Is it worth going into engineering or is finance a better option?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Is engineering even worth a degree? Worth the struggle?</p>

<p>As far as I can see...</p>

<ol>
<li>Jobs are being outsourced, it won't be long before India (computer & software jobs) & China (manufacturing jobs) take over engineering jobs.</li>
<li>It seems that employers only care about the GPA, doesn't matter what degree you get but its your knowledge and GPA that really matters.</li>
</ol>

<p>My friend who just dropped Electrical Engineering (NC State University) tells me that at the end we just want a college degree that will get us a good salary. He says that engineering is not worth the route when finance can clearly get you the same salary with better chances of rising.</p>

<p>He also told me that with engineering, you are basically being used to complete a company's project. After the project is over, your back in the market looking for another job. </p>

<p>I don't know what finance has in store for me. Is there any way I can combine Comp. Engineering with finance so I can work as manager level?</p>

<p>My initial plan is to major in comp engineering, minor in electrical engineering and then go to grad school; still haven't decided what to pursue yet...I will do computer programming and learn Java classes so I can have both low and high level programming knowledge. The only bad part is that I don't have a good GPA.</p>

<p>What to do? Should I continue or should I switch to finance?</p>

2

<p>Let me see, spend 60 hours a week preparing spreadsheets and playing Bain Capital Redux or spend 60 hours a week and your stuff ends up on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas or elsewhere, where it is admired or vilified by the masses (and your peers).</p>

<p>There are jobs that combine the two - we have a finance guy at work whose job is to deal with pricing and market sources for commodity items that go on our boards (wire, solder…). I’d cry if I had to do it :)</p>

3

<p>Just to throw something out there, it’s possible to get a finance job with an engineering degree, but the reverse is much harder, if not impossible. Also, even though it’s not “true engineering”, many banks hire CS majors.</p>

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<p>Pretend for a moment that engineers only make 30k a year; would you still want to go through the struggle? If the answer is no then forget about it. In my opinion, when people ask “should I do engineering or <insert other=”" major="">?", if the “other major” is anything other than another science or math related major then they have no business in engineering. I have heard of Financial Engineering, which uses an engineering mindset for financial problems and products and such, so if you want something that really combines the two that is probably your best bet. Otherwise, I’ve heard of some engineering majors being hired by financial firms due to their mathematical abilities, though I don’t know how common this is.</insert></p>

<p>Sounds to me like your friend has a bitter attitude toward engineering cuz he couldn’t hack it, don’t let him discourage you if you want to do engineering.</p>

5

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Maybe. It very well could happen, but the future has a habit of being unpredictable.</p>

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Depends on the employer, but honestly this isn’t really a bad thing.</p>

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Why do you want an engineering degree? For a safe, stable career? If so, your friend is at least half right. I don’t know if finance is really the better route.</p>

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Depends on the job. But this is not the rule.</p>

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You seem to have no idea what you want to do. Care to share more about yourself so that we can help you decide? Why do you want to do CompE? Why graduate school? What year are you?</p>

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This is both wrong and utterly biased and you know it.</p>

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<p>From NeoDymium:
“You seem to have no idea what you want to do. Care to share more about yourself so that we can help you decide? Why do you want to do CompE? Why graduate school? What year are you?”</p>

<p>A Junior, I want to do Comp E because I like learning about computers, so I basically decided to go into this field. I have good interest in programming but I do struggle with it (I did not start form an early age due to bad high school experience). I did not choose Computer Science because a Comp E degree is more valuable than Comp Sci. A master’s in today’s economy is pretty much necessary so I might as well go ahead and put the extra effort and get it.</p>

<p>Appreciate the help!</p>

7

<p>It is wrong and it is biased, but it’s also true. I’ve shown stuff at CES for 7 or 8 of the last 10 years - always worked thru the holidays, weekends, thru blizzards, all in an effort to show that our gadget is better than the other guys’ gadget, and so on. And all for a pizza lunch in late January and a few Best Buy gift cards (and occasionally seeing our stuff actually make it to production).</p>

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<p>If you’re dealing with hardware, usually.</p>

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<p>It’ll be pretty long… I mean, sure, some engineering jobs are gonna get outsourced in the near future, to India, to China, to Mexico, Brazil, and others. But not the mass of them. And now there’s more and more talk about jobs coming back from these places. Outsourcing really shouldn’t be a concern. </p>

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<p>This is true, if you work very hard. If you prefer to have a better life, albiet with a little less money, Engineering is the way to go. In addition, there’s a certain type of person you need to be in order to be successful in IB. Engineering is a lot more flexible with personality types.</p>

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<p>Can be the case, but not usually. Companies who are doing many projects will try to keep the same people around for multiple projects because their expertise from completing other projects can help them in future projects. A company who does one project will usually just outsource the project to another company. Most companies don’t want to hire and manage new employees for a single short term project.</p>

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<p>I don’t like to make direct attacks like this but this is a very bad post. </p>

<p>I sure wouldn’t be majoring in engineering if I knew the best I was gonna get was 30K, assuming all other majors have the same job prospects they do now. Hardly anyone would. I’d major in Math or Econ or something instead. If you wanted to say that you should like engineering if you want to do it, that’s a terrible example to illustrate it.</p>

<p>And come on, you don’t know this guy or his friend at all, and you’re going to automatically assume the guy just wasn’t smart enough to do it.</p>

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<p>You can get a job in finance with a degree in engineering or CS. Happens all the time.</p>

<p>Also, and I know this isn’t the point of the question, but CS is a perfectly fine thing for someone to major in. While it’s not “real engineering”, software “engineering” is doing pretty well compared to most traditional engineering majors (at the moment; things like this change). Statements like “CS is not as valuable as X” are, generally, untrue.</p>

<p>Finance is a fine thing to major in, too. If you want to do finance, there’s no reason not to go for it. You might get a different impression from some people in the engineering subforum, but successful people graduate in things other than STEM, let alone engineering, let alone “true” engineering, every semester.</p>

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<p>@ Vladenschlutte</p>

<p>It’s a simple question, do you want to study engineering to be an engineer or to make an engineer’s money? And who said anything about his friend not being smart enough? All I was saying is that it’s obvious that he picked engineering for the money, not for any interest in the actual material, and found it was more than he bargained for. It happens often. It doesn’t mean that they’re not smart, just that they are not really somebody who should be giving advice on whether or not to major in engineering.</p>

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<p>@Soclydeza</p>

<p>I did not pick engineering for money, I knew the consequence and I never cared what engineers earned. But there were some areas of engineering and the IT field that I was not aware of, until now. I was much better with computers; apart from computers and cars I know nothing else. I really went after my passion and it seems that Engineerign is just shooting me in the foot. </p>

<p>Nobody knows what engineering really is until you actually start doing your work and when you further progress, you begin to realize what decision you have made. I just don’t know if its worth having a low gpa and graduating with engineering degree or go with a decent gpa in finance. Or maybe I am just not trying hard enough.</p>

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<p>How about double majoring in computer science (liberal arts) and finance?</p>

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<p>

First of all, EVERYTHING worth doing is a struggle. To quote Jimmy Dugan, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.” Seriously, if you can find a high-paying job that requires neither struggle nor conspicuous and unusual talent, please let me know.</p>

<p>Second, it depends on what is important to you - for some people, the answer is a clear no, because they don’t want the job enough to really work for it. If this is what you actually want to do, then heck yes it is worth it. It’s not an insurmountable task, the US graduates tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of engineers every year.</p>

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Nearly every job that can be performed remotely can be outsourced - don’t be surprised if this spreads beyond engineering very soon. Also, many jobs are NOT outsourced, and engineering gives you a lot more fall backs than most other degrees.</p>

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Varies by the employer, but yes, GPA is extremely important. GPA is a good indicator of a lot of factors that they value, such as how well you learned the material, and how hard you worked, and how good you are at working within the rules of an institution. If you have other significant things to offer (like a truly inventive mind) then you will still get a job, but most people don’t.</p>

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This primarily a factor of the company and the scale of the job. Some companies have a small number of products and have a binge/purge approach to hiring engineers. Other companies have a large number of projects and prefer (when possible) to rotate engineers through different designs, keeping their workforce stable. I work for the latter, but have seen the former as well.</p>

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Statistically, something less exciting than engineering. Seriously, finance offers some truly stratospheric heights in salary and power, but that is a tiny, tiny fraction of the field - the average finance major has a more modest career than the average engineer. It’s like rock and roll - for evey platinum-selling band there are thousands more playing in bars while working other jobs on the side.</p>

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A manager in what field? A manager in engineering has little need of finance (outside a couple of positions), and a manager in finance has no need of engineering. If you start in CompE you can either move into management (with any or no master degree at all), or you can get an MBA or masters in financial engineering and move into the financial world.</p>

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Don’t be surprised if that plan changes substantially. Sounds decent to start with, you will have years to explore the field and decide what you want to do.</p>

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I suggest you figure out WHY you do not have a good GPA, and see if you can fix it. A high GPA will open a LOT of doors, a poor one will leave you struggling in any field. I graduated in the middle of my class in high school, but graduated (eventually) in the top 6% of my engineering department. Out of high school I had few prospects, out of college I had tons.</p>

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At the end of the day, what do you want to spend your days doing? The money is going to be at least decent either way (assuming you work for it, of course!) but some people would hate the actual job of engineering. Personally, I would hate being in finance. My boss’s cohort in grad school largely went to the financial industry, and he decided not to simply because the money was not good enough to take a job he would hate every day of his life.</p>

<p>So make the call. And remember that it is not a final decision - you can change your mind later, although it is easier to go from engineering to finance than the other way around.</p>

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<p>1) Umm a Computer Engineering is not more valuable than a CS other than for hardware jobs. In the software world CS > Comp. Eng. If you want to do software a CS will give you more job opportunity, better positions and higher salary. I am almost sure CS graduates have higher salaries than Comp Eng on average. I know engineering is more valuable than science but CS is not a science. It is more related to math and engineering than anything else. >>>>>>DO RESEARCH<<<<<<<<</p>

<p>2)You CANT major in comp Eng and minor in EE BECAUSE comp. eng. is a subset of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In most schools, there are no comp eng classes. They usually take 60-70% EE courses(Hardware classes) and 30-40% CS classes(Software and the hardware CS course AKA Computer Architecture). You will have more than what is required for a minor in EE. >>>>>> DO RESEARCH <<<<<<<</p>

<p>3) DO NOT MAJOR JUST FOR THE MONEY. Major for both because you like the field AND the salary LOL. </p>

<p>You have to do a little more research before actually majoring in something.</p>

<p>If you are not good programming, major in Electrical Engineering. But then again, If you DON’T like physics 2. You probably should not do CS or engineering. Do another major and actually do yourself a favor and do research. Engineers and CS can work on finance because of all the math classes required and the problem solving skills. I wouldnt do it bc I believe that you should do your job WELL. If you want to work on finance, Why the hell would major in eng or cs?</p>

<p>Do a degree related to the job you want to do AND actually do research using google is free lol</p>

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<p>I’m not saying that finance is the bane of civilization, but it is a fact that the fall of many major human civilizations has been preceded by the financial sectors of those civilizations growing to a particular percentage of total economic “output.” Wait, I guess I am saying that finance is the bane of civilization. That’s enough for me to it want to have anything to do with it. I’d rather make less money by producing something than more money simply by moving money around.</p>

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<p>Debt may be the bane of civilization, but it’s also its greatest enabler. The biggest double-edged sword in history.
For example, without the ability to borrow money, 99% or more of engineering jobs would never have existed because of large startup costs that no one would be able to pay.</p>

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<p>Debt is one of the most powerful tools that responsible people can use to achieve their economic goals. The problem is that it’s basic human nature to be irresponsible with debt.</p>

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<p>Oh I never said debt was an inherently bad thing. An overly large financial industry is.</p>

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<p>Not entirely true… I can think of several girls in college that were hard to get but not worth doing. :D</p>