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, who cares that engineers can possibly convert to lawyers or doctors.... what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Fact: most of them and most people for that matter can NOT become doctors or lawyers for whatever reasons. Still has nothing to do with the original topic.
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Come on. I would say that 99% of all posts made here on CC have nothing to do with whatever was the original topic. Threads always have a tendency to branch off into subtopics.
I make the point that engineers can become doctors or lawyers to show why it is unfair to compare engineers to doctors or lawyers. If you're an engineer and you think that you're getting a raw deal relative to doctors and lawyers, then you can convert. Sure, not all engineers can do that, but heck, that's true of people from any major.
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Total aside: Sakky, I dunno about that whole "engineering isn't as hard as physics or math" thing... I routinely compare notes with my friend on the PhD track in superfast optical physics at UC-Boulder (yikes), and I'm perpetually incredibly surprised at how much our courses overlap. We go on road trips together and discussed theoretical mechanics and how much studying it totally bites, and she does just as much eye-glazing as I do when one of us gets too in-depth theoretically in our respective fields. Engineering certainly can pack a punch!)
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Nobody is saying that engineering can't invoke eye-glazing. However, I would say that in the hierarchy of majors, even at the tech schools like MIT, physics is generally considered to be more difficult than is engineering. Mathematics is too, to some degree (depends on what kind of math).
The issue seems to be that you can get by with just hard work, but not sheer brilliance, more so in engineering than in physics or math. For example, engineering majors have classes that consist mostly of labs and design projects where as long as you work hard and turn in something half-decent, you are going to pass. Maybe not with a good grade, but you are going to pass. Hence, I've seen some of the relatively less-brilliant (but hard-working) engineers take fulfill their engineering elective requirements through lots of these lab and design classes. Not so with physics or math. There is nowhere to hide. Math, in particular, generally breaks down into a whole series of proofs. The nature of solving math proofs is that you either get that flash of insight, or you don't. Hard work isn't going to help you very much.
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is *completely* beside the point that engineers might be able to *become* doctors and lawyers, because doctoring and lawyering ain't engineering! =)
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Nobody is saying that this was the original point. However, it is important to deal with those people who shall remain unnamed who continuously tout how medicine and law are better than engineering. My remark to that is simple - engineers can become doctors and lawyers. Hence, what I said is a remark to a remark. If what I am saying is beside the point, then so is the original remark.
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it's high time we start demanding pay that is more respective of the fact that we're professionals, IMHO.
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Personally, I think some of the problem lies with the engineering student themselves, particularly the top ones. While this may sound harsh, from what I have seen, a lot of supposedly "top" engineers don't really understand the opportunities that they have, so they take engineering jobs that underpay them relative to their talent. For example, it's sad when companies are offering MIT chemical engineers only 47k on average, which is 6 k BELOW the national average for chemical engineers. It's even sadder to see those MIT chemical engineers actually take those low offers.
http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infost...aduation05.pdf
So as long as companies see that they can get engineers from the top schools to actually take offers that are BELOW the national average, then companies have no incentive to ever make better offers. Why pay more salary to somebody from a lesser school when you can pay less to get the guy from MIT?