grad school. Several friends of hers went to work in the industry, none of them offered less than $100K/year. I don’t know if the companies need to pay so much, but apparently they are willing to.

You’re referring to the AMD 2900/29000 bit-slice series? My senior project was using the AMD bit-slice series to design a system equivalent to a Motorola MC68000. To test the system, we had to write programs calling routines written for MC68000 in a ROM supplied by the professor.

Back to OP’s question: CS is a major as worthwhile as any other major. If you’re concerned that there are millions of others pursuing the same major, having better GPA and/or graduating schools “better” (whatever that means) than yours, you should have the same concern with any major.

I graduated from a second tier engineering school, and I’m sure there are engineers much better than I am. But for the last 30 years, I’ve been always employed. I’m by no means rich, but have been able to provide my family with a comfortable life, and more importantly, I always like what I’m doing.

32

Yes. We used AMD 2900 series. If I remember it, we only need to “design” a cpu which can run any machine instructions we could define ourselves.

Since there appears to be some engineering/CS/CE-minded people here, let’s have some fun for those who are programmers or programmer-to-be. Is it reasonable or unreasonable (i.e., fair or not) for a new college graduate to be able to read and explain the following piece of code if he or she claims to a Python programmer? (It is intentionally made somewhat cryptic here to make the “test” not so trivial. But the person is only required to read the existing code and explain it, unlike, as I heard, the Google may ask an interviewee to write a piece of code which implement the general (not need to be as full function as being PCRE-compliant of course) regular expression matching function on the spot.)

Is this piece of code Pythonic or is it maliciously written as mysteriously as possible to throw other programmers off? In our nest of wood, we occasionally play with code so that the same task can be done in as few lines of source code as possible, sometimes just one-liner, just for the fun of it. Occasionally, we compete by creating code that runs the fastest. (When we were younger, we also added another requirement: It had to be coded in assembler. Much earlier years, we wrote and keyed in machine code in hexadecimal code too - on Mostek KIM-1 kit and Motorola D2 kit or some Intel SDK kit. We also ported a then-popular small-sized mini-Basic interpreter from one machine to another, both in assembly language.)


[QUOTE=""]
def prob(): ... x = ["", "+", "-"] ... y = ["2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9"] ... z = [["".join([op, num]) for op in x] for num in y] ... i1 = "1" ... return [i1+i2+i3+i4+i5+i6+i7+i8+i9 for i2 in z[0] for i3 in z[1] for i4 in z[2] for i5 in z[3] for i6 in z[4] for i7 in z[5] for i8 in z[6] for i9 in z[7] if eval(i1+i2+i3+i4+i5+i6+i7+i8+i9) == 100] ... res = prob() for pair in enumerate(res): ... print "Solution %d: %s = 100" % pair ... Solution 0: 123+45-67+8-9 = 100 Solution 1: 123+4-5+67-89 = 100 Solution 2: 123-45-67+89 = 100 Solution 3: 123-4-5-6-7+8-9 = 100 Solution 4: 12+3+4+5-6-7+89 = 100 Solution 5: 12+3-4+5+67+8+9 = 100 Solution 6: 12-3-4+5-6+7+89 = 100 Solution 7: 1+23-4+56+7+8+9 = 100 Solution 8: 1+23-4+5+6+78-9 = 100 Solution 9: 1+2+34-5+67-8+9 = 100 Solution 10: 1+2+3-4+5+6+78+9 = 100

[/QUOTE]

33

There will always be a need for most college major fields- they evolve as society changes. Now electrical engineering is combined with computer engineering (or computer e was added to ee one could say) for example.

Yup- bachelors in computer science can get $80-100K per year straight out of college even outside Silicon Valley or Seattle. Some super smart grads there- those who could easily do grad work in it or math somewhere. It offers enough intellectual challenge and a good peer group for those that enjoy it.

You have many excellent responses so far that point out LIKING a field. Economics is Social Science at my flagship U and I’m sure elsewhere although it has become much more science/math based than in my college days (as has psychology for that matter).

Everyone’s point- don’t try to game the system in choosing your major. Go with what you enjoy and have aptitude for. Not everyone needs to be at the top of any profession- there is a need in other places for many different jobs that are saturated in some markets. Go for it. Plan your life around living and enjoying what you do, not some mythical best job.

34

What if I, for example, graduate from my state flagship with a BA in Computer Science? What amount of money am I looking at yearly straight out of college? Does having a high GPA garner a higher salary?

By the way, I love programming and computers. I chose Computer Science solely on my enjoyment of the field.

35

Not so. The reality is that employers like to hire grads they don’t have to train. Employers have abrogated any responsibility they once had to train new employees. It has nothing to do with “brainpower” and “work ethic.” There are plenty of subjects requiring a high degree of cognitive functioning and self-discipline that don’t yield a market reward in the form of a high starting salary right after college.

36

@stugace - yes, high GPA and a graduate degree are like starting 2 spots up in a game of Candyland. It helps, but doesn’t necessarily predict the outcome. You’ll find the occasional PhD who earns less than a higher energy BS equipped peer.

37

Just curious about this (if anyone here happens to know something about this):

Is Python a popular first language today, before a CS major starts to take the CS core courses? Back in my days, Python was not invented yet. It seems a more ad hoc scripting language PERL came along before Python. (But both are before my time. When I was in college, Pascal and C were what students into programming would pick up.)

Not any engineering/programmer-minded CCer here would like to comment on whether a beginning (or somewhat more experienced than a beginner, say, one year after college) Python programmer would likely understand the piece of code in post #31?

38

MCAT, you are asking the wrong forum.

39

Yes.

40

“When my son and I were discussing which AP tests to take, he eliminated Physics because it wasn’t something he wanted to pursue beyond H.S. He was well prepared and I’m sure would have scored the needed 5, but he didn’t see a purpose in using his time to study something that he wasn’t going to pursue beyond H.S”

I can see why he opted not to do a STEM major. But it’s a shame he didn’t take the exam. He probably could have gotten a 3 or 4 with minimal studies. At many schools that would be good enough to get credit for a science requirement or free elective.