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<p>The most tedious subjects were the same ones that most engineers find to be tedious-- the introductory courses.</p>
<p>My favorite courses were the design courses. Steel design was my favorite, then concrete design, mechanics of materials, geotechnical engineering, and other really practical subjects.</p>
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<p>They were prerequisites to getting to where I wanted to be.</p>
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<p>Most profitable would probably be as a highly experienced structural specialist doing finite element work for a niche defense market, or as an executive, though probably not as an executive for an engineering firm. Most firms are fairly small (except for the huge conglomerates like KBR or the like).</p>
<p>Least profitable? I guess being a lousy engineer…</p>
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<p>Most of structural analysis <em>is</em> done on computers today. You need someone to operate the computers and use engineering judgment to put the correct input into the computer, and to make sure you’re getting correct output from the computer, and to make sure the computer isn’t doing it wrong. A lot of my day is spent figuring out why the computer is wrong. It’s a lot faster than doing it by hand, but in every new version, there are new bugs that we have to work around. It’ll be generations 'til we’re replaced by the nice robots.</p>
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<p>Civil engineering’s the only field of engineering that I’d ever want to pursue. I wouldn’t want to work with money, either… it’s nice to have money, but I wouldn’t want to deal with the pressure of markets up/markets down all day. If I did anything else, I’d teach, or I’d volunteer, or I’d be a musician, artist, photographer, or architect. Sometimes I think it’d be interesting to be a doctor. I think I’d rather design hospitals than work in them, though.</p>