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Inferior Third Season posted:Aerospace Engineer here who uses calculus every day. I also use calculus every day if MATLAB commands count. I guess it doesn't count because I'm still in academia. Not a student though! Just insanely underemployed (really great experience though). What you do need to do is understand how the math works and where to apply it. Not necessarily that you need to use a trig substitution to solve a given integral.
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Oct 2, 2009 08:47
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permabanned posted:This is what worries me a little, it is said that the foundries/IP/EDA market has shrunk by 13% on average this year, so how I am going to find a job in Computer engineering now? The impression I've gotten is if you want a hardcore computer engineering position you need a PhD.
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Oct 2, 2009 21:03
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The Wensey posted:Any Chemical Engineers in the house? I'd seriously considering it, as well as straight-up Chemistry. Care to enlighten me? Do you like organic chemistry? Do you really like pipes, steam tables, and more pipes? If so, then chemical engineering may be for you!
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Oct 3, 2009 06:32
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Corrupted posted:Unfortunately there is a bit of difference between a BA and BS in physics. Harvard is usually ranked 1 in astrophysics and will only issue you a BA in physics. Caltech will also be happy to issue you a BS in English. Don't make assumptions about the BA vs BS thing without knowing about the school you're talking about.
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Oct 3, 2009 19:31
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Slumpy posted:Has anyone here been horrible at math and decided to become an engineer? How did that work out? Everyone thinks they're horrible at math at some point, including those with PhDs in the subject. Why do you say you're horrible at it?
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Oct 4, 2009 22:05
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DerDestroyer posted:Remember for every 1 of you who call yourselves engineers here in North America, there's 4-5 more Indians who can be paid off all together with your salary and each one of them will do twice as much work as you. My father's firm is already exporting a lot of their engineering work to India. Thats why you get your PE and get a fancy little stamp.
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Oct 7, 2009 20:25
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DNova posted:We weren't impressed. I got that in one of my classes once. The professor came back with something like "I guess thats why I made twice your salary as a consultant for <company>"
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Oct 8, 2009 04:11
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Joiny posted:What's a bad GPA for engineers? Mine is a B- but I pick things up pretty fast, have a good personality, and have had a relevant internship (mostly just doing QA.) I'm worried when I start applying for jobs in December my GPA will just screw me, but hopefully a B- isn't all that bad. I've had a hard time finding raw numbers, but I did see that for one year the median GPA of graduating engineers at my school was 2.91. This would mean that over half of graduating engineers are immediately disqualified from employment at major companies due to a cutoff GPA of 3.0.
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Oct 11, 2009 05:25
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Phlegmbot posted:I don't think this belongs in this thread. There are tons of engineers in quantitative finance. Its pretty much just programming with a fancy name (and sometimes a very fancy salary).
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Oct 12, 2009 21:37
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quote:What is the most interesting field in engineering and why? Let me answer this for everyone: Mine, because I majored in it.
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Oct 15, 2009 00:27
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Thoguh posted:If you are really looking for money engineering isn't the way to go anyways, sure we start high, but we also cap off fairly quickly if you don't move into management. This isn't really much of a statement because everyone that is making the big bucks is actually in management.
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Oct 15, 2009 04:45
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Mongolian Squid posted:I heard electromagnetics is the most challenging topic in EE, can you comment on this? What kind of research are you working on? For many people, then there are those weirdos that say things like "Its simple, all you need to do is <garbled mess of vector calculus". Note: we are all such weirdos to the right people. EDIT: Electromagnetics research can get into some very interesting very classified fields very quickly. See all those antenna nests on top of military stuff? Each antenna needs to not interfere with each other. Its a very interesting problem because <REDACTED>. Other cool stuff involves huge loving magnets that <REDACTED> and <REDACTED>. On the up side, US citizen only grants are awesome. God help you if your thesis project ends up classified though... hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Oct 15, 2009 |
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Oct 15, 2009 20:29
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Thoguh posted:EDIT: Page 13 of the 2008 study that Enzo posted gets to the heart of what I was referring to. 11% of Fortune 500 CEO have worked Engineering at some point in their career path. 31% have worked finance, and 24% have worked Marketing. It definatly possible to move up through the engineering ranks, but it's by far not the most common path. 22%, a plurality, of Fortune 500 CEOs have a degree in Engineering and a plurality (42%) worked in operations before rising to CEO. The statistic you reported comes from "job functions worked" and one person can be counted in many categories. Someone with an engineering degree that was hired as a sales engineer goes into sales and engineering for example. What I would conclude from this would be to say do whatever you drat well please after getting an engineering degree, your odds of becoming a fortune 500 CEO are the same as anyone else (slim). You should try and move into operations, graduate from UC Berkley, Princeton, or Duke and get an MBA at Harvard. Perhaps you should just start your own company though. A local company, Exstream Software was sold to HP for something like $800mil. It was owned by the guy that founded it and a few of the people that started in the beginning. His degree was in civil engineering and he claimed that he hadn't used anything from his degree in the business (software company). hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Oct 16, 2009 |
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Oct 16, 2009 19:16
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DNova posted:I agree, but only in the sense that you should be going somewhere doing the research you want to do, not somewhere that has a nice shiny name, just for the sake of the nice shiny name. For a PhD its who your adviser is, not what school you're at. On the other hand, I've been given the impression that a master's is basically like a check box on a form that gets you more "points".
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Oct 20, 2009 18:16
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Woodstock posted:I am very interested in Systems Engineering, but I haven't seen many BS-programs for it, and don't know too much about the exact work that it would do. Systems engineering really has no reason to exist at the undergrad level. You really need to build up to the controls and systems stuff from some angle, be it electrical, mechanical or chemical. Its an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how complex projects should be organized - you need some experience with simple stuff first to really get into it.
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Oct 22, 2009 01:36
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grover posted:I really doubt you're 2 years behind. The first 2 years of any science-related major are going to be very similar; in some cases, identical. You may end up having to stay in an extra semester to take the handful of EE-specific sophomore classes, but you can probably make up for it by taking a class or two over the summer. Hard prereqs can really screw people over. His school may do something stupid like having circuits require a prereq of a freshman seminar or something like that. As a result, you can end up two years behind, but you those two years consist of one class a semester. Everything can be overridden by talking to the right people though, you should see if you can sit down with the EE department's director of undergrad studies.
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Oct 22, 2009 20:36
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grover posted:I skipped all sorts of prereqs when I was in college. Honestly, I pretty much ignored them entirely when picking electives; nobody even checked on it. The main problem is that unless you're hot-poo poo, you're probably going to have problems in a course if you don't have the necessary background. 5 semesters of math should bring you into the hot poo poo category; or at least not a complete idiot. I am assuming that 5 semesters of math means that you have completed the full calculus sequence, linear algebra, a calc based prob/stats class and maybe taking a first class on real analysis now. At my school the math majors have to take the calc physics sequence, so someone with 5 successful semesters as a math major should slide right into engineering just fine.
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Oct 23, 2009 00:05
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Colawa posted:Out of curiosity, what % of students in your classes were not there straight from highschool? This is not directed at anyone in particular Maybe 25% in the upper level classes. I was actually pretty surprised, but it makes sense.
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Oct 24, 2009 02:14
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Dangbe posted:Would my education be compromised by doing this? I feel like at a good engineering school I should go there for all 4 years to get the best education possible. Is this not true? Besides missing out on "the best education" I feel like I might not be prepared for the higher level courses if I take lovely community college classes. Thoughts? What you primarily miss in the first two years is all the huge physics and calculus classes that cause everyone to drop out. You should be fine, if you can get in.
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Oct 28, 2009 15:34
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Corrupted posted:I was going to put a maybe on DiffEq as a fourth. Thats the standard 4 semester "basic" calculus sequence. Math majors start all over again at the 400 level and prove everything as they go. I haven't heard one of those classes called cal5 though. Perhaps a quarters system would cause things to be grouped differently.
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Oct 29, 2009 06:48
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orinth posted:I'm a EE with 3 years experience and I can't find a loving job. I don't know how new grads are doing it, because I'm seeing hardly any entry level jobs. New grads aren't doing it. Though, check out power companies, especially those with nuclear plants. Unfortunately everyone else seems to be applying to the same jobs...
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Oct 29, 2009 19:04
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grover posted:At Penn State, we had: I was curious because I hadn't heard of a setup like that, it looks like they have the standard sequence now? Or maybe you took an elective? I do like how there is a 3 hour DE class without Fourier analysis and a 4 hour DE class with Fourier analysis, seems a little redundant. I wonder how much ABET related infighting was involved with that one. To contribute, my EE degree required 4 semester of calculus (diff, integral, multi, DE), a calculus based probability course and one free math elective. I took numerical methods for mine. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Oct 30, 2009 |
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Oct 30, 2009 00:17
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Cyril Sneer posted:As I mentioned earlier, an engineer's real job is producing paperwork. Academia requires tons of paperwork too, I have no clue how it compares though.
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Oct 31, 2009 02:30
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Cypress posted:So wait, all you guys got the Calculus courses credited along with the physics courses, towards your degree? Yes, the calculus sequence are a part of the curriculum for the major. My electrical engineering bachelor's required 131 semester hours. I think I have upwards of 160 on my transcript, that includes AP work though.
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Nov 3, 2009 22:12
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grover posted:The thing about the FE is that every question on it is trivially easy... if you know how to do it. If you can't answer the 2 minute problems in 30 seconds, you're doing it wrong. The breadth of the test is so expansive that it's difficult to know how to do it all, though. Everyone gets their area of expertise as a bunch of gimmes, but knowing all the OTHER areas is tough- that's why there's a 40ish% failure rate. I took it 8 years after I graduated college, way overprepared, and left about 2 hours early, scoring well into the 99th percentile when I took it. But I recognize that it's a bitch of a test- I mean, it's 8 hours of marathon test-taking. You got your actual score back? I just got a letter that said "Congrats, you passed". I would say that the FE isn't hard, it is however exhausting. Tip: see if you can get an explanation of how to do "easy" problems in the various areas from an upper class man in whatever engineering discipline is. Basically everything on the exam is easier than you want to make the question; that in and of itself makes things harder (if that makes sense),
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Nov 5, 2009 06:16
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grover posted:Yes, I was not expecting it. I got my score back from the PE, as well. Only a few states did this, and only for a few years. I'm glad I was one of the lucky few! NCEES says they don't like disclosing scores because they designed the exam to be a measure of minimum competency, and don't want to see people try to use it as a sort of metric to compare two engineers' skills. I can see that, you cheated by having the perfect major for the FE.  The typical EE's schooling does not cover 2/3rds of the general section of the FE, so it wouldn't make much sense to compare their scores to a ME or Civil to evaluate who the best engineer was. I'm sure a large company's HR dept would love to do that though.
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Nov 5, 2009 20:28
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Kippling posted:I think people think engineering is much harder than it really is. I think some people have no interest in how things work and don't want to tear apart everything to see how it works. To these people engineering must be incredibly difficult.
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Nov 7, 2009 01:22
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Svartvit posted:Always pour the acid into the water, son. But water into acid makes such cool explosions! spwrozek posted:Not all engineering is mech/elec... I have have never 'torn something apart to see how it works'. There are a lot of engineering disciplines out there. Well yeah, substitute tearing stuff apart with whatever your chosen specialty is. Be that looking through buildings to see how they're constructed or how a certain plastic you're buying is made or what have you.
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Nov 8, 2009 22:55
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Kid Awesome posted:Not sure if this has been answered yet, but I got a question for Electrical Engineers. I have no answer other than pick up a soldering iron and do something. Build a robot, a speaker, a HAM radio or whatever. A good start with electronics would perhaps be to get an Arduino and do something. I built robots myself, it involved lots of googling and trial and error. You could start here and/or here.
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Nov 9, 2009 09:34
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Kid Awesome posted:Really? I've heard people say due to the high demand for engineers that as long as you have a degree and can work with others, the GPA hardly factors in. The "There aren't enough engineers!" whining comes from companies that have hard GPA cutoffs of 3.0-3.5(?!). The median GPA of a graduating engineer at my school in one of the past few years (I forget which  ) was 2.9 with a standard deviation of .2 or so (it wasn't quite normally distributed for obvious reasons). If you're limiting yourself to 30% or less of graduates then yeah, theres a shortage!I had a 2.8; I couldn't find a job (got some interviews, went to someone "better qualified"). I'd been working with a professor I did undergrad research for most of the past year since January; we just started a business and got some seed funds. This is proving to be far more "fun" than any "normal" job...
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Nov 11, 2009 02:25
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5436 posted:They are in high demand, but a lot of places have 3.0 GPA cut offs. Almost every place has a 2.7 cut off. The guy who said his school average is 2.9, std of .2 is probably way off. That would mean .5% of people have over a 3.5. Yeah, its more like .4 now that I found the charts again, can't find the actual data though.
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Nov 11, 2009 03:00
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Thoguh posted:I think that's what he meant. Unless you are misrepresenting it, it's a blue collar job that arbitrarily decided to put the word "engineer" in the title. Or am I reading your posts wrong and the job requires a engineering degree? Stationary, Operating, Railroad, Audio, Broadcast, and Microsoft/Novell/whatever are not the type of engineers this thread is about. They're tradesmen, like electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, etc.
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Nov 12, 2009 00:25
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grover posted:BTW, slather the roll with mayo and thousand island dressing. Cook up steak and sautee onions, mushrooms and peppers with it. Add double the normal provolone cheese, and mix in pizza sauce. Fill the bun, and top with lettuce, tomatoes and dust with italian spices. Mmmmmmm How many monte carlo runs did it take to come up with that?
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Nov 12, 2009 05:41
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SneakySnake posted:Mostly I'm just looking to use it to get into the school I want, knock out the classes I need (calc, chemistry, physics, etc), then swap to biomedical. After reading your post and checking around a bit more I think I'd still rather shoot for my goal of biomed. Why do you want to be a biomedical engineer? What is it that you want to do? Honestly, a bachelor's in something like biomed is probably not a good idea.
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Nov 14, 2009 06:07
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SneakySnake posted:I've always liked biology, and I find biomed a really interesting field. I'm shooting for Drexel hard at the moment because I really like their co-op program, and hoping to use it as a strong foot in the door. I'm particularly looking to specialize at neuroengineering with a master's from UCONN. That's basically the long-term goal of it and is getting a bit ahead of things. Right now I'm still sitting around step one or two. I'm developing software for EEGs right now, and some hardware for other sensor stuff. I have a BSEE. My boss is a PhD in EE, the PI is a MD for one project and a Bio PhD for another. All I need for a background in the stuff we're doing biologically is the basics I got from AP Bio back in high school. However I really do need the "hardcore" EE classes for the engineering I'm doing. The MD doesn't know sensors, EMI, electronics, statistical signal processing or programming; thats fine, we just need to know enough about each others fields to get a good statement of work settled and understand each other's issues. (a lot of MDs and Bio PhDs are MDs and Bio folk because they hated math - thats fine, we're EEs because we didn't mind math and hated organic chem) In short: do one thing extremely well, not two (or more!) things with mediocrity. If you want to do that engineering, major in EE or perhaps ME; if you want to do crazy nanotech MEMS stuff I don't understand go get a PhD in that field. If you want to do biological research in this area go get a PhD in bio or do a MD/PhD program.
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Nov 14, 2009 07:58
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Colmface posted:I ended up getting an internship with ABB in Switzerland, which is really exciting. For LabVIEW see if you can find the Basics I or Basics II CD based training materials at your school. They're included in the academic version of LabVIEW (last two CDs in the lovely little binder). Some lab at your school almost certainly has it; ask some grad students if they know anything (or ask a professor, who will send you to their grad students). If you really want to go in strong, try and pass the CLAD practice exams. (hell, you could get the certification if you really want to spend $129; they'll mail you a shiny certificate too!) As for MATLAB, I never really did much past in class instruction, going through old code and lots of reading help files. Many schools have "Introduction to MATLAB" powerpoints and exercises online, I can't personally recommend any, but googling will reveal a ton. Both programs should be in some computer labs at your school, they may even have training materials there too!
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Dec 2, 2009 01:39
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Ayudo posted:LabVIEW is an extremely easy program to pickup, and National Instruments has great customer and community support to boot. But dear god can people that "just picked it up" create unholy messes of timing issues and race conditions. I probably shouldn't complain, as that is whats paying the bills right now, but still...
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Dec 2, 2009 03:52
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illcendiary posted:So how hard is the FE anyway? I'm getting my BS in Mechanical Engineering in January and I plan on taking the FE pretty soon. No individual question is hard, its the breadth and length of the exam that can get to you.
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Dec 3, 2009 21:50
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slorb posted:Is there a reason you need to be tested on material totally unrelated to your specialty to be licensed in america? It seems strange to me. I believe the logic is that engineering is so cross discipline that as a professional engineer you need at least a cursory knowledge of stuff outside your field so you know what you don't know.
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Dec 4, 2009 01:54
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plester1 posted:Pretty high. In fact, I think every single person I know who did a co-op got an offer from the company after graduating. "Sorry, we have a hiring freeze." "I'll be in grad school if you need me "Is the story of about 5 people I know.
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Feb 20, 2010 03:47
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