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boeman posted:Here is a free tip: if you like the intellectual challenge of your engineering cirriculum, go to graduate school. You will be bored out of your mind if you go into industry with a B.S. I speak from experience This is painfully untrue. Yeah, if you get an entry level job at a giant company you might spend two years being a calculation monkey sizing anchor bolts or something. If you get a job like that, quit and find something else. However, the amount of intellectual stimulation involved in engineering jobs is pretty much proportional to the level of interest of the engineer. There are always better ways to solve problems and more you can know about how to solve them. In every project I've ever worked on, even very straightforward ones, there's always some little detail or issue that catches my interest and leads to some reasonably in depth research. It's not research that I would necessarily need to do to complete the project, but it's research that leads to a better understanding of why what I'm doing works which usually results in a better design and better engineering in the future. Once you get interested in something, you can spend months learning about even the seemingly simple things. I have bookshelves full of printouts, notes and information that have come from me deciding that there has to be a better way to do something completely mundane. Half the time there isn't, but there are volumes of information available about all the stuff that gets taken for granted and that most people never bother to understand. You can spend a lifetime in almost any job learning interesting new things about engineering if you're motivated. T.C. fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Oct 5, 2009 |
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Oct 5, 2009 11:10
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, but at least I'm changing that now.
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BeefofAges posted:This isn't really the sort of thing that needs to go on a resume, but you might get asked if you like travel during an interview. Usually positions that require travel will say so in the job listing. It depends entirely on the type of industry. There are all sorts of places where this might not be necessarily required, but having people willing to head to the field for a few weeks is an absolutely huge bonus. If you're applying for somewhere where it could help, put it in your cover letter. No job listings for my company mention travel unless it's an actual job where you'd be seconded to a client but I can promise you that saying you'd be willing to travel, or enjoy travelling in your cover letter would make you jump quite a number of spots up the list.
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Oct 13, 2009 22:32
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grover posted:It matters less, but it still matters. It will always be there on your resume; if you don't put it, people will assume it's even worse than what it actually is, so you HAVE to put it. Some companies will even require it, and require you to submit a transcript. So no matter how hot your poo poo is through your 30 year career, and you've got this 2.5GPA or whatever on your resume, and you will be judged by it like it's a quantitative measurement of your intelligence or work capacity or whatnot. Really? That's ridiculous. I don't think I even put my average on my first job application and I certainly wouldn't do it now and I'm only three years out of school. I wouldn't even know what my university average was without finding a transcript and actually checking. I guess it's a difference in countries or industries or something. Grades are completely irrelevant once you've got even a small amount of actual experience.
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Oct 13, 2009 22:58
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BeefofAges posted:That's interesting. What industry are you in? I'm a structural engineer. I generally work industrial stuff, and at the moment it's mostly oil and gas. The travelling thing seems to be the case for most consultants I've met who work in the resource industry, or in heavy construction or in large scale power or machinery. Basically, anything that costs a lot of money and is too big to bring to the people doing the engineering work will result in the engineers having to send someone to go look at the site and figure out what the field conditions actually are and what you're going to do with them. In some cases you have to send one of the really experienced guys to figure things out, but if they can possibly avoid it they tend to send the young guys. Power, electrical/controls and mechanical also tend to have to send guys for commissioning new industrial systems. I'm not talking long term assignments, which can happen as well. I'm talking more two day to two week trips.
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Oct 15, 2009 03:03
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There are all sorts of things you can do that have a neutral or positive impact on the environment. Hell, even if you're on a project that's an overall negative impact you can, personally, have a positive impact by designing with environmental factors in mind. The way you solve problems and detail things can have a huge effect on environmental factors. You can also work to convince people that these elements are a positive selling point they should be willing to pay a premium for. It often isn't that hard. Even in oil and gas and other apparently environmentally awful fields you can get jobs that don't make you completely cry yourself to sleep every night. A non-insignificant percentage of infrastructure projects in the Alberta oil sands, for instance, are due to government mandated environmental improvements.
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Oct 16, 2009 18:56
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Cypress posted:Hey Guys, NAFTA included provisions for skilled professionals to work between countries. The normal stuff you hear about work visas in the US don't really apply to engineers from Canada. If you can get someone to offer you a job you can apply for a TN1 visa and get it reasonably quickly with the right documentation. You don't have to deal with the crap most people going for work visas have to, with the whole lottery of visas at the beginning of the year, and long application times and quotas and things like that. I don't know all the details because I just looked fairly superficially into it at one point, but it's worth some attention on your part to see if it applies to you specifically and to figure out exactly what you'd need to do. So it's a question of getting a job and possibly security clearance. 'Sponsering' and the visa and all that shouldn't be nearly as hard for you, although you'd probably want to have a lawyer or something to make sure you do it all correctly. In theory you can even apply for a TN1 visa at the border, but I bet you'd be pretty hosed at that point if you got denied.
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Oct 21, 2009 00:18
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In Canada there are colleges that have programs specifically designed to transfer into the local university after the second year of engineering. They'll work with the university to make sure all the courses they offer will transfer. It's fairly easy to do, since the Canadian engineering associations have fairly strict requirements for curriculums. Things are fairly standard across the country. While you have some places that are 'engineering' schools, pretty much every university in Canada has an engineering program that will be roughly comparable. Honestly, these programs are better in some ways than the university programs at that level. The teachers that teach in the colleges generally also teach courses to engineering technicians and surveyors, so the classes are more practical that the stuff you get in the first couple of years of university engineering courses. Talk to the university you plan on going to and see what they have to say.
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Oct 28, 2009 19:49
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Colawa posted:Subcrid are you from Vancouver? Would you be able to tell me how BCIT compares to UBC as far as engineering education goes? BCIT's program is very new. They just started to offer full degree programs a couple of years ago and they weren't offering them yet when I started school so I didn't look into it all that much. I work with one person who graduated from the first class of BCIT civil/structural engineering. It seems like I had a better technical and theoretical background and she has some more experience in things like surveying and drafting. I don't know if that's representative though. Their program is interesting, in that the first two years are their engineering technician program. So you can go into the program and decide halfway if you want to be a technician or do the extra two years for a full degree. The only issue at the moment is that the BCIT engineering program hasn't been certified by the engineering accreditation board yet because it's so new. I think they're doing the review of the program this year. There was an agreement with APEGBC over the last three years where you could take some tests when you're done the program to get your EIT status, but I don't know what will happen next year. Even if they don't get accreditation, I'm sure they'll modify the program to meet whatever they're told to do. If you have any questions about UBC I can probably answer them.
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Oct 29, 2009 09:22
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We didn't have numbers like that, but the civil engineering program at UBC required: Differential Calculus Integral Calculus Linear Algebra Multivariable Calculus Differential Equations Partial Differential Equations Plus some stats courses The partial differential equations course was taken in the third year of the program and the equivalent course in the math department was a 300 level course but the engineering course was numbered as a 200 level course specifically because an inordinate number of people fail it. Putting it at the 300 level would make it count for the average grade used for admittance into masters programs. I know a few people who took the course three times.
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Oct 30, 2009 00:13
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You people who never had to take Partial Differential Equations are horrible and I don't like you. 
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Oct 30, 2009 18:39
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In one sense I spend a lot of time doing paperwork, in that what I'm doing has an effect on a drawing or words on a page, but I spend nearly no time doing bureaucratic style paperwork. I get given a problem to fix and drawings generally end up being the thing we give to the client, but that's not really my product. We sell problem solving, technical knowledge, and the fact that they need an engineer's stamp before they can actually build anything. We get hired because we can solve a problem a client has. I also spend a lot of time climbing around inside industrial buildings and mud for someone that just produces paperwork.
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Oct 31, 2009 03:55
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Cypress posted:So wait, all you guys got the Calculus courses credited along with the physics courses, towards your degree? I just looked mine up. We required 155 credit hours over 4 years. So our program apparently just squeezed more in. I don't know why you'd design your program so that everyone has to take a bunch of prerequisites when you know they don't have them out of high-school. Just design them into the program.
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Nov 3, 2009 23:02
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leo_r posted:Does anyone know anything about summer internships in Canada? I'm studying aerospace engineering in the UK, but I'm originally Canadian. All the public sector stuff seems to have a very confusing application process through some central organisation, or is directly linked to universities. Not studying in Canada, finding information about placements (or how to apply) is pretty tricky. The UK aerospace industry is pretty much 1 company, who I don't really want to work for. It's probably going to be difficult if you're not at a Canadian university. Most schools here have an organized internship program, so companies and organizations will just call up the local university and have them list the job openings with their students. You might have some luck if you contact the Engineering Co-op offices at schools near where you want to work and see if they can help you. You might have problems with that though, because it's likely they want to horde as many jobs as they can for their own students. It's worth a shot though. The other way to do things would be to just contact engineering companies and ask them if they're hiring students. You might have better luck with that.
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Jan 5, 2010 19:52
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AllAmericanAndy posted:Not to discourage you, but in my experience (engineering contractor) we don't do any AutoCAD work in-house any more, it just gets farmed out to low cost centres in India etc. where they have cad monkeys prepared to work for a hell of a lot less. What kind of engineering do you do? I've never seen a significant amount of drafting being contracted outside of the firm in any company I've worked in or anyone I've really discussed it with in civil or structural engineering. It seems like it would be impossible to actually work like that in any sort of time critical scenario.
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Jan 6, 2010 06:43
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timtastic posted:Do any of you read any trade journals or have some sort of other source for what is happening in your industry? There are good journals if you can find the one that fills the specific niches you're interested in. A lot of journals aren't particularly useful for anything practical because they publish papers about incredibly specific problems. It's an important function, but often not particularly useful for a design engineer until it works its way into a more generalized model of things unless it's an incredibly specific problem you're actually involved in. That being said, there are journals that publish articles aimed at the more practical as well. There are also publications that focus on case studies and things if that interests you. Personally, I find it more useful to spend a couple hundred bucks on a new text every few months than subscribe to three or four journals for the same price. I've been buying books for several years and still have dozens in the list of ones I want to buy. I can't keep them all at work anymore because I've run out of bookshelf space. I make sure to keep an eye on the information coming out of relevant associations (for me, CISC, AISC, Cement Association of Canada, ACI, a couple of different steel organizations and some other places). I'm a member of a couple of them and always keep an eye out for technical bulletins, design guides, and that kind of thing. I'm also on a couple of mailing lists and like to read and sometimes post on eng-tips.com because it's nice to see and discuss different approaches to problems. edit: But yeah, as an Engineer you're selling problem solving. The more you know, the better and quicker you can come up with a model of a system and the more information you can effectively access the more effective you are. Keep up with learning about your trade. It doesn't matter how you do it as long as your understanding is growing and you can apply it somehow. T.C. fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Aug 21, 2010 |
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Aug 21, 2010 09:21
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It depends on how your program is structured and what they actually do in the classes. The spots where it might be important are in materials classes/metallurgy if you do either of those, water treatment or possibly some kinds of environmental engineering classes. I know I could have gotten away without university chemistry. The classes where it was vaguely useful explained the concepts again because they figured you wouldn't remember. See if you can find someone in the program you're doing to ask. It's pretty program specific.
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Sep 5, 2010 21:42
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Our provincial association does a salary survey every two years and it tends to show that doing a masters doesn't really help the earning potential all that much on average. In 2008 in BC the mean total compensation for an Engineer was $105,078. The median total compensation was $90,246 For someone with a Masters in Engineering or Applied Science the mean was $111,684 and the median was $94,500. MBAs have a mean of $109,528 and a median of $100,300 PhD/DSc have a mean of $119,945 and a median of $101,915 For some reason an MA gets you a median of $140,113 and a mean of $117,500. I'm not quite sure what's going on there. There were 98 of them, so it's not just one or two guys pulling up the numbers. But yeah, the average between someone with a masters and the overall average isn't that much, and it's even less when you realize that you're less likely to have an inexperienced engineer getting a masters or an MBA, so you don't have the entry level salaries bringing it down.
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Sep 13, 2010 03:50
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All but one or two of the people I know that took Environmental Engineering have ended up spending all their time writing Environmental Impact Assessments. It`s great for the one person that really loves doing EIAs. The rest, not as much. It`s one of those disciplines that has a few really cool jobs but the rest tend to end up doing paperwork and monitoring test wells and things. But really, most of engineering is like that, so hey.
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Oct 23, 2010 07:12
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Geoduck posted:I'm looking into doing a degree in Mechanical engineering at McGill University. I've always been good and calculus and physics and I have lots of family connections in engineering so I don't think a job would be hard to find as long as I keep my marks up. McGill's pretty good from what I've heard. Honestly, if you're doing one of the major engineering disciplines, any school accredited for Engineering in Canada is going to get the job done for undergrad. Some are better than others in different ways and they focus on different things, but I've never seen anyone care what school a person went to in hiring decisions unless it's an "I went there too!" thing. The general content of the programs will be fairly similar. I assume cost is an issue. You might want to look into doing the first two years at a college or technical school and transferring over. Lots of universities will have an affiliation with a local college where the college has a two year course that is directly transferable to the university with no hassles. It's significantly cheaper and you'll still be getting the same basic courses. People that went that route seem to have a better handle on some of the practical applications of things right out of university, just because trade schools and colleges are more likely to focus on that than the guy from the Chemistry department teaching a a few hundred second year students about Materials. That route also seemed to have a higher rate of non-traditional students where I went, so you might fit in better instead of being with a bunch of 18 year olds. My experience may not be representative, but it's worth looking into alternative paths.
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Oct 25, 2010 20:15
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If they're critical and vulnerable to freezing why aren't they already heat traced and/or insulated?
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Nov 21, 2010 05:22
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Apple2o posted:What engineering degree would have me NOT working in a cubicle? Depends on what you consider exciting, really. If you want to a field engineer you can actually end up in charge of various stuff fairly quickly. If you want to be more technical you may not. You're going to be doing earthworks, infrastructure, roads or drainage or something, most likely. Civil work is generally one of the less technical fields in real world application. There are certainly areas where there's all sorts of testing and math, but it's also a field where you can end up doing standard things constantly and basically applying standard details and reusing previous designs over and over again. I know a few civil engineers that are quite good at what they do but are pretty much useless in a theoretical capacity. However, you can find jobs where you're not in a cubical in most disciplines. Go for what you're interested in and you can move your career towards the type of work you'd like to do in that discipline. If you want to get into the field more, you can either focus on the construction/implementation/commissioning/inspection side of things more or you can work on smaller projects where you're working with a small team and have to have intimate knowledge, or projects where you're modifying existing items and need to familiarize yourself with the site. If you don't want to leave the office you can work for bigger companies, purely on greenfield projects, or work for a part manufacturer or on electrical components. There's all sorts of ways you can target your career towards the sort of work that you'd like to do. You'll actually find that a lot of companies will try to get you out into the field a reasonable amount in the first few years so you can actually understand what the heck you're doing. If you can't connect your work with it's implementation in real life it's difficult to do a good job.
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Jan 3, 2011 05:54
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Environmental Engineers can be almost anything. You'll have schools that have it as its own discipline, others that put it with Civil, I've seen Chemical Engineers that took Environmental options, I'm sure somewhere out there there's a Mechanical Engineering program with an environmental option. Look at the type of environmental engineering you want to do. If you want to look at things like pollution, dirt, water, community planning, green buildings, or things like that you might want a Civil degree. If you want to build wind turbines, energy efficient devices, or things like that you probably want a mechanical engineering degree. If you want to go into power systems it could be a wide number of degrees. Fish and wildlife could be a biological engineering degree of some sort. With a chemical engineering degree you could do process work, all sorts of things with pollution, water treatment, testing, rehabilitation... If you want to do environmental work you can do it with any degree. If there's not a specific program at your school with Environmental Engineering, look at the type of work you want to do and get the degree that involves that, then look for jobs in a company that does Environmental work. Honestly, a lot of the people that I know that got degrees specifically for Environmental Engineering seem to spend all their time writing impact assesments, which is important but seems incredibly boring to me. On the other hand, I know a number of people that had other degrees and now do projects in green energy, environmental monitoring, water treatment and treatment of industrial process waste. So yeah, it's really more what you do with it that matters. What's more important is your first few jobs. Your experience defines your worth, so it's hard to get out of whatever general line of work you start out in unless you're willing to take a reasonable cut in salary.
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Mar 20, 2011 02:38
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Terrifying Effigies posted:Engineering jobs tend to have some of the highest job satisfaction ratings out there. Most older engineers simply enjoy their work v Well to be fair, engineers either really really love their jobs, or really, really hate their jobs.
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Mar 24, 2011 21:49
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lightpole posted:School wasnt that hard and if someone wants to call themselves an engineer who cares? There is no definition that says you had to go to school to be one. If they can do their job and have a solid grasp of engineering fundamentals they are an engineer. In many countries and jurisdictions this just isn't true. They simply aren't engineers. In fact, in some places, graduating from an engineering program doesn't mean you can call yourself an engineer. In Canada, only registered professional engineers may take part in things that are legally defined as the practice of engineering. Only those people may use the title Engineer. In a lot of disciplines it's also true that many technicians and other similar technical people will have gigantic blindspots in their knowledge that they aren't aware of. This can be dangerous as hell. It happens to engineers as well, but not generally to the same extent. quote:I know what you are talking about but theres no reason to be pretentious about graduating from college, especially when you will have to work with the techs and those techs might have some good pointers for you. You certainly shouldn't come out of university thinking you know more than experienced technicians, surveyors, drafters or other similar people. You should also always be willing to learn from people with experience. However, you can't let people get away with the whole "Look kid, I've been doing this for twenty years" thing. Lots of people do things in ways that don't hold up to codes or safety requirements, but it doesn't necessarily break so they do it for years the wrong way. If you're the engineer it's still your responsibility to prove to at least yourself that whatever is happening is actually right. Take advice, listen to the ways people do things, but always always confirm. Of course, all the above holds for dealing with Engineers as well. Really, listen to everyone and then decide things on your own. Never trust anyone, or anything and always have a crippling fear that things could go to poo poo. That's how to be sure you're always a safe engineer.
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Apr 18, 2011 21:52
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Basically, when it comes down to it, listing your qualifications is never pretentious in a knowledge based field if you aren't an rear end that tries to use qualifications as a reason that your opinion is right. Listing your qualifications gives people a better idea of what they're dealing with. I don't put my degree in my title because it's implied by the professional designation that I have, but if it wasn't implied I would explicitly state it.
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Apr 19, 2011 02:45
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SeaBass posted:
Yeah, it's a nice bonus if you can do it because it makes it easier to talk to your draftspeople, but it's certainly not required. If you're comfortable using it, though, it can be nice sometimes. If you've got something really really small that's incredibly urgent or at five on a friday or something it can be nice. It's great for when you're doing your own final check on a drawing and notice that somehow nobody saw that a 3 was mistyped as a 4 or something. If you're out of time and can't get a draftsperson right away it's nice to be able to fix it. But really, it makes no economic sense to have an engineer do his own drafting except in odd circumstances. A proper draftsperson should be faster than you and gets paid less.
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Apr 19, 2011 19:04
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ch3cooh posted:Let me just say that the best part of being an engineer is having vendors. Who's going to Nuggets-Thunder game 5 and sitting in a suite? this guy If you're a consulting engineer that really seems like you're setting yourself up for a massive conflict of interest...
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Apr 27, 2011 02:38
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TheOmegaWalrus posted:
Why are you applying to work at a company if you don't know what they do?
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May 20, 2011 20:08
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There are good reasons for course based masters. My school gave out Masters of Applied Science for research based degrees and Masters of Engineering for course based degrees. The MEng doesn't count for anything if you decide to get a PhD in the future. The research based track is the usual thing, you take a few courses, help with some research projects and do your own major work. The course based track is more for getting mastery of advanced theories, methods and concepts that are needed for specific types of engineering but aren't necessarily covered in standard engineering practice or a bachelor's program. For example, a structural engineer can get his MEng and do advanced coursework in seismics, dynamics of structures, plate theory, nonlinear structures, and all sorts of fun things that are very useful but not generally relevant to the common engineer. I'd love to get an MEng if I could somehow squeeze it around work, which I can't.
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May 27, 2011 21:01
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Arvannies posted:Hoping I can get some advice here. The thing is, if you want to do actual engineering, jumping straight into a masters isn't going to teach you a bunch of the things you need to know. There isn't a lot of fluff in a structural engineering bachelor's program, almost all of the courses you'd need to take are directly required to understand what you're doing afterwards in the real world. If you went for a research based masters and they let you in, you might be able to pick up courses to understand whatever area you're specifically researching, but in my mind you wouldn't have the breadth to actually practice once you graduate. If you took a course based masters, you'd just get eaten alive. New graduates of university programs are useless in the workplace for about a year even taking a full program. You should also check the licencing requirements wherever you're looking to become licensed. In my jurisdiction in Canada you can't become a licensed professional engineer without a degree from, at minimum, a four year engineering, geoscience or technology program.
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Jun 19, 2011 22:18
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RogueLemming posted:I agree that it is maybe an unnecessary evil, but it's still good experience. If that experience is worth his time to him, I think he should go for it. It's a value judgment for him then. Would you give up a few hours of TV every week if it would possibly put you in a much better spot a few years from now? He's obviously providing some value to the company he's working at or they wouldn't bother having him. He should be compensated for that value. If there weren't a free worker available the company would need to pay someone to do the work. As such a free intern is displacing at least part of a paid job. Sure new guys are useless, but that's why the get paid less and, in a consulting situation, are charged out for less money. Honestly, I think unpaid internships would be contrary to the code of ethics of the engineering association in BC. One of the items in the code of ethics is: APEGBC Code of Ethics posted:(5) uphold the principle of appropriate and adequate compensation for the performance of engineering and geoscience work; The point being that if there isn't adequate compensation for engineering work, the engineers will not be able to spend the necessary time on a task to provide the appropriate standard of care. The guidelines for the code of ethics basically expand on that saying that you should always charge a fee appropriate to the scope, never put yourself in a position where you're not charging enough to actually accomplish the scope with the appropriate amount of attention, not lowball estimates, not accept or give kickbacks, and that "members in a supervisory role over other professionals should strive to ensure that compensation is appropriate and fair" edit: also, it's devaluing things for his peers because by participating in it, it legitimizes the practice. If good young engineers aren't willing to participate in this kind of thing then it can't happen. Paying actual money to employees also increases the expectations from their employers and co-workers, which is a good thing. An unpaid worker is someone you don't feel you have to keep occupied with legitimate work because it's not wasting money or budget if they spend a week doing pointless busywork. A paid worker is actually expected to at least make a good effort at producing something useful and will likely be given tasks that reflect that unless the company is horrible. T.C. fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jul 16, 2011 |
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Jul 16, 2011 03:22
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RogueLemming posted:Jesus christ you all sound entitled. Let me guess, you all DESERVE more money? And someone else always get promoted/moved to the spot that you DESERVED too, right? I bet that someone is a person who was willing to think about more than the paycheck they DESERVE. Note that nobody here was talking about salaries for engineers who have been practicing for a while. You brought that up for some reason. We were discussing salaries for students. I'm not sure how you can sound entitled when you're talking about making sure others are paid for their work. Nobody is worried that an unpaid intern is displacing experienced engineers. They'd be displacing entry level engineers. That is bad for the profession because we should be supporting and helping new engineers and teaching them how to be professionals, not exploiting them for free work. However, I'm going to go on and actually sound entitled now, because it's a legitimate stance. People are entitled to some form of compensation for their work. Frankly it's insulting that you're assuming people's points of view are formed because they're bitter or underpaid or something. I love what I do, I just spent a 70 hour week working on a project because I understand my responsibility as a professional and that my clients expect me to complete the work I've committed to when I commit to it and with a high level of quality. (Note that consistently working long hours is also not someone's responsibility as a professional unless they knew the situation going in and committed to it and are also compensated appropriately). However, I also did the work with the understanding that I would be paid for it. I am not a charity when it comes to providing work for commercial entities. I spend several hours of personal time a week reading and learning about engineering topics, and have spent many thousands of dollars of my own money on my personal technical library, continuing education and related items. Those are definitely my responsibility as a professional. It is not, however, my responsibility as a professional to provide free labour and I wouldn't want to work for a company that would expect me, or anyone else, to do that. I expect to be paid for my work, and I expect that all the people that work with me or that I supervise should get paid for their contributions as well. We provide value and should be compensated for it. I have had times where I have sat down with people and have had to tell them that they should be reporting all the time they work for a client because that's time they should be paid for. People take work home and don't bill it because they don't feel that they're productive enough and then don't want to bill it because they're embarassed or think they'll look bad because of it for some reason. If you're not as productive, you may get paid less, but that's the whole point. You should still be paid for what you do. My company annually reviews everyone's salary and will quite happily give you a significant raise without being asked if it reflects your level production. That's the way a profession should work. There should be mutual respect between professionals and part of that is making sure that everyone gets compensated for the work they do. A student engineer can provide value. I've never had one work with me that didn't provide some sort of useful contribution. If they're not contributing it often seems to be that it's more a failure of the supervision or structure around them because they're not being utilized on tasks appropriate to their level or being given the support they need. They're contributing, so they should be paid for their contribution. The fact that they're learning from the experience is a crappy excuse. Everyone learns in an engineering office. Guys who have been practicing for 50 years learn new things all the time. Hell, new hires of all types are often fairly unproductive for the first few months, but nobody would ever suggest that you don't pay the 35 year old guy until he's fully engaged at the company because he's gaining the relevant experience and knows the money will come later when he's fully trained. It's not like students are getting paid $100,000 a year or something. They get paid at a low rate because their output is small and they require more supervision. That is reasonable. Paying them nothing because they're a group of people that have very little negotiating power is exploitative and inappropriate.
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Jul 16, 2011 05:30
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TrueChaos posted:Can you explain what you mean by environmental engineering? I've honestly never really understood the point behind a degree that was so specific like that - I graduated with a MechE degree, and am working for an environmental remediation company, and most of the people here have Elec and Mech degrees. It's not all that specific. The degrees I've seen are generally some combination of courses that would otherwise be seen in Civil, Geological, Chemical or Biological engineering programs. You can get involved in the environmental sector using almost any degree, because obviously you can approach environmental problems from all sorts of angles and you require all sorts of equipment and knowledge and construction to get to implement a lot of things. That's not the point of what's being referred to here though. Environmental engineers are supposed to have the background to understand the overall systems at play, how all the different environmental bits interact and how we can affect them. Civil engineering often looks at things like water runoff and groundwater and things like that, but those people often don't have the chemical or biological background to go into too much depth when dealing with contamination. Chemical engineers may have the depth of understanding of chemistry but don't know all that much about hydrology or ground water travel. It's basically a discipline that can actually look at environmental systems as a whole. It's also seems relatively versatile as programs seem to go into enough depth to actually have an understanding of the underlying things they're looking at. A lot of the environmental engineers I know seem to end up doing Environmental Impact Assessments, which really wouldn't be something I'd enjoy personally, but they also have the background to work in all sorts of industries. Waste treatment and water treatment/management are big ones, as is overall environmental systems planning for ongoing projects and remediation, but they're also involved in things like mining and heavy industry to deal with pollution issues, the resource sector to deal with resource management and the government to do various monitoring and assessment tasks.
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Jul 17, 2011 00:23
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timtastic posted:How can I change my career focus? Right now all the potential employers that see my resume take a rather myopic view and assume that since I have 4 years of software QA experience (mostly internships) that that's all I can do. The one option that comes to mind (grad school) isn't an option for me. I'd like to move into something that has more growth potential and I just don't see that happening in software QA. To change career directions you generally have to drop a few steps in seniority or come up with a way to frame your experience so it fits the type of role you're looking for. It sounds like you're pretty new at things anyway though, so just find entry level-ish jobs you want and apply for them. You haven't been at things too long, so if anything any experience is good experience. Don't try to hide what you've been doing for the last four years. Sell it. You can explain that you want to move forward with a career in whatever you're aiming for and point out why whatever you've done in the past helps you with that. If you don't frame it right it just looks like you're a guy that needs a job and is applying outside of his area of expertise. Read your cover letter from the point of view of a manager at the company you're applying to and try to figure out what impression you're giving off. If you don't at least acknowledge the shift in focus somewhere it looks like you're just firing off applications everywhere even if the jobs don't fit in with what your previous experience indicates your career focus is. You have to remember, though, that the job market is tough in a lot of places. Depending on where you are and what you're trying to do it may just be that there are too many applicants. It's going to be tough to get a job without applicable experience. In that case, really all you can do is try to network your way into a job. You can try doing things like joining professional associations, volunteering for things like Engineers without Borders, or even going to meet and greets at universities. Local universities here throw events specifically to allow students to meet people from various companies and network. However there's nothing that says the professionals who are there can't network with each other as well. Basically, it's going to be like finding any other job but harder because you're going to have to talk your way past a resume that doesn't quite click with the types of jobs you want.
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Jul 18, 2011 05:15
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mokhtar belmokhtar posted:When a job posting asks for skills with SAP, is there a specific product they make used by engineers or does it just depend? What kind of an engineer are you? While SAP is a business software provider/suite, SAP 2000 (often just referred to as SAP) is a piece of relatively popular structural analysis software made by someone else entirely.
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Jun 8, 2013 22:30
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I've always loved the places that ask for an 'Intermediate' Engineer, also ask for a decade of experience, include responsibilities that put you in charge of a bunch of engineers, and then list the salary as something like $60,000. There are a surprising number of them. I also saw a listing today that listed 0-3 years experience but required extensive knowledge of shoring, scaffolding and engineering of construction facilities. What it tells you is that the company listing the work doesn't know enough about the work to even list a job properly *or* they treat everyone like crap. In either case, you likely don't want to work there.
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Jun 11, 2013 03:25
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movax posted:What do you think the salaries for that position should be out of curiosity? I don't know if I'm off-base expecting considerably more for that for that given job/responsibilities. Yeah, that was an example of a laughable job listing. It'd depend on where you are and what industry you're in: a) Intermediate engineer is generally the 4-8 year experience range in my experience. It's the first few years after you get your PE/P.Eng/Whatever normally. Sometimes it'll be up to the 10 year range, but it's stretching it. b) According to our local association, that kind of experience level and responsibility puts you around a mean of $100,000 to $110,000 in total compensation. High quartile's around $130,000, low quartile's around $85,000. That's across all disciplines. You see a reasonable number of job ads where they give a title, them list qualifications that are above what that title would normally do and then a salary that's way below what even the understated title would earn.
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Jun 13, 2013 05:30
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Humour doesn't really come across in a resume and it seems silly to try. Don't try to make your bartending sound super amazing on the resume. If you try to tongue in cheek thing it's going to read like you're serious because there are people who will actually try that kind of thing and there's no context to understand that you aren't serious. Just focus your resume on your academics (put them first), then when you get to your job list how it's helped your skills and demonstrates your work ethic and things like that. Then explain yourself in your cover letter. You can even be clever there if you'd like because there's actual context to show that you're joking.
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Jan 3, 2014 21:50
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spwrozek posted:
I'm a civil engineer that does distribution lines on occasion and I can't understand why anyone bothers to get them engineered in the first place. Even if I do a magical job it's probably not going to be significantly different from what a contractor could just eyeball. Half the time I'm just going to use the same local utility company tables and standards that everyone has a photocopy of on their shelves. The only time there's anything interesting involved is when there are: A) really tall poles B) restrictive guying conditions or weird guying arrangements C) lots of circuits
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Jun 5, 2014 19:59
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 11:01 |
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Different disciplines and industries have different types of technicians. They're knowledge based workers who have some amount of technical training but generally focused on implementing tasks rather than working at a more conceptual level. Technicians work in labs, do surveying and field work, are 'designers' (do conceptual level designs or implement engineering into fleshed out designs), do QA/QC and that kind of thing. I've known lots of designer type techs who have later become engineers.
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Jun 19, 2014 02:17
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