Thread: Any engineers in here?

Hello everyone, I am going back to school after hurting my back falling off a roof at work. I originally started to be an MD back in 2004 but after working in a few hospitals I realized it isn't for me, so I changed my major to Bio-systems engineering and am currently taking Calc 2 in 5 weeks(take a guess how much fun that is). I know I have a rough road ahead of me but I have my four month old baby girl to keep me going. My real question is if there are engineers in here, how many of you actually went directly into a related field or if you sidelined into and engineering position that wasn't really your major? I would love to do things with mechanics and hydraulics but to go to that major would completely scrap all the bio courses that I have already taken. Anybody care to chime in with some personal anecdotes?

Hi, I'm a mech engineer, which covers a wide range of subject matter. I didn't major in anything specific, the only thing I didn't want to do was designing air conditioning. I am currently working for an engineering consultancy firm (GHD) designing air conditioning, along with medical gas systems. All that being said, love my job most of the time.

Not sure if any of this helps. Good luck with the calculus, hated calculus.

Stu

the worst part is that once I am done with this class, I move straight into calc 3 for the next 5 week session

I have a mechanical engineering degree and the pure math portion was not a whole lot of fun.

Take a look at the Bob Miller's Calculus for the Clueless series. I think there were three books when I took Calc. They helped me visualize it in a different way than was taught in class.

It also helps if you can see real world engineering functionality in what you are learning in math class. Wish I could have taken my calculus class with better engineering examples. An example is vectors for heat transfer.

Best of luck to you.

the real funny thing is that I hated math with a passion in highschool, argued with teachers nearly every day. Now I am in an applied math major, haha guess the jokes on me, and if i decide to get really stupid i am going to tack on a math minor............what have I become??

I'm an electronics engineer.

I interned in an engineering company that created test and measurement systems for labs and factories. At the end of my internship I landed a job there. It didn't pay that well (small company) but the work was very interesting and valuable in the building of skills, since each new project used different technology (software and hardware), depending on the customer.

While most of my work was software, my engineering skills made a lot of difference for me because I spent most of my time in research envirnments in that field. I was the ideal software developer because I was good at software, and I had the required knowledge to talk with the customer's engineers and understand the actual things I had to implement or analyze. Throughout my career, my major and all my minors have come in handy to understand the things I was dealing with.

Mechanical engineer here !

I'm curently working in the aerospace industry. I only took 1 aeronautic's class, which seemed to be enough for the company that hired me.

Calculus rocks ! (Funny, I didn't think that as I was doing it)

Good luck with your studies !!

I'm a Locomotive Engineer, does that count? I know, I know. I did take Calc though when earning my BBA & hated it. Calc II, forget it! I'll stick to driving trains.

Originally Posted by acoda

the real funny thing is that I hated math with a passion in highschool, argued with teachers nearly every day. Now I am in an applied math major, haha guess the jokes on me, and if i decide to get really stupid i am going to tack on a math minor............what have I become??

High school math instruction is a known weak point in US education.

"Arguing with teachers" could mean _you_ didn't understand what they were teaching, or that _they_ didn't understand it, or just that you understood it differently.

Past high school, the teacher _will_ understand what he's teaching.

With two calculus courses coming in 10 weeks, my heart goes out to you.

Charles (MA physics, retired software designer and programmer)

I'm not an engineer myself, but I work in university development and a good number of alums I work with majored in engineering. What was surprising to me was how many of them had never worked as engineers. The big Wall Street banks and private equity firms hired them because of the analytical training they had via the engineering major.