UChicago for a Possible Engineer Career?

@cpark252, I have admiration that you know yourself better than i did at your age. I went into hard-core engineering and its only later in life I realized I should have taken a more balanced academic menu including humanities. But my school focused only on engineering so even if I had the insight then there were few options to do humanities. So my first thought would be to go to a school which offers a broad curriculum that allows you take courses in philosophy etc.

There are many career progressions for engineers, the conventional (or used to be conventional) is to get into design of components parts, and then advance to doing systems engineering which is figuring out how all the parts of a system interact and making trade-off decisions. Just like riding a bike, there is no text book on how to “do” systems engineering, you learn by being an apprentice to a more experienced engineer. (My favorite quote describing Systems Engineers is that they exercise engineering judgement, which involves selecting between two right answers- you can only learn this through an apprenticeship). When I graduated in the eighties, only Aerospace had Systems Engineers, but as the underlying subsytems became more complex other industries started needing this position.

There are many richly rewarding off-shoots off this path. You can peel off to become a sales engineer, i.e. someone who sells complex technical equipment, i.e. engineers selling to other engineers and helping solve complex problems. For example, if you are selling semiconductor equipment to say an Intel at a few millions of $ a pop, Intel won’t fully pay you unless the equipment is fully working - so you need to get the equipment installed and working, which involves art and science (and some prayer)

Or you can move into “engineering support” which is to support manufacturing, maintenance and other productivity initiatives. If maintainence sounds boring recall that someone like Caterpillar makes the most $ by selling spare parts and keeping their equipment running in the field. Ditto for jet engines.

Last but not the least you can become an academic- my EE Prof in grad school was an ex GE guy who had made breakthrough discoveries in his GE career and then retired and taught grad students (funnily enough most of his students ended up at GE). Incidentally this was at a 2nd-3rd tier school, and one aspect of an engineering degree that within reason it doesn’t matter where you go to school (assume it is accredited)

The field is being rapidly transformed by extensive use of computers (so cyber-security issues are now key which was never a blip on the horizon when I practiced), AI and Machine learning, so you have to stay on top of those evolving fields to be relevant. Often younger people know more than you (unlike medicine or the law) so you need to get used to that. More prosaically you need to survive the introductory physics courses, which are used for weeding out. Its the first application of complex math to real problems and usually fairly brutal.

For inspiration you may care to read up on the work of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who had as much impact on the modern world as did Edison but is far less known. He was physically handicapped and was almost turned away at Ellis Island but ended up taking the theoretical work of Maxwell and Faraday and making it usable in terms of the electrical transmission lines and other equipment. He embodied the essence of an engineer- taking complex theory and making it work…safely.

Good luck in your choices.

@BrianBoiler Now I am slightly confused, isnt what you are describing a sales engineer? I was considering mechanical engineer (if I dont go to UChicago) What major is the right choice where you make discovery and push the boundaries of science? Based on your response, marketing isn’t my favorite thing to do. I recognize that engineers will at one point be involved in that field and I also recognize that computers are doing more work but I thought engineers were about making new things

@cpark252 if you want to make discoveries and discover breakthroughs you become a research scientist. If you want make that discovery commercial you become an engineer. Very rarely do engineers make the type of breakthrough you’d think of as a pure scientific breakthrough. They may make one that makes an existing product a step change better.

Engineers solve real world problems (like how to make the iPhone smaller) using math and science and previous work to find a solution, sounds like you want to be a scientist. Still there is a lot of overlap and you will find chemists doing chemical engineering and vice versa.

A sales engineer is one with a technical degree who uses his engineering knowledge to sell engineering equipment/solutions. He/she does not spend much time,if any actually inventing and improving products

A sales engineer is a salesman. Period.

For complex items the “sales” engineer knows as much- sometimes more- as the audience. This is purely darwinian- if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be respected and their ability to persuade and influence would diminish.I have seen complex CAD SW tech sales guys, and sales guys for jet engines in action and they were impressive. They may not have the prestige of line engineers, but usually laugh all the way to the bank.

“Very rarely do engineers make the type of breakthrough you’d think of as a pure scientific breakthrough. They may make one that makes an existing product a step change better.”

Sorry to distract but we know PhD engineers who ARE working on breakthroughs - they do research and publish, etc. There must be PhD engineers in industry as well, conducting research? Couldn’t someone doing a science or ME major at UChicago then goes on to grad school in engineering? We also know chemistry majors who have done the same thing - one guy left with a master’s in chemical engineering, and later on went on to Kellogg for an MBA in finance!

There are many paths.

One nuance about UChicago - at least the UChicago I remember - is that they can be theory-heavy. CS is a great example - I understand that recently they’ve worked in some more “hands-on” courses. In the past it was almost like they prepared the kids for grad school rather than industry. Having said that - this preparation seems optimal if you are interested in discovering new things and conducting research in a field that has a large applied component to it. Maybe engineering at UChcago is the same way - you will receive some “hands on” opportunities but you will also receive a deep theoretical understanding of your subject. It might be highly demanding intellectually, just like any other engineering undergraduate program, but in a different way from something that is just preparing you for a job upon graduation. A job is important of course! But at UChicago they kinda look beyond that horizon.

Just my 2 cents.

^^ (Should add that the guy with the chem BS, chem Eng. MS, and Finance MBA then went to work at a financial valuation firm devising and valuing complex financial instruments, and now runs his own proprietary investment business. His deep knowledge of math definitely helped! He was NOT stuck on the trading floor or in the corporate finance department underwriting securities or any such).

Thanks everyone! For now I’ll stick to deciding between CalPoly SLO and UCSD for my engineering major. Besides I am also waitlisted for UChicago so something I might worry about at a different time. UChicago is a great school for me in any other way besides engineering. So if I decide to change majors maybe I should transfer (if I can)