Weird career paths for EEs??

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>my whole career experience has been pretty crazy…i graduated from RPI in 2008 with my UG degree in EE…</p>

<p>then i found a job in a nuclear plant consulting engineering company doing power engineering type of stuff…it got boring about a year or two into it…so i got into grad school at WPI, and worked on my MS in Electrical & Comp. Eng (ECE), specializing in signal processing…while working the power job (yeah talk about two extremes lol)</p>

<p>so upon finishing my MS, i just found work as a…get this…programmer…i interviewed at this one healthcare software company that uses a proprietary programming language…their interview was a tutorial on their language, and then asking u to write code in it, as well as evaluate code…signal processing is kinda coding-heavy so that’s prob how this happened…</p>

<p>it’s so weird…i HATED programming as an UG…then i started liking it as a grad student bc i did a lot of it, but i mean, i never expected to work as a programmer lol…</p>

<p>so i was thinking of the different directions i can go…option 1 would be to go back into signal processing jobs (of which there aren’t all that many)…also, step 2 is i can get into software development (bc i kinda appreciate coding now)…do EEs get into programming like i just did?? it’s such a trip!</p>

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<p>Some people fall into all kinds of career changes while others find a niche and stay there their entire career. </p>

<p>I fall into the latter. I started with a company right out of college and retired from there a few years ago. All the time I was doing about the same type of work, but many different projects, many different challenges. </p>

<p>One of my best friends is the former; he was a design engineer, a pilot in the military, a drug counselor (he never did any kind of drugs himself, but it was a real weird turn that got him there), a construction supervisor, a stockbroker, a quality engineer, technical sales and then into management (roughly in that order). Each career change had a certain logic to it. </p>

<p>My friend has led an interesting life, but so have I.</p>