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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? Something to talk about during job interviews? If you can explain in 30-60 seconds what the goal of the research is and how it could be applied and spend a little while chatting about it without sounding like a moron, you are way ahead of most recent-grad interviewees, even if the job isn't 100% related. The best part is that you can prepare that explanation ahead of time and once you're talking about it, you're on home turf.
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Jun 21, 2013 17:17
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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. From what I know, the local National Laboratory is pretty much a PHD only club. You can get hired and do research with a masters, but for the most part, you won't be much more than an assistant. Sandia and Los Alamos might be different though. Get on with one of the contractors doing cleanup at Los Alamos. It's not R&D but it is good work.
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Jun 22, 2013 04:41
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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 just came back from the Pulsed Power and Plasma Physics conference where there was a lot of nuclear physics and related stuff going on. Very niche stuff, but a pretty interesting niche (railguns, directed energy weapons, active armor, etc.)
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Jun 22, 2013 07:59
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SeaBass posted:I just came back from the Pulsed Power and Plasma Physics conference where there was a lot of nuclear physics and related stuff going on. Very niche stuff, but a pretty interesting niche (railguns, directed energy weapons, active armor, etc.) Looks like the abstracts are online, but I can't get to them without a password  Are the ppts anywhere?http://www.npss-confs.org/ppps/program/
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Jun 22, 2013 17:37
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grover posted:drat that sounds interesting; I'm super-jealous. I'll have that password somewhere in my notes at work. Unfortunately the presenters did not make their ppts available.
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Jun 23, 2013 18:49
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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. Right now the new reactors being built are... AP1000 (US), EPR (Europe), and APR1400 (S. Korea), VVER 1000, and VVER 1200 (Russia). Those countries are who designed them, not where they're being built. I think that's it.
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Jun 27, 2013 03:53
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I'm totally in it for the money and I'm not ashamed to admit it. gently caress your $29,000 lab tech position.
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Jun 27, 2013 05:55
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Haha who would endure four years of [ABET degree] for 29k?
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Jun 27, 2013 11:56
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Hed posted:Haha who would endure four years of [ABET degree] for 29k? But you'll get sooooo much more hands on experience as an underpaid slave without an engineering title than your friends making more than double your salary at some big faceless corporation. I am reminded of my high school DeVry and ITT Tech recruiters. Why go to a fun university with an accredited education, when you could pay an inflated for-profit mill and hang out with the gooniest people on earth! minutes from the strip mall by your parents house!
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Jun 27, 2013 19:36
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Yeah, I'm not that into research to be a slave for it. Find some high school grad for that poo poo. Research really is depressing, I don't know why anyone does it.
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Jun 27, 2013 20:55
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Senor P. posted:I'd say go work as a construction engineer on one of the new reactors (Vogtle or V.C. Summer) if you can. Last time I checked Westinghouse was having lay offs. Right now I think getting on the design side of things might be a bad choice. As someone who was laid off by Westinghouse I'd say stay far away. Not a good time to start working for them, things will get worse before they get better. I'd also say to avoid nuclear in general, but that probably doesn't help someone 1 year from a nuke engineering degree. The constant audits and paperwork for everything are such a pain in the rear end, not to mention outage season being absolute hell. I am so much happier in my new job outside of nuclear.
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Jun 28, 2013 00:24
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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. If you are looking for other choices, you could look at the labs run by the DoE/Navy for designing reactors for submarines/carriers.
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Jun 28, 2013 02:32
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Just be aware that "Reactor/Refueling Operations Engineer" with Bettis/Bechtel is not a job you want unless you're desperate. Any job posting where they say "We continually hire for this position at a rate of 3 applicants per 2 months" has gotta be a totally awesome job, right?
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Jun 28, 2013 02:39
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KetTarma posted:Just be aware that "Reactor/Refueling Operations Engineer" with Bettis/Bechtel is not a job you want unless you're desperate. Any job posting where they say "We continually hire for this position at a rate of 3 applicants per 2 months" has gotta be a totally awesome job, right? Haha, that's a post for the Operations program. It's a really intense program (but pays very well) that will eat up a lot of time. In that program you go to the Navy's Power School and then go to operate stuff at a plant, become the people who operate the important panel, become shift supervisor of the navy training prototype reactors, stuff like that. It's a demanding program but they do need to constantly replace people because most people leave that program, either early or after 5-7 years for some other internal job/go into the private industry because all your reactor operating training has been handled by the Navy and they don't have to do anything. There's plenty of desk jobs he could apply for.
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Jun 28, 2013 02:58
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I was a prototype instructor for 3 years. Every civilian that worked on shiftwork was trying to either transfer or find another job.
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Jun 28, 2013 03:10
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KetTarma posted:I was a prototype instructor for 3 years. Every civilian that worked on shiftwork was trying to either transfer or find another job. I understand reactors are nothing to mess around, but what makes nuclear stuff so intense? Is it the technical nature of the physics or just the decades of Cold War serious business tradition? I mean economically it can't be a vicious pull like some demanding petroleum engineering stuff.
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Jun 28, 2013 04:53
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CatchrNdRy posted:I understand reactors are nothing to mess around, but what makes nuclear stuff so intense? Is it the technical nature of the physics or just the decades of Cold War serious business tradition? I mean economically it can't be a vicious pull like some demanding petroleum engineering stuff. Every second a nuclear plant is not running is a lot money lost, so when a plant goes into an outage for refueling it is extremely busy and high pressure. All outage activities are tightly scheduled and one fuckup on the 'critical path' can the utility all kinds of money.
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Jun 28, 2013 05:36
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This is within the military-nuclear sector. I cant speak directly about commercial sector though I do have a huge number of friends that work in it: If you ever make a mistake, it carries huge political implications. Every single thing has to be triple checked because any problem may end up in the local paper and get you shut down. Even minor problems can get spun into huge disasters. Look at Three Mile Island. No one was hurt or even exposed to significant amounts of radiation. It is still considered a nuclear disaster decades after the fact. Look at Fukashima. No one died because of that. Despite that fact, Fukashima may have put the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power. People are terrified of things that they do not understand. As such, there is a super-high level of sensitivity to anything nuclear related. To give you an idea, imagine taking an exam on a random part of your job every single month. Failing that exam means you're not allowed to do your job until you pass that exam. Fail enough and you're removed from nuclear duties permanently. Things like that are why people get out of nuclear. E: That being said, an electrical tech in the nuclear field makes almost double what a non-nuclear electrical tech makes. Nuclear ops guys make about 30%+ more than non-nuclear. A lot of people do it for a few years to build up a nest-egg then go into combined cycle plants. KetTarma fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 15:45
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KetTarma posted:To give you an idea, imagine taking an exam on a random part of your job every single month. Failing that exam means you're not allowed to do your job until you pass that exam. Fail enough and you're removed from nuclear duties permanently. Things like that are why people get out of nuclear.
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Jun 28, 2013 16:53
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Most jobs do not have a monthly proctored exam to keep working there. The questions were not usually related to daily operations, either.
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Jun 28, 2013 16:57
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grover posted:That sounds like pretty much every job, honestly. Most just aren't so formal about the testing process, they just fire your rear end if you gently caress up too badly or too much. No it doesn't. I've worked a bunch of jobs and never had to be tested on them more often than when I was getting a promotion or finishing some sort of training. Yes there's job evaluation but what he's talking about is not job evaluation.
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Jun 28, 2013 19:05
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I have an NRC license for our campus research reactor, and the test for that thing is insane. The possible questions are pulled from a pool of questions that apply to all of the reactors in the class. There were questions on our reactor specifically, a practical, and a theory section that included questions for reactors I'd never seen or likely will see. Some of them are even counter to the design of our reactor but I still need to know the answers to the questions to keep my license.
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Jun 28, 2013 20:38
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On the other hand, if poo poo fucks up at a nuclear reactor, poo poo can get REALLY hosed up. Who's ever going to say "Yeah, let's let the engineers working on these reactors know a little bit less"? No one, ever. Not even if it's because they believe you need to know all that, but just because who wants to raise their hand for that?
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Jun 28, 2013 22:08
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The same goes for "This part broke, how long can we wait to fix it?" Sometimes the answer is that you need to fix it ASAP or shut down the reactor. You can rack up some very, very nasty overtime real quick in nuclear.
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Jun 28, 2013 23:22
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You guys are doing a great job of dissuading me from going for a Nuclear Engineering degree next year. I think I'll just stick to Mech/Aero.
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Jun 30, 2013 12:44
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I'd think of it more like selecting Hard mode to get a score (pay) multiplier in a video game.
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Jun 30, 2013 15:29
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KetTarma posted:I'd think of it more like selecting Hard mode to get a score (pay) multiplier in a video game. I laughed way to hard at this. But thanks for explaining a bit more about those jobs. I had always wondered why the nuclear program had such high requirements.
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Jul 3, 2013 20:55
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I'm an EE and looking for a job in embedded programming. Does anybody work in that field that could comment on it? I work on robots as a hobby and enjoy the programming part, so that is why I am interested. Is there any language I should learn besides C?
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Jul 6, 2013 03:38
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C++ maybe. Embedded programming covers a pretty huge range nowadays, from $0.25 micros that have 256 bytes of RAM to RTOSes and embedded Linux running on beefy ARM chips. so it really depends on what you are working on. Robotics is kind a tough field to get into right now just because there are a million and one people doing robotics Ph.Ds at basically every prestigious university everywhere. But embedded programming in general is pretty in-demand and I think if you can show some experience and some systems level thinking you should do pretty well on the job market. If you're an EE, you'd do well to learn some RF / DSP / signal and information theory stuff.
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Jul 6, 2013 06:02
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I'm an EE and looking for a job in embedded programming. Does anybody work in that field that could comment on it? I work on robots as a hobby and enjoy the programming part, so that is why I am interested. Is there any language I should learn besides C? Did you enjoy the "traffic control" (abstracted) parts or the nuts-and-bolts control systems parts?
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Jul 6, 2013 06:26
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evensevenone posted:*snip* I'm in my second year of EE, and at the end of this year I have to pick a specialization. My options are pretty much the following: RF, DSP, Control Systems, Power. (RF/DSP have more embedded systems papers) I honestly don't know which to pick, but I'm drifting towards RF/DSP. Any advice would be appreciated.
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Jul 6, 2013 11:11
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Odette posted:I'm in my second year of EE, and at the end of this year I have to pick a specialization. My options are pretty much the following: RF, DSP, Control Systems, Power. (RF/DSP have more embedded systems papers) (I specialized in semiconductors; that poo poo was a blast.)
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Jul 6, 2013 13:00
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grover posted:RF is probably the mathiest of the bunch, as far as high-level calculus and differential equations go, if that makes a difference. Shitload of jobs out there for power, as not too many students seek it out as a specialty; may seem simple, but it's a lot more complex than it appears on the surface. It seems like power is becoming a hot spot specialization due to the emerging global smart grid construction, but it also involves intensive control theory knowledge as well.
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Jul 6, 2013 13:56
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Slark posted:It seems like power is becoming a hot spot specialization due to the emerging global smart grid construction, but it also involves intensive control theory knowledge as well.
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Jul 6, 2013 13:58
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Power systems is not a bad specialization at the moment, because a huge swath of them are retiring (or very close) in America. Smart grid (or field area network) is going to be a hybrid of power systems, control systems, and communication networks. Any one of those 3 would probably give you a route to get into that field.
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Jul 6, 2013 16:42
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evensevenone posted:C++ maybe. Embedded programming covers a pretty huge range nowadays, from $0.25 micros that have 256 bytes of RAM to RTOSes and embedded Linux running on beefy ARM chips. so it really depends on what you are working on. Yeah I know robotics is tough to get into, that isn't really my plan. I just thought I could take some of the stuff I liked about robots and get a job with it. I'm taking a signal processing class for my MEng. in the fall so that should be cool. Do you have any textbooks you could recommend for RF stuff? I looked for online resources but had some trouble. I do see it mentioned in a lot of job descriptions so I would like to at least check it out and see if it might interest me. Corla Plankun posted:Did you enjoy the "traffic control" (abstracted) parts or the nuts-and-bolts control systems parts? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by traffic control. I would say I enjoyed the intersection between circuit design and programming. An example of something I enjoyed is that we had a color sensor on the robot, but the lighting wasn't very good so I enjoyed collecting color sensor data and then writing code so our robot could distinguish colors that were hard to tell apart in the bad light. Any job where you get to do stuff like that would be pretty cool.
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Jul 6, 2013 23:25
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I'm an EE and looking for a job in embedded programming. Does anybody work in that field that could comment on it? I work on robots as a hobby and enjoy the programming part, so that is why I am interested. Is there any language I should learn besides C? Are you me? I've been told to be very good at C with a smattering of assembly and python thrown in. I have a MSP-430 microprocessor that I sometimes fool around with. Raspberry PI can also be fun. There's an embedded programming thread somewhere in SHSC that you should take a look at.
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Jul 6, 2013 23:44
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Odette posted:I'm in my second year of EE, and at the end of this year I have to pick a specialization. My options are pretty much the following: RF, DSP, Control Systems, Power. (RF/DSP have more embedded systems papers) RF or Controls I would say...not sure what excites you personally, but those are two that benefit from having access to the university environment / will always be in demand. Power electronics is in demand right now because of the green case, but in my opinion, outside of very high-power/high-voltage scenarios, it's something you can pick up on your own without needing a lab. OctaviusBeaver posted:I'm an EE and looking for a job in embedded programming. Does anybody work in that field that could comment on it? I work on robots as a hobby and enjoy the programming part, so that is why I am interested. Is there any language I should learn besides C? I think it's saturated, personally. No shortage of people who can be hired to sling some C for an embedded MCU, at least in the MI area. That said, it sounds like you enjoyed writing code for that sensor, and being able to write low-level drivers for some hardware and do useful things with that data while being one person (i.e. not farming that task out to two different folks) is quite valuable.
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Jul 7, 2013 05:04
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Odette posted:I'm in my second year of EE, and at the end of this year I have to pick a specialization. My options are pretty much the following: RF, DSP, Control Systems, Power. (RF/DSP have more embedded systems papers) In my opinion, Control Theory is the way to go if you don't feel strongly about a specialization. That's what I did and it has a lot of really good math and broad applications, whereas it is pretty tough to use RF and DSP outside of the situations they were designed for.
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Jul 7, 2013 05:53
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Corla Plankun posted:In my opinion, Control Theory is the way to go if you don't feel strongly about a specialization. That's what I did and it has a lot of really good math and broad applications, whereas it is pretty tough to use RF and DSP outside of the situations they were designed for. Yes control engineering will enable your carrier paths almost in any fields. It's a specialization that you won't regret too much, also there are many interesting unsolved mathematical problems in control theory from fundamental aspects.
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Jul 7, 2013 11:08
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