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CatchrNdRy posted:I think the CS idea is better for employment opportunities than BME, but it puts you out of pure engineering realm too. This forum is so bipolar. Someone posts that they want to be a computer engineer and they are told to look into computer science because it's more versatile and there is no way you are going to build computers. Then someone says they want to do CS and they are told to do computer engineer for the title "engineer."
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Jun 13, 2013 19:01
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I think it's because there are a ton of people on both sides that want to argue for their favored profession.
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Jun 13, 2013 19:37
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HClChicken posted:This forum is so bipolar. Someone posts that they want to be a computer engineer and they are told to look into computer science because it's more versatile and there is no way you are going to build computers. Then someone says they want to do CS and they are told to do computer engineer for the title "engineer." I honestly feel like if a company disqualifies you for a general engineering position because you are "not an engineer" (due to CS degree) that company is probably run by idiots who would have been unbearable to work with anyway.
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Jun 13, 2013 19:59
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My take on it/expectations: Computer Engineer - hardware-focused, should have digital logic experience, be proficient in VHDL/Verilog and low-level C programming. Should also have basic knowledge of electrical engineering (lot of programs have these guys share classes with EEs) and what their logic/software is doing. Computer Science - really needs to be split into software engineering and computer science. In my head, computer scientists have amazing beards and do high-level mathematics/algorithm development, design programming languges / compilers / etc. In reality a giant spectrum ranging from people who can do amazing math/algorithms but couldn't write a line of code to save their lives to some hipster who can sling CSS/JavaScript with absolutely no idea how to write anything that isn't interpreted. Software Engineering - you do software for a living in a structured environment. You write software to specifications, use version control, sane software design methodlogies, etc. Maybe not a super deep understanding of algorithms/low-level work, but you know how to get tasks done expediently without getting bogged down in details I'm thinking of these as job titles and not degrees...I would argue that if you solely consider the "ability to program" sufficent for a programmer, you could hire literally any degree (or lack thereof) to fill a position assuming they are technically competent. Same for a CpE; if you're not expecting the low-level hardware design experience, you could probably pick up someone who's self-taught themselves embedded code from playing with AVRs/PICs. I think I've said/done this in the past in this thread but I think it's better to ask what people want to do rather than asking them about a course of study. For instance, with medical imaging, I would argue an EE is the way to go because you can focus on signal processing courses, perhaps pick up a CS minor if you need it (just self-teach yourself...) and be able to write your own processing routines. Naturally, some HR people might disagree because their management thinks they need BME and nothing else, but that's what networking is for. Corla Plankun posted:I honestly feel like if a company disqualifies you for a general engineering position because you are "not an engineer" (due to CS degree) that company is probably run by idiots who would have been unbearable to work with anyway. ^^ pretty much, if you have management policies / automated resume filters like that in place, it's their loss. e: alternate yet common takes Computer Engineer - embedded systems engineer, write software for embedded platforms, no logic / hardware experience expected Computer Science - IT guy among so many others 
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Jun 13, 2013 20:05
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I think after 2 years my program splits into CS and Software Engineering, probably going the SE route myself.
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Jun 13, 2013 20:10
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grover posted:I took 6 credits last semester (taking 3 over the summer) while working full time, and didn't think it was that bad at all. Yeah, cuts into my free time somewhat, but it's not like it's to the exclusion of all else. Lecture 1 night a week really helps. Homework load definitely depends on the prof and the student; if you're struggling, every "hour" of homework might take you 2 or 3. Well yeah if you can take six credit hours while going to class once a week then go for it I guess.
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Jun 13, 2013 22:57
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HClChicken posted:This forum is so bipolar. Someone posts that they want to be a computer engineer and they are told to look into computer science because it's more versatile and there is no way you are going to build computers. Then someone says they want to do CS and they are told to do computer engineer for the title "engineer." All I was trying to say was cross-discpline work for engineering majors tends to be more common and easier than for pure CS people. There is a shared skillset that a more theory-trained CS person MAY not have. I am not trying to push electrical or computer, I am neither. an skeleton seems truly interested in bioinformatics, I'm glad he has focus, I was willing to take any sort of technical work when I was younger, even if it slightly deviated from my schooling. CatchrNdRy fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 23:49
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movax posted:I think I've said/done this in the past in this thread but I think it's better to ask what people want to do rather than asking them about a course of study. I've seen this mentioned a few times in this thread, but it's honestly been a touch difficult finding anything beyond broad brush descriptions of what "X" Engineer does. For instance, I've been considering Chemical Engineering heavily partially because it seems so adaptable and has a number of applications that I find intriguing but I'm not entirely uninterested in Mechanical. I just have very little idea what they do beyond the basics.
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Jun 14, 2013 00:39
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Well yeah if you can take six credit hours while going to class once a week then go for it I guess.
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Jun 14, 2013 00:47
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Relentlessboredomm posted:I've seen this mentioned a few times in this thread, but it's honestly been a touch difficult finding anything beyond broad brush descriptions of what "X" Engineer does. Chemical engineering and mechanical engineering have many subjects shared in common like fluid dynamics or heat transfer, even to some extent they both involve dynamic system and control. Yes they both have wide range of applications so it's quite hard to tell what are you supposed to do for a job after you finish your studies. I have friends studying mechanical engineering but ended up working for a chemical process company and I know a professor who's specialist in automatic control but he graduated with Ph.D in chemical engineering.
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Jun 14, 2013 14:27
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I just had an interview for a sales engineer position. It's a customer service type of job which won't really utilize my bme degree at all. I don't feel like it's what I should be doing and its about an hour's drive from my house, but it's all I have going and it pays alright. Should I just suck it up or keep looking? I don't even know for what jobs I aught to be looking. This just kinda fell into my lap when a recruiter contacted me. At the end of the interview when I met back with the hiring manager it felt awkward. She mentioned a lot of people don't realize this is a desk job until later. So I assume this means a lot of people bail out when they hear this. I can't tell if I'm afraid of committing, or if this is the wrong choice. I'm definitely getting ahead of myself, but I need to be ready just in case.
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Jun 14, 2013 18:11
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Booties posted:I just had an interview for a sales engineer position. It's a customer service type of job which won't really utilize my bme degree at all. I don't feel like it's what I should be doing and its about an hour's drive from my house, but it's all I have going and it pays alright. Should I just suck it up or keep looking? I don't even know for what jobs I aught to be looking. This just kinda fell into my lap when a recruiter contacted me. At the end of the interview when I met back with the hiring manager it felt awkward. She mentioned a lot of people don't realize this is a desk job until later. So I assume this means a lot of people bail out when they hear this. I can't tell if I'm afraid of committing, or if this is the wrong choice. I'm definitely getting ahead of myself, but I need to be ready just in case. FWIW, I don't know any engineers who actually ended up doing what they studied in college. That's just the way things seem to work, and a large part of why so many here advocate general ME/EE over specialized majors.
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Jun 14, 2013 18:19
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grover posted:It's a job- and that means pay and experience. TAKE IT! You can always leave if you find something better. Who knows, you might like it. Yeah I am just trying to make sure I look at the cons as well. May be that I'm just a little panicked to commit.
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Jun 15, 2013 18:54
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As a sales engineer, would you be utilizing your knowledge and skills to help design solutions for the customer? (almost like an application engineer) If the job has you just being glorified sales guy, I would question it's usefulness in helping you break into a "real" position at a future job. Though, being sales might give you some time to develop skills on your own on company time (programming, etc.).
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Jun 15, 2013 22:40
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I'm starting to have a slight identity crisis. Since my EE internship for the summer fell through at the last minute, I figured I'd work on some of the stuff that I would've learned so that I wouldn't be bored. Basically, they were going to have me do infosec/network engineer stuff which seemed pretty cool. They still want to bring me on (permanently, at that) but are unable to hire me due the main corporate office saying no interns until further notice. I've spent a few months studying IT certification books (They wanted me to get N+/S+ while I was there) and am starting to feel pretty good about the tests for them. I've even built a small CCNA lab that I've been messing with and learning the commands for. Basically, my question is: Am I just wasting time/effort? Network engineer jobs dont necessarily even require a 4 year degree and most of my EE classes are only tangentially related to that field. Sure, knowing how a router's ASIC works might be neat trivia but it wouldn't help me define a subnet. I genuinely enjoy electrical/electronics stuff but my main desire is to have a decent paying job where I live once I graduate. I still have a few years until I graduate and my college is paid for (GI bill). I figure that I can knock out every major entry-level-accessible industry certification before I graduate if I decide to commit to that path. That does, however, make me question if I should even be going to school full time instead of trying to get some relevant experience. For what it's worth, I have about a decade of military electrical/nuclear tech experience and an active clearance. I'm unsure how well that translates though. TLDR: EE student doing network engineering, good/bad?
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Jun 15, 2013 23:58
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movax posted:As a sales engineer, would you be utilizing your knowledge and skills to help design solutions for the customer? (almost like an application engineer) If the job has you just being glorified sales guy, I would question it's usefulness in helping you break into a "real" position at a future job. Though, being sales might give you some time to develop skills on your own on company time (programming, etc.). At the company I work at the sales engineer is just a glorified sales man. Myself or one of the other design engineers handle part design while everything else is handled by other engineering staff. Our sales engineer doesn't even have an engineering degree or prior engineering experience.
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Jun 16, 2013 00:04
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KetTarma posted:I'm starting to have a slight identity crisis. Since my EE internship for the summer fell through at the last minute, I figured I'd work on some of the stuff that I would've learned so that I wouldn't be bored. Basically, they were going to have me do infosec/network engineer stuff which seemed pretty cool. They still want to bring me on (permanently, at that) but are unable to hire me due the main corporate office saying no interns until further notice. You don't need EE to do network engineering, that's for sure. Most of the best network engineers I know got their jobs through a combination of insane amounts of experience and networking (  ).That said, if you stay an EE, having network knowledge is a nice addition, but probably not to the level you're working at (CCNAs, advanced/large-scale networking...being able to maintain a small network for a lab is probably enough). If you want to do network engineering, well, that's a career choice for you to make.
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Jun 16, 2013 00:48
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Yeah, I have no experience with networking beyond playing with a 2950 switch a little. I guess I'm just trying to find something constructive to do in my free time. Would computer networking skills be a good skill subset to have to compliment my engineering skills? I know that it's a pretty big bonus for an EE to know how to program computers.. is it somewhat the same way with understanding networking stuff?
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Jun 16, 2013 00:59
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No they are complete unrelated. That said stay in school and be a loving EE. EE is awesome. Our EEs just designed their own high speed radio and developed an FPGA to do forward error correction. Beats the gently caress out of configuring switches and bitching people out for lovely passwords.
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Jun 16, 2013 02:41
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I did some soul searching and decided to just forget the networking stuff for now. I'm going to focus on improving my C and maybe pick up Python. anyone want to buy a small cisco lab? 
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Jun 16, 2013 20:50
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Just popping in to say that I really really wish companies would stop using brassring for job applications. It only works like 25% of the time on both of my computers, I've tried Chrome and Firefox also....it just loving sucks.
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Jun 17, 2013 01:06
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mokhtar belmokhtar posted:Just popping in to say that I really really wish companies would stop using brassring for job applications. It only works like 25% of the time on both of my computers, I've tried Chrome and Firefox also....it just loving sucks. Applicant tracking systems in general are just really terrible.
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Jun 17, 2013 01:22
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bjobjoli posted:Applicant tracking systems in general are just really terrible. I hope some fancy hipster web 2.0 developers get into the business of making job application software that doesn't totally suck. They could call it 'jobr' or something.
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Jun 17, 2013 17:03
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Someone I know is an engineer for a defense contractor, and is salaried but still needs to bill each hour she works to a specific program. She's been having computer problems, meaning that her work computer has not been working and they have been unsucessfully trying to fix it. She feels like she can't bill the time that she is sitting there at work waiting for them to fix it, and she is very upset and thinks she has to make up the time, and I think she should just bill the time. She is showing up to work after all. Am I totally off on this one?
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Jun 17, 2013 18:17
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Doghouse posted:Someone I know is an engineer for a defense contractor, and is salaried but still needs to bill each hour she works to a specific program. She's been having computer problems, meaning that her work computer has not been working and they have been unsucessfully trying to fix it. She feels like she can't bill the time that she is sitting there at work waiting for them to fix it, and she is very upset and thinks she has to make up the time, and I think she should just bill the time. She is showing up to work after all. Am I totally off on this one? Your friend must be very high strung and legalistic,or has not been working very long. As long as she isnt engaging in consistent and wholesale fraud for hundreds of hours, these types of downtimes are expected and common. Very well paid government contract types often chit chat about golf and Obama  for laughably long amounts of time on the clock. We aren't North Korean robots we are allowed a certain amount of reasonable leeway.Her managment budgeted for her a certain headlevel and if she deviates too much from it, even by charging too little, she is messing with some cost account managers numbers. If she is really feeling bad, have her get up and have a work related conversation during the upgrade. The technically correct answer is to ask for an overhead charge number from her manager. This will be company money. They do not like giving away company money. Most defintely do NOT take vacation time and certainly do not leave the timecard short for the week. CatchrNdRy fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 18:35
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Doghouse posted:Someone I know is an engineer for a defense contractor, and is salaried but still needs to bill each hour she works to a specific program. She's been having computer problems, meaning that her work computer has not been working and they have been unsucessfully trying to fix it. She feels like she can't bill the time that she is sitting there at work waiting for them to fix it, and she is very upset and thinks she has to make up the time, and I think she should just bill the time. She is showing up to work after all. Am I totally off on this one? I'm a salaried engineer that is still direct billing to projects so I also have to fill out time sheets. From my experience it's mostly so project managers can do costing and forecasting labor hours. It is also pretty pointless as the project managers will typically ask you to put time on projects the way they want you to, rather than what you actually did so the numbers look better (they get poo poo for having jobs too far over or under on forecast so they game it). Also there are _always_ time inefficiencies, just book the time to a job and don't fret. If her work gets up at her for booking her time to a job because their IT infrastructure is broken, there are bigger issues at play within the workplace and it's a sign of really awful middle management. Also, the sales engineers at my work are not engineers and don't actually do any design beyond grand hand-wavey gestures that get scrapped by the actual delivery engineers as it's usually incorrect. Don't let that stop you from getting a job though if things are tough.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:24
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Doghouse posted:Someone I know is an engineer for a defense contractor, and is salaried but still needs to bill each hour she works to a specific program. She's been having computer problems, meaning that her work computer has not been working and they have been unsucessfully trying to fix it. She feels like she can't bill the time that she is sitting there at work waiting for them to fix it, and she is very upset and thinks she has to make up the time, and I think she should just bill the time. She is showing up to work after all. Am I totally off on this one? "Administration" time IMHO. The only thing my hours on a timesheet are used for is estimating R&D time spent / project labor. I put down .5 to 1 hr of "admin" each day to cover random stuff I do (asking questions, Windows updates, PC maintenance, whatever etc). If management is micro-managing the numbers (at a really large firm, 10s of hours are probably a rounding error) submitting by exempt, salaried employees that's just all kinds of incompetent. e: Also I have a lot of recruiters pinging me lately, if you're interested in working in hardware at a Tier 1 or Tier 2 auto-supplier shoot me an e-mail or PM with your resume.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:31
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boxorocks posted:Also, the sales engineers at my work are not engineers and don't actually do any design beyond grand hand-wavey gestures that get scrapped by the actual delivery engineers as it's usually incorrect. Don't let that stop you from getting a job though if things are tough. Is there a difference between sales engineer and application engineer? As the latter, I admit I'm removed from the "pure engineering", but I've got my hands in so many things from product development to production, QA, logistics, and warranty/failure analysis that if I weren't an engineer (or, rather, had the skills that I gained while training to be one, which is what an engineering degree is really all about) that I doubt I could do everything properly.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:40
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Thanks for the feedback.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:41
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totalnewbie posted:Is there a difference between sales engineer and application engineer? As the latter, I admit I'm removed from the "pure engineering", but I've got my hands in so many things from product development to production, QA, logistics, and warranty/failure analysis that if I weren't an engineer (or, rather, had the skills that I gained while training to be one, which is what an engineering degree is really all about) that I doubt I could do everything properly. Depends on the company; a poster earlier mentioned that sales engineers at his company were just sales dudes that had 'engineer' in their title. That said, I know some people with "sales engineer" in their title that basically handle everything from pre-sales, to coming up with a candidate/possible solution for the customer, and then acting as a support between the customer and the guys implementing it. Apps engineers tend to be intimately familiar with what the company makes & sells and acts as highly-knowledgeable technical support & resource for the customer. They could end up seeing a lot of on-site time too; my company has applications engineers that are basically resident at the customer site supporting & running our products.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:51
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Thoguh fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2013 23:03
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movax posted:Depends on the company; a poster earlier mentioned that sales engineers at his company were just sales dudes that had 'engineer' in their title. That said, I know some people with "sales engineer" in their title that basically handle everything from pre-sales, to coming up with a candidate/possible solution for the customer, and then acting as a support between the customer and the guys implementing it. Apps engineers tend to be intimately familiar with what the company makes & sells and acts as highly-knowledgeable technical support & resource for the customer. They could end up seeing a lot of on-site time too; my company has applications engineers that are basically resident at the customer site supporting & running our products. This is true also. I have met sales engineers who are actually engineers but in my industry (building automation & controls) and in my country (Australia) they're few and far between probably because the sales estimating process is so fast and loose based on how quickly everyone in the construction industry wants things done. On a related note: The Australian construction industry is generally pretty awful. I'm actively searching for opportunities in a different industry  Edit: to clarify I'm usually a subcontractor or a subcontractor of a subcontractor on site and poo poo usually flows down hill. boxorocks fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 00:09
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KetTarma posted:I did some soul searching and decided to just forget the networking stuff for now. I'm going to focus on improving my C and maybe pick up Python. Part of the reason that studying EE is great is that you can go in a ton of different directions. I started out as an EE and have meandered through several different niches of telecom. If you like computer networking alongside whatever you enjoy about EE, then you could start reading up on general, vendor-agnostic topics. E.g., get a sense of how spanning tree protocol works, don't bother worrying about how you turn on BPDU guard on a Cisco switch. This is really just an extension of what I'm sure a bunch of other people have said, too: for your typical undergraduate education, pick something that's pretty broad. EE/ME fits the bill because the mathematical background is applicable to a huge range of potential careers. Most undergraduates are young, and not quite sure of what they want to do for the rest of their lives. If you get 5 years into a narrow-ish career path and decide it's not for you, it's way easier to make that change if you have a broad knowledge base on which to fall back. If you go from a narrow knowledge base to a narrow career (like network engineering built out of a mountain of vendor certs), and you decide it's time for a change, well, best of luck, I wouldn't envy you.
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Jun 18, 2013 04:42
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To add to the applications/sales engineer conversation, I just finished up my first day as an applications engineer \/. From talking to management and the other apps engineers, our job is a weird combo of software and test engineer (which is funny considering all the apps engineers are aero). The job is more applied software than anything else and there's no real sales involved which is perfect for me since I'd rather like tinkering with expensive electronics. It would be a perfect job if only I didn't have to leave my house at 5:30 am and not get back till 7 pm due to traffic.
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Jun 18, 2013 05:31
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boxorocks posted:This is true also. Awful job-opportunity-wise or awful working-condition-wise? I'm looking for a job in Melbourne as a (not civil) engineer (how is that market, by the way? Oh, but I'm not Australia so I'm hosed no matter what  ) and all I see are construction-related.
totalnewbie fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 15:40
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How important is undergrad research for a cheme in applying for a job? I'm doing research in catalytic membranes and besides looking good on a resume is there another benefit to it?
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Jun 19, 2013 06:32
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totalnewbie posted:Awful job-opportunity-wise or awful working-condition-wise? I'm looking for a job in Melbourne as a (not civil) engineer (how is that market, by the way? Oh, but I'm not Australia so I'm hosed no matter what This is pretty long winded and I ramble a bit, and I'm probably a bit bitter about the whole thing, so take it with a pinch of salt: It is condition wise, and that is to do with the conditions on a construction site (not really safety conditions, but more the relationships between contractors). Building Automation and Control is usually a finishing trade (as in, we're last in - last out) and typically we don't even start the design process for the controls etc until well after construction has started. This is in part due to the nature of contracts and subcontracts, where we won't start work until a contract has been signed (otherwise the business needs to find a place for the cost to go, usually overhead, if the prospect doesn't come through). It's also a function of us not really having anything to design for until the other trades have finalised their designs as we touch every component of the building from the pumps and chillers down to the water meter attached to the cleaners closet tap, and for a large building there is a lot of poo poo to do. We might be doing access control (which requires the doors to be there), HVAC (which requires pumps / fans / duct / pipework to be there), fire systems etc. As for the structure of contracts, it's typically as follows with regards to where we sit: Head contractor (typically a builder like Lend Lease or Multiplex) ---> Mechanical Subcontractor ---> {sometimes the mechanical electrical subcontractor sits here} ---> Automation / Controls Subcontractor (us) For the security side of things it is usually direct to the builder, but that doesn't stop life from being harder as the security side of things finishes really at the last second. Anyway, a construction firm doesn't really know much about any of the stuff it is doing, so it'll subcontract out most duties like Mechanical, Electrical, Additional Services and hire consultants to oversee and take design responsibility for those areas as well as employ a guy called a "services manager" to sit there and get all angry about why it isn't finished ("You have to build a wall there before I can mount a sensor on it!"). In some cases the "builder" doesn't even do the form work and just act as the project management for the client and subs out everything. So basically where I sit is at the bottom of a long chain of project managers at the tail end of a project. It isn't difficult to see that when you're at the bottom, the project has run late (because the form work was delayed at the beginning or they found asbestos on site when digging nearly a year before you'd even signed a contract or whatever) you're constantly on the back foot. Hell, it's almost guaranteed the contract signing will get delayed by our legal team wrangling with their legal team for a couple months only for the contract to come out exactly as it was before only we're two months down on time with no change in our completion date, so there is that as well. And then there is the corner cutting. Everything revolves around cost and time compression so contractors at every level try to cut as much cost as they can to maximise their margins. It could be something as simple as only running 1 data outlet with no spare to buying second hand mechanical equipment like chillers. Even if a contractor has been asked to provide something in the specification, don't be surprised when they don't provide it. A great example of this: it's not uncommon for mechanical contractors to be asked to provide the automation contractors with a high level communications interface for packaged air conditioning units. They never do, and it's always just three relay contacts for start/stop, on/off or fault. The non-mechanical services plumbers won't even give you a fault signal for their pumping gear so we have to then write code that says "If we tell this pump to start, and we don't get a status back after a delay of 30-60 seconds say it's in fault". Then, to top it off, every time you bring up the fact that this stuff hasn't been provided somehow it is your fault. You're the automation and controls engineer, why can't you do that? People will yell at you over stuff that isn't even my fault, or my problem or even in my scope of work and then it gets hung over our heads as a reason to not sign off on completion of our work. Finally when everything is up and running and we're in the defect liability period and our SCADA system is reporting/controlling everything happily; as soon as a piece of mechanical equipment breaks, it's our fault. "Why did the chiller break? Fix it." "It's not my equipment, I just monitor and control it." "I don't care. It's your system that says it's broken." As the messenger you get shot. a lot. All of that stuff happens all the time and it's why I say it's pretty terrible from where I sit and it's needlessly stressful with awful work life balance. It's also why I've seen many talented engineers walk away from the industry because they get treated like poo poo. Builders, managers, property trusts et al all bang on about these great automation systems and how much energy they save, about how they can monitor their operating costs, how comfortable / efficient everything is but the engineers that put together those places are the people they trolled out of the industry. It's given me a killer CV though! 
boxorocks fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 09:33
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Tovarisch Rafa posted:How important is undergrad research for a cheme in applying for a job? I'm doing research in catalytic membranes and besides looking good on a resume is there another benefit to it? I would say that unless you are doing actual experiments and data analysis (i.e. testing membranes for permeance and reactant conversion and doing the calculations to figure that out) it may not be considered as important as a co-op or internship with a company. In my experience, I have seen most undergrad researchers end up doing more menial tasks, like materials synthesis, which employers don't care much for if you are applying for a typical Bachelors level Chem Eng position. I think it's good experience, especially if you have an interest in graduate school, but I would recommend doing an internship or co-op in addition.
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Jun 19, 2013 18:45
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I have a year left in my nuclear engineering degree. Anyone out there who works in reactor design? Am I better off working for the private sector (Ge, Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox) or trying to get with one of the labs (I live in Albuquerque, so I have Sandia and Los Alamos near at hand) if I want to design next-gen reactors? Does designing reactors suck? Tell me what is better than that. I've done some work in non-proliferation and didn't find it very interesting, and I have no desire to work with weapons. Those are pretty much the only things I won't do, although I'd prefer not to be driving a reactor forever if I could avoid it.
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Jun 20, 2013 07:17
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Olothreutes posted:I have a year left in my nuclear engineering degree. Anyone out there who works in reactor design? Am I better off working for the private sector (Ge, Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox) or trying to get with one of the labs (I live in Albuquerque, so I have Sandia and Los Alamos near at hand) if I want to design next-gen reactors? Does designing reactors suck? Tell me what is better than that. I've done some work in non-proliferation and didn't find it very interesting, and I have no desire to work with weapons. Those are pretty much the only things I won't do, although I'd prefer not to be driving a reactor forever if I could avoid it. I know some guys who work in the field of reactor cooling, it's quite fluid mechanics oriented, like multiphase flows.
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Jun 21, 2013 15:44
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