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I'm applying for a certification job at a company where my old company got testing from. Is there a conflict of interest if I mentioned that I read their reports in my cover letter? Is there any issues with it? I'm not being specific aside from "we had testing done through your USA branch and it was cool to read the reports". I got laid off from that job a while ago, and the testing was at another branch (I'm applying to the Canadian branch). They were in the process of trying to actually do things like NDAs and the like, so I have no idea.
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Dec 18, 2015 05:51
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Thoguh fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2015 16:40
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Thanks, you did understand my post just fine. My old company was such a mess when it came to IP/etc that I just didn't know. Now that I've slept on it, I don't really know why I was freaking out about it.
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Dec 19, 2015 02:04
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I'm considering going to school for electrical engineering(Canada) and was just wondering what the job outlook was over the next 5 years? I don't want to come out of university not only in the hole but jobless and with my luck that's a possibility. I was also wondering if there were any Canadian power systems engineers that could give me a little look at how the schooling is, daily life after school, and salary expectations. Thanks in advance.
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Dec 22, 2015 01:29
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Are you talking power systems like power grid and such?
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Dec 22, 2015 01:35
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More of the distribution side. I'm an electrician so I figure I would have a better understanding of it when it comes to schooling but I could be way out to lunch on that.
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Dec 22, 2015 01:47
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Short of a severe, sustained economic depression coming out of left field, it's a pretty safe bet.
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Dec 22, 2015 02:25
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I work on the Transmission side, that is where the money is at honestly. This is american numbers but here you go: If you are in consulting (although distribution design is mostly done by non engineers, we have about 10 distribution engineers that I know of for ~2 million customers): Staring out $55-65K in transmission, not sure on distribution but it is probably similar. 5 years exp with your PE/P. Eng you are looking at $90-120K. Bonus depends on the level you are at and the company, it can be nothing or reallllllly super good. If you are at the utility: Starting out at about $60K. 5 years with your PE/P. Eng you are looking at $80-90K. Bonus maybe? Obviously take this all with a grain of salt and know that I am basing this on my experience as a consultant and working for the utility. FWIW I am a registered PE with 7 years out of school and pretty much a go to for most situations and I am making $102K with a 10-15% bonus. I also think it is a good industry to get into but again I think the Transmission side is where it is at.
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Dec 22, 2015 03:08
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spwrozek posted:I work on the Transmission side, that is where the money is at honestly. This is american numbers but here you go: So what do you do day-to-day because I can't imagine you're constantly designing transmission systems. Is there a big field-work aspect?
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Dec 22, 2015 03:43
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Ultimate Shrek Fan posted:So what do you do day-to-day because I can't imagine you're constantly designing transmission systems. Is there a big field-work aspect? You would be surprised... When I was consulting that was what I did all day. I spent maybe 25 days in the field. I worked mostly on 69 and 138 kV rebuilds and new lines in Indiana. Most projects took 6-12 months to get through all the engineering, material ordering, specs, etc. Pretty much though I was engineering or doing engineering activities everyday. I work for a major utility now and I basically do whatever I want. I do a lot of design work and a lot of design review for junior engineers. I spend plenty of time out in the field looking at lines or watching construction if I feel like it. I do a lot of estimates for projects, work on standards, give training sessions, work on a bunch of special projects. Really it all goes back to doing design of transmission lines though. I have 4 projects that will finish construction this year.
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Dec 22, 2015 05:44
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I work in consulting (USA, though) and I can pretty much second everything spwrozek is saying with regard to that. I work for a primarily civil firm as one of a very few electrical guys (I think I may actually be one of only two degreed EEs at my location) and my position is even more office-oriented (I've been in the field maybe 4 times in 2 years). Started at $64k, and after 2 years I'm up to $75k plus full tuition/PE prep with a path paved to mid-management within 10 years. I don't get a bonus, but plenty of nice perks. I'd say my work-life balance is phenomenal, but obviously that will vary by firm. Most of what I look at is load distribution, and not exactly hugely complicated stuff. I do a lot of reviewing bid submittals to make sure they're in line with our clients' needs and standards. There's a pretty even divide between cookie-cutter projects (i.e. boring but vital fact-checking) and interesting new designs (fact-checking with intrigue). I'm expected to do a fair bit of CADD work on top of that, but that's pretty easy to pick up on the job if you're handy with computers. Obviously your mileage may vary, but my experience has been that as long as you've got a decent GPA and can come off as a non-mongoloid in an interview, finding a job in the industry shouldn't be tough at all. Electricity ain't going away, and from what I understand, the rate of new power engineers is just about keeping pace with the rate that they're leaving the workforce, so you shouldn't have to worry about a glut of talent devaluing your job. This is, again, an American perspective, so I'd do some reading up on the jobs numbers in Canada to get a clearer picture if I were you. Not a Children fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Dec 22, 2015 |
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Dec 22, 2015 06:52
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The work force is old for sure. My group has 8 engineers ages 65, 62, 61, 59, 54, 34, 30, 29 (me). We have 4 offices and 2 are like this. The other is kind of weird and is basically all kids out of school. All in all good industry to be in with lots of growth potential. Plus as an EE you will have lots of other options potentially.
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Dec 22, 2015 07:01
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If you do a lot of plasma as an EE you can get a pretty good job working on science fiction projects that we will fund forever (fusion). Most of the people I know that work on that stuff are EEs.
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Dec 22, 2015 07:29
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Yeah, completely neglected to mention that once you get an EE degree, as long as you can talk intelligently about a given kind of tech you can be hired for a ridiculous variety of applications in that field. I know a guy who made a jump from working ~6 years on magnetic field studies to getting an engineering position at SpaceX. I did the same for about 2 years before switching to the power industry, where I use literally nothing from my old job.
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Dec 22, 2015 16:39
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There's a lot of spooky poo poo about being drowned in student loans from college, but it really doesn't apply to EE or ME. I got hired at the height of the last crash and my out of school resume wasn't all that impressive.
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Dec 22, 2015 18:44
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While I'm a Canadian EE I can't really give any advice because the current state of my career is a mess... I can say that a lot of provinces have a public Utility. I'm not from Newfoundland but when they were having issues with power generation in early 2014 and you can see a presentation with one line diagrams and the like. So you can see what aging infrastructure on an island where people are moving away from wood heat to electrical does to the power grid. If anything you'll see a nice charred transformer in the pdf. Not sure what its like in other provinces, I'm in Alberta and we have a private utility and I really don't know anything about the other provinces' power except Quebec's in passing.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:48
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Uncle Jam posted:There's a lot of spooky poo poo about being drowned in student loans from college, but it really doesn't apply to EE or ME. I got hired at the height of the last crash and my out of school resume wasn't all that impressive. It's even better if you go to a an accredited state school with a merit scholarship.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:51
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notZaar posted:It's even better if you go to a an accredited state school with a merit scholarship. Don't forget Junior and Senior year STEM grant.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:16
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notZaar posted:It's even better if you go to a an accredited state school with a merit scholarship. This. I walked out of school, which took me 5.5 years because Im a tard and was lazy in hs, with like $2000 in student loans which were paid back by my ~4th paycheck. This is because of a combo of my state's scholarship program which I managed to keep and pell grants. Thanks Obama.
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Dec 22, 2015 21:24
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Thanks for the responses guys. I appreciate them. The job sounds exactly like what I want.
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Dec 23, 2015 00:18
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So I'm going into my 4th semester of my civil engineering program and was wondering if there's a big use for GIS in transportation/urban planning. I'm taking a pre-req for a GIS course I can use for a professional elective and wanted to know if it was worth my time (Anything related to surveying doesn't seem too hard anyways).
Eskaton fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Dec 23, 2015 |
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Dec 23, 2015 23:17
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Eskaton posted:So I'm going into my 4th semester of my civil engineering program and was wondering if there's a big use for GIS in transportation/urban planning. I'm taking a pre-req for a GIS course I can use for a professional elective and wanted to know if it was worth my time (Anything related to surveying doesn't seem too hard anyways). Caveat is that I'm water/wastewater, but I don't think I've heard of anyone in transpo/urban planning using GIS for actual engineering, just making exhibits.
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Dec 24, 2015 00:42
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We use small world to track all our assets. All our GIS people work on the land side of things.
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Dec 24, 2015 01:03
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Eskaton posted:So I'm going into my 4th semester of my civil engineering program and was wondering if there's a big use for GIS in transportation/urban planning. I'm taking a pre-req for a GIS course I can use for a professional elective and wanted to know if it was worth my time (Anything related to surveying doesn't seem too hard anyways). A lot of municipalities/counties/state departments that we work with maintain GIS databases of varying degrees. They get used a lot in transportation and public works projects, but I would say the databases themselves are probably more a part of their Urban Planning departments (if they have one). Who makes and maintains it all depends on how the agency is funded. On the private side, we import a lot of GIS data, but don't keep it ourselves. Digital records are the norm now, so I think it's worth it to at least understand basic GIS concepts: raster vs. vector data, TINs vs contours, coordinate systems, datums, projections...things like that. If you want to be in transportation, I wouldn't put a lot of time into learning ArcGIS or other specific applications, though. One last thing, if you are talking to a surveyor and say what he is doing is just "related" to GIS, you're probably going to get dirty looks and/or punched in the face.
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Dec 28, 2015 15:07
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Eskaton posted:So I'm going into my 4th semester of my civil engineering program and was wondering if there's a big use for GIS in transportation/urban planning. I'm taking a pre-req for a GIS course I can use for a professional elective and wanted to know if it was worth my time (Anything related to surveying doesn't seem too hard anyways). For context about my comments, I work for a civil consulting firm, doing transportation design. In my company, the heavy GIS people are not engineers - they do good work, but there's not much point in having an engineer do it. They export files into CADD formats for the engineers to make use of. The natural resources folks use GIS a ton to document their field work. The planning department uses GIS to generate some of their displays that go in Environmental Impact Statements and other NEPA documents. But for all these groups, you universally have a non-engineer doing this work, while the engineers work in Microstation and AutoCAD. So GIS is not a bad technical skill to have, and if you were going to have a buzzword/skillset on your resume, GIS is not bad. But it's not likely that a job opening would have ArcGIS as a requirement for an engineer. The biggest use is if you ended up at a tiny firm with like 5 employees, then you might be the GIS guy and that would be valuable to them. Like the other dude mentioned, surveying has almost zero to do with GIS. The closest it comes is that we have the actual surveyors help with the conversions among various coordinate systems, which is a shared concept with GIS. If you have some other options for electives, we could probably give feedback on which of those would look best on resumes. The aboslute hugest would be CADD experience, and surveying doesn't hurt.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:39
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I'm one semester away from graduating with a bachelor's in electrical and electronic engineering. I've been applying to graduate programmes I'd think I'd be interested in and compatible with. Coming out of final year I feel my degrees been very broad and despite doing well I felt out of my depth a lot during my recent internship. My internship was with an IC design company. My interest would be with something like that. So I've been applying to places on the electronics more than the power side of things. I also applied few control places as I've a module in that and heard its a well paid area. I've been lucky to make it through the application to a pharmaceutical company. But they were looking for graduates for their control and mes departments. I was hoping to get practice on PLCs and control systems but instead got offered the mes position. My initial impression is that mes engineering has a lot in common with IT support. Which I actually worked in before going for an engineering degree to get out of that kind of work. I was wondering if anyone here knows someone or worked in MES and can give me an idea of the role and industries such engineers work in, and what kind of advancement is available.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:53
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How does Villanova rank for engineering schools? On US News they're ranked as 11th under the category "At engineering schools whose highest degree is a bachelor’s or master’s". I'm a little confused because I know almost none of the other schools on that list.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:03
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What's confusing about that? It just means they don't have a doctoral program.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:11
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Noctone posted:What's confusing about that? It just means they don't have a doctoral program. Yeah but why is it its own separate category? When I think of top engineering schools I think MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. The doctorate list has those 3 schools. The non-doctorate list has a bunch of schools I've never heard of. So where does Villanova actually rank compared to MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley and all the other schools with doctorates?
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Dec 30, 2015 01:48
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They tell you right in their methodology. They're separate rankings because a research-based institution is going to approach undergraduate studies in a much different fashion than a non-research-based institution. It's almost useless to compare an engineering program at a school like MIT or Berkeley to an engineering program at a school like Villanova because they have very different goals and pedagogical methods.
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Dec 30, 2015 02:14
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I went to a small, non-doctorate granting school. Here are my thoughts: All of our classes were taught by PhD-holding professors. We did not have TAs. Most professors had several hours of office hours per day. There were often lines in the hallway. There were UG students paid to tutor other UG students. There was absolutely no type of research available beyond non-credit independent study that one professor offered. It was mainly electromagnetic field simulation scripting in MATLAB. People that wanted to do research had to land assistantships at other schools. Professors were authorized a sabbatical every 2 years to go do their own research to stay current. All of my professors knew me personally. Most of my classes were fewer than 20 people. Several were only 6 people. I had little choice in schedule as most 300/400 level classes only had a single day section and a single night section. I had little choice in professional electives. Everyone that I graduated with either went down the signal processing track or the communications track because that was all that was offered. You can probably see why comparing my school to a big research school wouldn't work because of how different they are.
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Dec 30, 2015 02:40
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Devor posted:For context about my comments, I work for a civil consulting firm, doing transportation design. spwrozek posted:We use small world to track all our assets. All our GIS people work on the land side of things. RogueLemming posted:A lot of municipalities/counties/state departments that we work with maintain GIS databases of varying degrees. They get used a lot in transportation and public works projects, but I would say the databases themselves are probably more a part of their Urban Planning departments (if they have one). Who makes and maintains it all depends on how the agency is funded. GordonComstock posted:Caveat is that I'm water/wastewater, but I don't think I've heard of anyone in transpo/urban planning using GIS for actual engineering, just making exhibits. Thanks, all. I'll look at some other stuff now. (GIS is sorted with all the surveying courses here and I've taken Intro to Surveying) I'm taking something called Evolution of Cities next semester as something fun and related to civil (The civil department seems dead in spring). Eskaton fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 02:47
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Edit: Disregard.
huhu fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 06:23
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Man is there any way to break into DoD jobs without being commissioned or knowing anybody in the system? USAJobs is horribly awkward and all their job postings are really poorly written.
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Dec 30, 2015 16:11
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notZaar posted:Man is there any way to break into DoD jobs without being commissioned or knowing anybody in the system? USAJobs is horribly awkward and all their job postings are really poorly written. Just keep trying, took me a few hundred or so applications before I got in. Applying at the beginning of the fiscal year/end of calendar year may give you more luck but ymmv Alternately try starting at a contractor like Jacobs or Mantech, a few people I know transitioned to government after that for a few years. Kolodny fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 18:57
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Kolodny posted:Just keep trying, took me a few hundred or so applications before I got in. Applying at the beginning of the fiscal year/end of calendar year may give you more luck but ymmv The process also takes a geological age. I'm waiting to start a job with the Army that I applied for in August, interviewed for and received the tentative offer in mid-November, and I'm still waiting on the security clearance to go through. Also, USAJobs still shows me as not referred for the position so take application statuses with a grain of salt. Speaking of the Army, does anyone have experience working with the Army Sustainment Command or large scale facilities engineering? After a visit to Rock Island the best description of the job I got is that I'll be taking known problems at various army facilities, developing engineering fixes for them, and then generating work orders in contractor speak, but then I'll have to go and find funding since the office I'll be working for doesn't have their own budget and instead must get the money to the complete work elsewhere? The whole financial side of the system sounds bizarre. -Zydeco- fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jan 1, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2015 19:20
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notZaar posted:Man is there any way to break into DoD jobs without being commissioned or knowing anybody in the system? USAJobs is horribly awkward and all their job postings are really poorly written. I did research funded by the Navy, met the university liason, made a good impression, and told him I wanted a job. I don't think I ever actually posted to USAjobs. See if your university does any DoD funded research and find a POC.
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Jan 1, 2016 10:28
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notZaar posted:Man is there any way to break into DoD jobs without being commissioned or knowing anybody in the system? USAJobs is horribly awkward and all their job postings are really poorly written.
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Jan 2, 2016 06:52
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Yea as a heads up, I eventually got a security clearance last year but did not get an interim. The process from application to granted was ~6 months. I have no foreign relatives and have lots of documentation for any question they could ask me.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:11
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Anyone have any suggestions on how a US-citizen mechanical engineer might find employment in the UK for a few years? I was expecting it to be a fairly simple matter but it seems like the work visa options are pretty limited for non-EU/non-commonwealth people and I haven't found any engineering companies that have exchange programs. My current employer (major US defence contractor) does a lot of work in the UK but pretty much all the engineering jobs require UK security clearance and I suspect my prospects of obtaining that are slim at best.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:12
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