TOP ten Benefits of Engineering

TOP ten Benefits of Engineering

Why study engineering?

Studying engineering can lead to exciting career prospects and top salaries, as engineering companies, career specialists and students themselves highlight.

Engineering offers a rewarding and profitable career ,Ñone in which you can use your mind to find creative solutions to the challenges facing our society.

1.       Intellectual Development

2.      Job Satisfaction

3.      Professional Environment

4.      Technological and Scientific Discovery

5.      Creative Thinking

6.      Variety of Career Opportunities

7.      Challenging Work

8.     Potential to Benefit Society

9.      Financial Security

10.  Prestige

1.  Intellectual Development

An engineering education will "exercise" your brain, developing your ability to think logically and to solve problems. These are skills that will be valuable throughout your lifeÑand not only when you are solving engineering problems. For example, your problem-solving skills can help you undertake tasks such as planning a vacation, finding a job, organizing a fund-raiser, purchasing a house, or writing a book.

2. Job Satisfaction

Studies show that, by far, the number-one cause of unhappiness among people in the United States is job dissatisfaction. Thus, it is important to find a career that provides you with enjoyment and satisfaction. After all, you might spend 40 or so years working eight hours or more a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. Do you want to dislike every minute of that time, or would you rather do something that you enjoy? For numerous reasons, some of which are listed below, engineering provides a satisfying field of work.

3. Professional Environment

As an engineer, you will work in a professional environment in which you will be treated with respect and have a certain amount of freedom in choosing your work. You will be also be in a position to influence what happens at your company

4. Technological and Scientific Discovery

Do you know why golf balls have dimples on them? Do you understand how the loads are transmitted to the supports on a suspension bridge? Do you know what a laser is or how a computer works? When you drive on a mountain road, do you look at the guard rails and understand why they were designed the way they were? Do you know why split-level houses experience more damage in earthquakes? An engineering education can help you understand how these, and many other things in the world, work.

5. Creative Thinking

Engineering is by its very nature a creative profession. When practicing engineers develop solutions to open-ended, real-world problems, they must employ conscious and subconscious mental processing as well as divergent and convergent thinking.

Because we are in a time of rapid social and technological changes, the need for engineers to think creatively is greater now than ever before. Only through creativity can we cope with and adapt to these changes. If you like to question, explore, invent, discover, and create, then engineering could be the ideal profession for you.

6. Variety of Career Opportunities

What do Neil Armstrong, Jimmy Carter, and Alfred Hitchcock have in common? Though they eventually chose very different careers - one as an astronaut, one as a president, and one as a filmmaker - they all started with an engineering education.

An engineering degree offers a wide range of career possibilities. Within the practice of engineering, there is an enormous variety of job functions.

If you are imaginative and creative, design engineering may be for you.

If you like laboratories and conducting experiments, you might consider test engineering.

If you like to organize and expedite projects, look into being a development engineer.

If you are persuasive and like working with people, consider a career in sales or field service engineering.

The analytical skills and technological expertise you develop as an engineering student can also be put to use in many other fields. For example, as an engineering graduate, you could go on to study medicine or law. You could become a politician and use your knowledge of technology and science to set important national policy. You could also become an entrepreneur in a related field such as construction, manufacturing, or consulting. Or you could combine engineering and business skills in a career as a technical manager or a salesperson for a high-tech company.

7. Challenging Work .

If you like challenges, engineering could be for you. In the engineering work world, there is no shortage of challenging problems. Any engineering manager will tell you that he or she has a huge backlog of problems that need to be solved.

Generally, "real world" engineering problems are quite different from most of the problems you will solve in school. In school, most problems have a single, correct answer. When you get into the engineering work world, virtually all problems will be open-ended. There will be no single answer, no answer in the back of the book, no professor to tell you that you are right or wrong. You will be required to devise a solution and persuade others that your solution is the best one.

8. Benefit Society

Just about everything that engineers do benefits society. Engineers develop transportation systems that help people and products move about easily. Engineers design the buildings that we live and work in, the systems that deliver our water and electricity, the machinery that produces our food, and the medical equipment that keeps us healthy.

Depending upon your value system, you may not view all things that engineers do as benefiting people. For example, engineers design military equipment like missiles, tanks, bombs, artillery, and fighter airplanes. Engineers are also involved in the production of pesticides, cigarettes, liquor, fluorocarbons, and asbestos.

As an engineer, however, you can choose to work on projects that clearly benefit society, such as cleaning up the environment, developing prosthetic aids for disabled persons, developing clean and efficient transportation systems, finding new sources of energy, alleviating the world's hunger problems, and increasing the standard of living in underdeveloped countries.

As a professional, you will receive liberal benefits, which will typically include a retirement plan, life insurance, health insurance, sick leave, paid vacation, holidays, and savings or profit-sharing plans.

9. Financial Security

While financial security should not be your only reason for choosing a career in engineering, if you decide to become an engineer you will be well paid. Engineering graduates receive the highest starting salary of any discipline

Furthermore, an understanding of technology will provide you with a better understanding of many issues facing our society. For example: Why don’t we have zero-emission electric vehicles rather than highly polluting cars powered by internal combustion engines? Should we have stopped building nuclear reactors? What will we use for energy when oil runs out? Is it technically feasible to develop a “Star Wars” defense system that will protect us against nuclear attack? Can we produce enough food to eliminate world hunger? Do high-voltage power lines cause cancer in people who live or play near them?

10. Prestige

Engineers play a primary role in sustaining our nation's international competitiveness, maintaining our standard of living, ensuring a strong national security, and protecting public safety. Furthermore, most people know that engineering requires hard work and strong technical skills. As a member of such a respected profession, you will receive a high amount of prestige.