Synthesis post: Engineering

By: Khalifa Alzaabi, Khalifa ALHammadi, Abdulaziz Khudada, Boyuan Sun

Engineering is defined as the profession in which knowledge of mathematical, natural sciences, economical, and the materials and forces of nature. It is also understood by public as a subject where people create inventions and develop technologies. From the first industrial revolution to the second, from transmitting letters by steam trains to sending messages via electric currents we have already met so many conveniences and surprises brought by great engineers through history. With a high median salary, engineering became a very interesting major for college students nowadays. In order to achieve such thing, it requires a long career path from an engineer all the way up to a technical director or a fellow. This blog will talk about chemical and electrical engineering majors including the pros and cons of both fields with some examples that help to understand them clearly.

According to the data of Engineering Workforce Commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies, the numbers of students in several broad engineering fields is increasing since 2006. This clearly indicates that people are becoming more interested in engineering for several reasons which are:

· Salary

· Highly employable

· Acquire a variety of skills

Electrical engineering is considered to be one of the most important fields in todays world, since almost everything works via electricity. Electrical engineering is divided into two main categories which are: electronics engineering and electrical engineering technology. These two categorize of electrical engineering includes eight different major areas: Computer, Communication, Circuits, Digital controls, Instrumentation, Signal processing, Bioengineering, and Power. Some of the blog posts are about these major areas mentioned above; you can have a close look at them to know the difference and get a general idea about each section. Furthermore, during their 4-year bachelor degree, electrical engineering students learn different skills that are required to solve several real life situations so they are ready to work in the future more efficiently. Our blog was made keeping in mind what those people who are going to start their career as electrical engineers will be interested in. GPS is one of the important topics that involves electrical engineering in lots of ways, click (GPS or Not?) to read more about GPS technology and how does it relate to electrical engineers. As every field, there are some advantages that you will have as an electrical engineer; however, there are few disadvantages that are discussed in one of our post. These pros and cons were collected from doing a survey that has ten electrical engineers, to read the post click (Engineering students).

Chemical engineers on the other hand have a few students enrolling in it, since it is considered to be one of the hard fields that a person can get in. There are a lot of hard classes that student should take in order to get their degree as chemical engineers. In 2010-2011, a research was conducted to find out how many students of a specific fields are graduating every year from the US, and the results were found to be that only 6,487 students are graduating as chemical engineering per year. While mechanical engineering has over 19,000 students graduating annually. This clearly shows that most people who are interested in engineering prefer choosing fields other than chemical engineering. It’s true that chemical engineering is hard and needs a lot of effort in order to get the degree; however, if a person really do his best and earn a degree then he will have lots of advantages over other engineers. Some of the advantages are:

· High Salary

· Intellectually stimulating work

· Job security

Chemical Engineering also have a lot of interesting topics that a student will cover in his 4-year bachelors program. The most interesting topic to most students is nanotechnology, the blog talks about nanotechnology and what is it in a very brief way to read about it click (Nanotechnology).

To sum up, engineering is one of the most important fields globally because these fields have an important role in almost everything we use in our daily life. Over the decades, the number of engineering students has been increasing in universities since almost every company requires engineers. The blog will talk about several important topics for those who are willing to be engineers especially chemical and electrical engineering.



Sources:

[1] Stephan, Bowman, Park, Sill, Ohland, Thinking Like an Engineer: an Active Learning Approach, MSU, MI, 2013, Print.



[2]William C. Oakes, Les L. Leone, Engineering Your Future: A Brief Introduction to Engineering, 5th Ed, Oxford, NY, 2015, Print.



[3] http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2011-profile-engineering-statistics.pdf