EngGeek

What's going on with Engineering? It's not like it has the same popularity when I went through school. The World Wide Web has significantly developed since my time in school and you would think there would be more sites promoting Engineering as a career. Why don't Engineers in the profession describe how rewarding Engineering can be?...and encourage others to follow their path?

The best site so far promoting Engineering as a career is EngineeringFolder.com. This site still has a way to go, but is at least attempting to indicate that Engineering is fun.

Does anyone know of any good sites that promote Engineering as a career?

ChamilitaryMayne

Discovery Channel

steevee

Engineering is perceived as too hard compared to other majors, and it's definitely not an ideal job for people who want to make a lot of money (think MBA, MD, JD, etc).

'08Holla

I'd actually second that. Mythbusters, Extreme Engineering, Build It Bigger, Big!,even Junkyard Wars - I don't know how well they are at converting people, but they're excellent for getting current aspiring engineers really excited about what they might be able to do some day.

scansmom

one of my favorite sites is Sloan Career Cornerstone

http://www.careercornerstone.org/

scorp

"Why don't Engineers in the profession describe how rewarding Engineering can be?"
maybe because many of them don't find that to be true?

EngGeek

Some good points have been made.

With the "declining" interest in Engineering, should companies with Engineering as a profession have a dedicated web page on their company sites that indicate why Engineering is fun and rewarding at their corporation? I would think it shouldn't be a contrived/manufactured page, but one with actual feedback from happy and mediocre Engineers to reflect a good balance of opinions.

Do you think this would this help reinvigorate interest in Engineering or at least provide insight into Engineering as a career?

ken285

I don't see what good it would do for individual companies to have such a page (not that it would hurt). If anywhere, it should be on the webpages of the professional societies, such as ASCE for civil engineers, ASME for mechanical engineers, IEEE for electrical engineers, AIChE for chemical engineers, etc. If you're considering engineering, you probably won't know many of the engineering companies so you won't be on their website anyway. If you google for something, chances are that the websites of the professional societies will be among the first few to come up. It's their responsibility to promote the profession anyway.

In my opinion, the younger you get to kids, the easier it will be to increase interests in engineering. I know ASCE does targets kids through competitions such as the West Point Bridge Design Contest and the Future City Competition. Personally, I was inspired through a technical drawing (manual drafting) class in middle school where one of the projects was to design a house. (elevation drawings, floor plans, etc). We even modeled it on a computer with some type of software in Windows 3.1.

That Sloan Career Cornerstone looks like a pretty good site. The interviewees in each profile appear to talk about both the positive aspects and the negative aspects of their careers, although overall, they expressed very positive opinions.