[Kangaroo]

Couldn't agree more with the advice in this thread.

What undergrads should do while studying engineering:

Get a part time job in retail to build social skills
Party, even when you lame friends go home continue and game girls
Go on exchange
Dont care too much
Understand that hard work actually beats out natural smarts
Play a team sport
Eat healthy
Go to the gym
Work as a group and cheat where you can

[phil81]

(08-10-2013 12:50 AM)Balkanite Wrote:  

Industrial engineering undergrad, now in sales. May get an MBA in the future but not sure I need to. Great stuff already in the thread, my take -

In sales, it is all about your numbers. Companies aren't going to care if you have an advanced degree. An MBA might be good if you want to get into sales management and eventually into executive management but it isn't needed. Also, top sales guys frequently make more than their sales managers and have a less stressful job. An MBA is only going to have a positive ROI if you plan to spend another 10 or 20 years in the corporate world.

[Balkanite]

(08-10-2013 10:36 AM)phil81 Wrote:  

(08-10-2013 12:50 AM)Balkanite Wrote:  

Industrial engineering undergrad, now in sales. May get an MBA in the future but not sure I need to. Great stuff already in the thread, my take -

In sales, it is all about your numbers. Companies aren't going to care if you have an advanced degree. An MBA might be good if you want to get into sales management and eventually into executive management but it isn't needed. Also, top sales guys frequently make more than their sales managers and have a less stressful job. An MBA is only going to have a positive ROI if you plan to spend another 10 or 20 years in the corporate world.

Correct if you're exceeding numbers you're a rock star, background doesn't mean shit.

An MBA is virtually a must though if you want to be a corporate officer and make the serious $. But not always the case.

[phil81]

(08-10-2013 07:58 AM)BecomingMachine Wrote:  

phil81 Wrote:

If I could give advice to my younger self while I was an engineering student this is what I would say

Don't overthink things
Have fun
Study abroad as much as possible
Develop skills that will allow you to work for yourself within 2 years of graduation or sooner
Social skills and writing are important
Listening skills and being humble are the most important social skills when working with more experienced people
Don't take yourself or school too seriously, once you get your first job you will probably never be asked again about things like your gpa or extracurricular activities

BecomingMachine - which campus are you at?

I like your outlook. Could I ask you to elaborate more on what the specific skills for working for yourself in Engineering are? Do you work for yourself? Is there a "blueprint" for soon or recent graduates to work towards this goal?

My experience is with computer technology so I can't speak for all types of engineering but there is a huge demand for software dev and it is portable. Get a little experience and you can do freelance stuff from anywhere or develop your own products. Take a look at the technologies being taught in the the dev bootcamps since that is what is in demand but probably not taught in universities. Consulting or sales engineering could also work but I still think software dev is best unless you hate coding.

My opinion on a blueprint would be to get involved with other entrepreneurs and startup communities. I would not work for a big corporations even though they paid a lot more. Their culture is the opposite of entrepreneurial.

There are a lot of youtube videos you could watch. Peter Thiel's stuff might be a good place to start.

[phil81]

(08-10-2013 10:55 AM)Balkanite Wrote:  

(08-10-2013 10:36 AM)phil81 Wrote:  

(08-10-2013 12:50 AM)Balkanite Wrote:  

Industrial engineering undergrad, now in sales. May get an MBA in the future but not sure I need to. Great stuff already in the thread, my take -

In sales, it is all about your numbers. Companies aren't going to care if you have an advanced degree. An MBA might be good if you want to get into sales management and eventually into executive management but it isn't needed. Also, top sales guys frequently make more than their sales managers and have a less stressful job. An MBA is only going to have a positive ROI if you plan to spend another 10 or 20 years in the corporate world.

Correct if you're exceeding numbers you're a rock star, background doesn't mean shit.

An MBA is virtually a must though if you want to be a corporate officer and make the serious $. But not always the case.

Depends on the industry. MBAs are needed just to get started in investment banking. Most executives in tech companies don't have MBAs.

[Genghis Khan]

@BecomingMachine...PM me if you're really interested in the entire PhD and then consulting/investment banking/think tank route. It's basically the track I'm on. I can tell you a bit more about it.

@Kangaroo 'Work as a group and cheat where you can'
...Although time-wise, it's a smart move. In the long-term if you want to stick with engineering as a job, it's probably a bad idea. From my own experience: working in a group is only useful if you're the smartest person. You effectively end up teaching everyone else and in the process learning your own weaknesses in the knowledge. Otherwise, you're usually spoon-fed by the smartest person in the group and it comes to bite you in the ass. As for cheating, I would never advise it . If you get caught, you can get in serious trouble. Everyone always think it won't happen to them...I saw it happen twice while an undergrad, the kids that cheated shit their pants so hard when they finally got caught. But that's just my opinion. If you want to cheat, go for it, just understand that there are consequences if you get caught.

@phil81, not necessarily true. I know a bunch of engineers who went into investment banking. They do have to take a few tests, can't remember exactly which ones. But just goes to show the versatility of an engineering degree I guess.

[Genghis Khan]

Athough I have to agree, software dev is huge nowadays. Almost makes me wish I went that route. Jobs are plenty. I was looking into hiring professional developers for a project. I decided to go with Drupal, which is an open-source CMS. Although Drupal is open-source, the developers who do custom coding charge $$$. Every developer/company's website I checked out were hiring Drupal developers. Apparently there's so few of them, one of the bigger companies started hiring people and training them to become Drupal developers because they can't meet the demand.

[MunichSux]

About those engineers : http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/25/news/eco...=obnetwork

[BecomingMachine]

I just wanted to clarify that I never, ever condoned cheating.

If I cheated, I could've had a 3.8-4.0 no problem. I'm rather okay with my honest 3.0, passable understanding of the material, and improved social skills and massive extracurricular fallbacks. Keep in mind that I'm likely to go into Academia or a position like Engineering Sales or try for project management- I learn what I need to for a project I'm interested in, so having talent and being a good student aren't always the same thing.

Cheating isn't worth it.

[BecomingMachine]

(08-13-2013 07:22 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  

Athough I have to agree, software dev is huge nowadays. Almost makes me wish I went that route. Jobs are plenty. I was looking into hiring professional developers for a project. I decided to go with Drupal, which is an open-source CMS. Although Drupal is open-source, the developers who do custom coding charge $$$. Every developer/company's website I checked out were hiring Drupal developers. Apparently there's so few of them, one of the bigger companies started hiring people and training them to become Drupal developers because they can't meet the demand.

It seems everybody needs some kind of developer for CMS-es. Do you have knowledge in what other Content Management Systems are popular/useful/lucrative, and what kind of applications other Software Engineers might employ these skills for?

[Genghis Khan]

(08-29-2013 01:22 PM)BecomingMachine Wrote:  

It seems everybody needs some kind of developer for CMS-es. Do you have knowledge in what other Content Management Systems are popular/useful/lucrative, and what kind of applications other Software Engineers might employ these skills for?

Drupal and Wordpress are the two big ones. I personally prefer Drupal due to its amazingly powerful framework, but it does have an extremely high learning curve.

Alternatively, there are several commercial CMS'es out there that cater to enterprise-level businesses. Think about companies that have $250,000 or more to blow on their websites. A few good examples of commercial CMS'es are Ektron, Kentico and iMIS (although iMIS isn't a CMS in the strictest sense of the word).

Personally, I would still go with Drupal as huge organizations such as the UN, the White House, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford etc. are using it and supported it heavily. I have no doubt it'll explode in the future as Drupal becomes more and more end-user friendly (as it's mainly been developer-friendly so far). Drupal itself is free, but $$$ is made making custom websites for these huge corporations and institutions.

A lot of times, you'll end up developing custom code, which is a skill transferable to other applications. A lot of companies are also looking into building stand-along mobile apps that connect directly to their website or at the very least a responsive web design. Nevertheless, a good way to get into the mobile business if you ever feel the urge.

[texrifle]

Hey Gents,

Quick Question, when studying thermodynamics, did the material take you through the "story" of thermodynamics, then teach you to apply the formula's, or just extrapolate application directly from the formula's? I think I'm being done a disservice through the initial introduction to the material. It's as if the professor is playing a joke, and the class is having to go and build crib sheets on which aspects of thermodynamic's are important and relevant to the question's being asked. Thanks in advance!

[redbeard]

Thermodynamics is wild, which one are you taking?

My tips for that class:

1. Talk to the teacher as much as possible to determine what he deems important
2. Learn the material from multiple books/websites/youtube channels/etc. in order to get a complete perspective

[texrifle]

The class is General Chemistry II, and we're covering thermodynamics for chemical reactions, from internal energy to how equilibrium is determined by thermodynamics. Thanks for the advice! I'll try the Khan Academy, and look for other sources as well.

[Phoenix]

Is there money or sex in thermodynamics? If so how.

- How people actually think outside the soft comfortable cushion of academia.

[texrifle]

(03-09-2017 10:29 AM)Phoenix Wrote:  

Is there money or sex in thermodynamics? If so how.

- How people actually think outside the soft comfortable cushion of academia.

To prevent a troll war on the forum, I'm going to assume you're question wasn't legitimate. The money involved would come from being able to maximize the useful energy of a system to perform work, and optimizing the system would allow you to increase revenue through reduced energy expenditure. The sex involved would never come as a direct result of thermodynamics. I'll avoid the newbie argument in the same vein as the following "Is there sex in any field of study". Maybe you misunderstood my field of study. I'm not studying thermodynamics as a major. What was the point of your post?

[Phoenix]

Don't sperg out bro, it's a legit post. This is the Lifestyle forum, not the Deep forum.

How would succeeding in this make your richer or more well-laid? I know so many engineers who are just salaryman drones making someone else richer. I also know engineers who became businessmen and retired early.

If this is actually a Lifestyle post I want to know how this is going to be connected to your lifestyle.

[sterling_archer]

I recently passed exam on thermodynamics but I feel you are asking something that I couldn't help you with. There is no chemistry on my college so I don't know how to relate it with thermodynamics.

[komatiite]

Texrifle, you should just pay a guy on Fiverr to find the solutions manual for your class; then you can start dissecting the different types of problems and the best way to solve them with a step by step guide. If you are just in Chem2, you won't have that much variation in your types of problems, but when you actually hit Thermo class you will really need to hit the ground running on understanding steam tables. They are quite logical but there are lots of moving parts... Is your fluid compressed? Subcooled? Saturated? Superheated? Was I given pressure? Or Temperature? Do I need to find specific volume? Enthalpy? Do I need to interpolate? Fuck, I'm stuck, can I pull any useful data from H=U+PV? etc. I still remember a thermo exam where I realized at the end of a problem that I had used the wrong table, asked the prof for a blank exam and rewrote it in the last 10 mins and got a 100, probably my all time clutchest academic moment!

In hindsight, I think thermo was by far the most useful engineering course I took. I'm in the oil industry and do tons of reservoir engineering, which is pretty abstract stuff compared to the mechanical side of the business with drilling rigs, pumps and pipelines (which I am admittedly weak in compared to many of my peers). Often the only data I have to work with is some geological data combined with subsurface thermodynamic parameters like pressure, temperature and fluid analyses from nearby wells drilled -- just vague data that was pulled from a hole 5000' underground. Thermo courses sort of teach you to think in the abstract -- it's easy to visualize a problem in Statics class where you have a truss and you need to find the sum of the moments on it or whatever. Yet visualizing a superheated steam at very high pressures is sort of weird -- but understanding that interplay between a fluid and its surroundings is paramount to my job of trying to maximize how much oil we get out of the ground... You never know where life can take you -- one of my friends works in the Canadian Oil Sands as an engineer and his whole job is creating steam injection schemes to maximize oil recovery -- he tells me his entire job is figuring out heat capacities of downhole rock and fluids, then determining the proper ratio of vapor and steam at specific temperatures necessary to maximize production at low opex... Thermodynamics 101!

I hate to just ramble about my anecdotal experiences in the oil business, but I am admittedly ignorant on the multitude of other industries that are so dependent on the theories learned in thermo -- automotives, power generation, nuclear, etc. The entire discipline of chemical engineering is basically boiled down to thermodynamics in a lot of ways -- maximizing efficiency of the SYSTEM. Think of Thermo as your best pathway to becoming a well-rounded engineer. A solid understanding of both the mechanical side and the abstract side will bode well for putting everything together for the most important part -- economics. I know that studying equilibrium equations and that Gibbs Free Energy shit in chem2 must suck because it just seems so much more vague when compared to Chem1 stuff like Lewis dot diagrams and stoichiometry, but trust me, it all comes together down the road. Just keep...grinding...problems.

[redbeard]

(03-09-2017 09:15 AM)texrifle Wrote:  

The class is General Chemistry II, and we're covering thermodynamics for chemical reactions, from internal energy to how equilibrium is determined by thermodynamics. Thanks for the advice! I'll try the Khan Academy, and look for other sources as well.

LOL if you're lost in Gen Chem II you're gonna be in trouble when it comes to actual Thermodynamics course.

Trolling aside, put your nose to the grindstone and you'll get there.

I komatiite...great post

The other tip I'd add is that it's OKAY to listen/read/write things multiple multiple times before they click. This is inherently illogical to us men especially engineer types. "If I don't get it now, I'll never get it." Wrong, there's been studies done, but I don't have my copy of "Why Don't Zebras Get Ulcers?" to cite it. Read and write and review and keep going.

Everything komatiite said reminds me of this quote:

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."

-Albert Einstein

I'm 3 years out of school now. I couldn't tell you jack SHIT about the course material, but I know for a fact that engineering school taught me HOW to think, and I am forever grateful for that.

[qwertyuiop]

I did engineering in school, had around a 3.0, and partied my ass off in the process. Very hard to get laid until I transferred when I started banging new girls at the college bars every weekend. Got pretty fucking good at game. It was my hobby other than school.

I hated every minute of it and went to sales as soon as I graduated. Now in software sales.

It is a legitimate career path but I would have been so much happier if I had done something else. Most of my friends are making ok-ish levels of money at 40 hours a week. If that's what you want sure I guess.

Would not do it again.

[texrifle]

I bought the solutions manual on Chegg and just check it after slogging through the problem set, or as a reference to how to solve a particular type of problem. It's definitely more vague compared to General Chem I komatiite, and you're right, gotta keep grinding the problems. Also, in the same line of thinking as red beard, if I don't understand something thoroughly the first time through, I now just push on and it more often then not reconnects later with the introduction of a new concept or application. Thanks again, and back to the grind!

[Genghis Khan]

(03-10-2017 05:40 AM)qwertyuiop Wrote:  

I did engineering in school, had around a 3.0, and partied my ass off in the process. Very hard to get laid until I transferred when I started banging new girls at the college bars every weekend. Got pretty fucking good at game. It was my hobby other than school.

I hated every minute of it and went to sales as soon as I graduated. Now in software sales.

It is a legitimate career path but I would have been so much happier if I had done something else. Most of my friends are making ok-ish levels of money at 40 hours a week. If that's what you want sure I guess.

Would not do it again.

This is perhaps the BIGGEST misconceptions that float around a lot - this idea that if you do engineering your life will basically be 40 hours a week making ok-ish levels of money or as Phoenix put it making other people richer.

Yet the reality is quite different. Some of the best Fortune 500 CEOs had engineering backgrounds:

GE - Jack Welsh, PhD Chemical Engineering
Lockheed Martin- Norman Augustine, Aeronautical Engineering
Texas Instruments - Thomas Engibous, Electrical Engineering
British Petroleum America - John Minge, Mechanical Engineering
ExxonMobil - Rex Tillerson, Civil Engineering

There are quite a few 40-hour engineers making OK-ish money right now who will be titans of industry in about 20-30 years, running multi-billion dollar companies employing tens if not hundred of thousands of people The 5 men I listed above (and I listed them on the top of my head) did exactly that, they worked their way up from their entry-level engineering positions and left behind a great legacy.

[Genghis Khan]

(03-09-2017 11:33 AM)Phoenix Wrote:  

Don't sperg out bro, it's a legit post. This is the Lifestyle forum, not the Deep forum.

How would succeeding in this make your richer or more well-laid? I know so many engineers who are just salaryman drones making someone else richer. I also know engineers who became businessmen and retired early.

If this is actually a Lifestyle post I want to know how this is going to be connected to your lifestyle.

It might've been a legitimate question, but you're obviously not an engineer and the way you posted it: "- How people actually think outside the soft comfortable cushion of academia" shows it was posted more to mock than in good-will.

[redbeard]

(03-10-2017 05:40 AM)qwertyuiop Wrote:  

I did engineering in school, had around a 3.0, and partied my ass off in the process. Very hard to get laid until I transferred when I started banging new girls at the college bars every weekend. Got pretty fucking good at game. It was my hobby other than school.

This^^

Let me clarify to any young kids reading this thread: engineering school SHOULD NOT be your source of pussy.

I hear this often on the forum and off.

"You'll never get laid if you're an engineer. There's too much work and there's no girls in any classes."

No shit.

"There's too much work" - good! The work habits, the GRIND, the mental strength I developed in college is exactly what I wanted!

Why do liberal arts degrees continue to be popular? They're easy! Change is painful, and people run away from it if possible.

In fact, engineering school could be GOOD for your game. Read this GLL article about Mr. Juxtaposition. Now you can be a dick at the bar, pour beer on girls, and when girls get to know you they'll realize you're actually an engineer and have your shit together.

On top of that, "Law 16: Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor." Engineering school is a great excuse to put girls on the back burner.

"Sorry honey I have a huge project due Friday. Come by the engineering building at 2:30 AM after you go to ladies' night and I'll bang you in the computer lab."

"There's no girls in any classes" - good! You are in class to learn. Any interaction with girls would be in a group project, where you DO NOT want girls anyway. They will waste an hour and a half organizing your spreadsheet to make it look pretty.