Results 1 to 6 of 6

Thread: Considering Engineering Career

  1. #1
    Associate Engineer
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Posts
    2

    Considering Engineering Career

    Hello,

    I am a 24 year old male from the United States. I graduated in May 2011 with a double major in economics and philosophy from a relatively reputable uni in the US. My GPA wasn't great (3.1). I am currently in South Korea finishing a year of teaching English to Korean elementary and middle school students.

    I've always been fascinated with the way things work, cars, computers, etc. But never really got into any one subject too much. My father works in the finance industry and that has never fully gotten my interest. I am decent with math, definitely not talented naturally, but I can get an A in university level calculus when I try hard.

    I want to explore the possibility of a career in engineering, but I know myself and I need to get some real world experience with the day to day life of an engineer before I can know for sure that it is what I want to do. I know engineering is a broad field, but my main interests are mechanical and systems.

    My question is... without an engineering degree does anyone have an idea of what kind of job I could get where I can work with engineers or maybe do some shadowing of engineers on the job?? I need to make some money, not a lot, but at least a little bit. If I do find out that I want to be an engineer for sure I plan to attend Boston University's LEAP program.

    Thanks for the help,

    Cooper

  2. #2
    Technical Fellow jboggs's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Myrtle Beach, SC
    Posts
    908
    Congratulations! Engineering could use people with proven skills that want to succeed.

    If you have desire to always understand how things work, you've already got the first requirement. A story - remember a few years ago when you first started seeing the imposed yellow line on the field of televised football games to indicate the first down line? 99% of the viewers saw it, liked it, thought it was neat, and that's it. Well, being an engineer, and understanding that those very simple little lines required ENORMOUS amounts of technology to appear correctly from all angles, and all zoom factors, and all field conditions, and all weather, every time, I verbalized my curiosity on several occasions. In fact, it got to be a "thing" with my entire extended family. Whenever I was in the room and a football game was on, someone would always say. "How do they make that yellow line?" And everybody would laugh at the weird engineer who spent more time trying to figure that out than watching the game. The other members of this forum will agree - you get used to it.

    A good way for you to start would be to take some drafting classes. Notice - I didn't say COMPUTER drafting. I said drafting, as in a pencil, paper, and a straightedge. Manipulating those tools to create drawings like you see in the books causes you to STUDY those sample drawings very carefully. It also gives you an appreciation for what it takes to produce a good, attractive, usable drawing. I'm not sure where you can even find manual drafting classes anymore, but if you can, take some. Then, after breathing eraser dust for a while, move into computer drafting, CAD.

    One thing you will learn in that process is which branches of engineering seem to hold more interest for you. For example, you mentioned mechanical and systems. Believe it or not, even those two fields are HIGHLY diverse. For example, a mechanical engineer could end up designing buildings, or bridges, or HVAC systems, or piping, or aircraft, or automatic machines, or consumer products, or entire manufacturing plants, or power plants, or production equipment, ... Each one of those specialties will require a different body of knowledge, but all could start with a mechanical engineering degree.

    My work has always been around manufacturing of some sort. You might consider this: most companies that have an engineering department have both degreed and non-degreed personnel on staff. Very generally, the non-degreed individuals might be called "designers", while the degreed folks have the "engineer" title. The designers usually aren't expected to know how to do the detailed engineering calculations, but they understand the concepts very well. And they know what it takes to make things work. I ahve learned a lot from the designers I have worked with over the years. If you aren't sure about pursuing the engineering thing all out, you might make your goal to become a designer. Usually all that takes is a little technical schooling and some good drafting skills. That would give you a very good insight into the working world of the engineers around you.

    I could go on, as most on this forum know, but I'll stop for now.

    Except for this - don't worry too much about sketchy math skills. You will be amazed how much more sense that all makes, and how much easier it is, when you are applying it to real world applications you can understand. Plus this - I barely passed calculus in college and flunked differential equations altogether. That fact has had zero effect on my career.

  3. #3
    Senior Engineer
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Posts
    33
    I am in my first year of engineering as well. So far everything has been very challenging, but I am able to get through all my courses when putting 100% effort into all my classes. One of my buddies is a mechanical engineer (ME), who works for Army Corp of Engineers. He's project leader in design for hydro-power turbines, been working with them for about six years now.

    I didn't exactly know where I wanted to work either when I decided to go back to school for a new career path, ME. I highly recommend you get to know people who work as ME's, EE's, CE's, etc. Because these people can possibly help you get a job. I did electrical contract work in a semiconductor plant for about a year, met a lot of ME's who monitored the tools on the test floor. Some of the ME's I met became friends, one of them was trying to get me an non-paid internship there even though I didn't have two years of engineering school under my belt.

    Try to get to know as many people who work in the engineering field because connections can help out tremendously!

    BTW good luck!

  4. #4
    Associate Engineer
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Posts
    2
    jboggs, it is funny that you mention the yellow lines on the football fields. I was always interested in how they worked as well. Especially the bit about how they work from all camera angles! Do they have a system on the field that projects the lines then the cameras pick up the signals? Do all the cameras have an electronic map of the field in their memory that can then superimpose the image on that line? How does it work did you ever find out?

    ME_student, what did you study before you started working? Are you pursuing a second bachelor's or a masters?

    Thanks for the tips and the wish of luck.

    Good luck to you too and thank you both of you for your time and kind advice.

  5. #5
    Technical Fellow jboggs's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Myrtle Beach, SC
    Posts
    908
    CooperT - I learned something about it from Howstuffworks.com, but the explanation is far from complete. I did learn that it requires several truckloads of equipment to be hauled around and installed (by specialists) at each stadium. (Maybe some of the installations are permanent by now.) It is based on the same technology TV weathermen use, a green screen. They combine the image of the man himself standing in front of a green screen with the image of the weathermap, and what you see is the man in front of the map.

    Now just add variables for multiple cameras positions, zooms, weather, shadows, team uniforms, lighting, shadows.....yada yada yada.

    Assume the grass on the field perfectly matches that green screen. (Ignore the effects of shadows, weather, bare spots, logos on the field, etc for now. Ugh!) The precise position of every camera (in three dimensions) and a (theoretical) field is established from some fixed base point. Several encoders on each camera continuously monitor all the variables that affect the picture that camera produces (height, altitude and azimuth angles, zoom factor, etc.) and feed that data to a central computer. A separate green screen creates an image of the yellow line (and all the other images they use now.) But its not just a "flat" projection. Using camera position and zoom inputs, the image on that screen is a graphical representation of what the yellow line would look like if it really existed on the field and was being viewed by the particular camera in use at the time. The image you see on your TV is a combination of the image being photographed by the camera in use and the artificial yellow line image as created on that separate "green" screen. Everything that isn't "green" disappears from that articifial image and you see the yellow lines superimposed on the field. Simple, huh? Can you even imagine the number of calculations that requires every single millisecond? It boggles my mind.

    Actually, that little story is a wonderful example of how engineers interface with the rest of the world. We work technical wonders and the rest of the world just accepts it without even thinking about the difficulty of the task. If you want praise and recognition, you should look somewhere else.
    Last edited by jboggs; 12-11-2012 at 05:41 PM.

  6. #6
    Senior Engineer
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Posts
    33
    Quote Originally Posted by CooperT View Post
    jboggs, it is funny that you mention the yellow lines on the football fields. I was always interested in how they worked as well. Especially the bit about how they work from all camera angles! Do they have a system on the field that projects the lines then the cameras pick up the signals? Do all the cameras have an electronic map of the field in their memory that can then superimpose the image on that line? How does it work did you ever find out?

    ME_student, what did you study before you started working? Are you pursuing a second bachelor's or a masters?

    Thanks for the tips and the wish of luck.

    Good luck to you too and thank you both of you for your time and kind advice.
    I did limited energy electrical work for about four years, went to trade school for three years. I am pursuing a bachelors in mechanical engineering.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •