Category Archives: Career

Information on jobs and careers in science and engineering.

Inspiring Students to be Engineers

Celeste Baine

Celeste Baine Recognized for Exciting Students About Engineering

Celeste Baine, a biomedical engineer and director of the Engineering Education Service Center based in Eugene, Oregon, was acknowledged for her outstanding accomplishments in motivating and inspiring students to pursue careers in engineering. Winner of the 2005 Norm Augustine Award, Ms. Baine is credited for being an outstanding contributor to the nationwide efforts to increase engineering student enrollment.

A new monthly journal, Engineering Education Advocate is available from the Engineering Education Service Center.

Engineering Jobs in Mexico

Maquila sunrise: Jobs headed back to Mexico:

What we see in Mexico today are things that have more engineering. And the reason why that is occurring is that it’s good to have your engineers in proximity to your manufacturing due to the fact that changes can be implemented much more quickly than if your center for manufacture is halfway around the world.

Today, Mexico’s pumping out more jet engines, semiconductors, and engine harnesses than its old staples like textiles and basic electronics. And that’s creating jobs for Mexican engineers inside the maquilas, like the Gulfstream Aerospace plant in Mexicali.

Read more about lean manufacturing (Toyota Production System) that values the performance improvement over short term savings on our management improvement blog. The kind of thing that allows Toyota to make a great deal of money manufacturing in the USA while Ford and GM can’t seem to do as well.
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Young Innovators Under 35

2006 – 35 Young Innovators Under 35 from MIT’s Technology Review:

Includes: Apostolos Argyris, disguising data as noise; Jeffrey Bode, Peptide “Legos” to make new drugs; Christopher Voigt, A vision in bacteria; Michael Wong, Cleaning up with nanoparticles

With some 300,000 hazardous-waste sites scattered across the United States, cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater is a daunting challenge. Chemical engineer Michael Wong is taking on toxic waste with tiny particles that can break down organic pollutants more quickly, and perhaps less expensively, than existing technologies.

Work for Stephen Hawking

There is an opportunity to work as the Graduate Assistant to Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time and much more.

The role of ‘Graduate Assistant to Professor Hawking’ is funded as a research post at the University of Cambridge. Normally it is under a 12 month contract, although sometimes the contract is extended to up to 2 years.

The post is available to recent graduates holding a Maths, Physics or Computer Science degree and a full driving licence. Responsibilities include:
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Most Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered

Dinosaurs remain to be discovered (bozos broke link so I deleted it – poor usability)

Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania and Steve Wang of Swarthmore College estimate that 71 percent of all dinosaur genera — groups of dinosaur species — have yet to be discovered.

“It’s a safe bet that a child born today could expect a very fruitful career in dinosaur paleontology,” Dodson said in a statement.
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The estimates are based on the rates of discovery — about 10 to 20 annually — and the recent increase in finds of fossils in China, Mongolia and South America.

Vast Majority of Dinosaurs Still to Be Found, Scientists Say, National Geographic:

The pair predicts that scientists will eventually discover 1,844 dinosaur genera in total—at least 1,300 more than the 527 recognized today from remains other than isolated teeth.

What’s more, the duo believes that 75 percent of these dinos will be discovered within the next 60 to 100 years and 90 percent within 100 to 140 years, based on an analysis of historical discovery patterns.

Electrical Engineering Future

The future of electrical engineering

The article discusses many of the explanations for the lack of growth in engineering graduates in the USA and reasons for studying engineering. Some related posts from our blog: Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering – Lucrative college degrees – USA Engineering Jobs – Global Share of Engineering Work – Engineers in the Workplace

Indeed, a degree in electrical engineering can open many doors, in part because electrical engineering is so broad. Electrical engineers have taken on many tasks that you might expect people with other technical degrees to do. Semiconductor processing, for example, is highly populated by electrical engineers, but its basis is in physics and chemistry. Other areas include optics (as applied to communications), aerospace engineering, and even life sciences. “A lot of people don’t realize that a lot of biomedical devices are actually electrical devices,” noted Georgia Tech’s May.

Research Career in Industry or Academia

In, Working in Industry vs Working in Academia, a computer scientist (software engineering) shares their experience and opinion on research career options. He discusses 4 areas: freedom (to pursue your research), funding, time and scale, products (papers, patents, products).

In academia, you’re under a huge amount of pressure to publish publish publish!
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In industry, the common saying is that research can produce three things: products, patents, and papers (in that order). To be successful you need to produce at least two of those three; and the first two are preferred to the last one. Publishing papers is nice, and you definitely get credit for it, but it just doesn’t compare to the value of products and patents.

R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year

photo of Dean Kamen

R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year

Mega-inventor Dean Kamen has two simple goals: to improve children’s interest in science and technology, and to raise the standard of living for the world’s poor.

A self-taught physicist, with more than 150 patents, Kamen is obviously knowledgeable about what works in the world of science and technology.

Kamen’s latest endeavors involve bringing clean drinking water and cheap electricity to those who don’t have access to either. More than a billion people, or nearly 20% of the world’s population don’t have access to clean drinking water. And even more, 1.6 billion or about one out of every four people on this planet don’t have electricity. Continuing his emphasis on healthcare, Kamen points out that with clean water, you can eliminate more than 75% of those people’s health problems and diseases.

Prevoius post on Kamen’s work with electricity and drinking water for all. Kamen also founded FIRST (see previous post: 2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events).
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What do Science and Engineering Graduates Do?

NSF surveyed Science and Engineering graduates and provide some not too surprising results in: What Do People Do After Earning an S&E.

Most graduates use the science and engineering knowledge (even if they went on to get unrelated post-graduate degrees in say business, law or no post graduate degree). It seems approximately 20% report having managerial positions currently (excepting recent graduates who are less likely to be managers).

About half never earned another degree after their S&E bachelor’s. Although less than a third of these S&E bachelor’s recipients worked in occupations formally defined as science and engineering, S&E knowledge remained important across a much wider set of occupations. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of S&E bachelor’s degree holders in non-S&E occupations reported that their field of degree was related to their job.

About half of S&E bachelor’s degree recipients go on to earn other degrees. However, fewer than one in five of all S&E bachelor’s recipients go on to earn advanced degrees in science and engineering.

Frankly I find this information less interesting than: the continuing high pay of engineering graduates and the fact that the top undergraduate degree for S&P 500 CEOs is Engineering. It would be interesting to see salary rates (with lifetime earnings), unemployment rates and career satisfaction by undergraduate degree (compared to other undergraduate degrees) throughout their careers (NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators – Workforce does include very interesting information along these lines).

Electrical Engineering Student

I ran across Christian Montoya’s web site today, he is:

a 20 year old Electrical Engineering student at Cornell University. I will graduate in May of 2007 with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. My main focus is digital circuit design and I am also interested in networks and statistical analysis.
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I am currently looking for a job, preferably in Europe. I am studying in the U.S. and I am a U.S. citizen so finding overseas employment isn’t easy.

I like the use of the blog to aid in finding employment. We see many warnings about how internet posting is going to harm students careers – but blogging can help your career. He also has a series of posts on life at Cornell, including: