Different Careers For Engineers

By Carey Bourdier


Engineering is a varied field that offers an abundance of career choices for those who choose to make this subject their college major. Engineers are essential, skilled workers that complete many of our most crucial tasks. These workers ensure our safety, ensure that products are correctly manufactured and even ensure that our armed forces can do their best to protect us.

Civil engineering is a field that is quite common to all of us. Most people have seen an engineer standing in the road or working on a construction site with a theodolite, taking precise calculations about the grade and slope of the land. While an architect is the person who has the design ideas for a building, a home or a bridge, it is the engineer who ensures that these construction projects are completed correctly. Without precise calculations and monitoring, public safety would be in serious jeopardy, and we depend on civil engineers to complete these tasks.

There are hundreds of industries in the United States, and industrial engineers are on hand to make these industries run as efficiently as possible. This might mean that an engineer sets up a plan for an assembly line, ensuring the fastest, most efficient output for many types of products. An industrial engineer might also be on hand to make sure that manufacturing equipment is calibrated correctly in order to avoid production errors. In some cases, production and design problems can cause fatal mistakes, such as in vehicle manufacturing or with medical equipment.

If you want to design products, then mechanical engineering might be just the ticket for you. This type of engineer will design everything from an aircraft carrier to toys for children. You might design something simple but useful such as a stapler or padlock, or you might be responsible for creating parts of a space station. Whatever the task, it is the mechanical engineer who creates all of the machines, big and small, that make our daily lives convenient and functional. A mechanical engineer designed the machine that dispenses the soda we drink at our lunch break, the gas pump we use to fill up our car and the automated teller machine where we make deposits and withdraws.

There are few people on earth who don't rely on some type of fossil fuel or natural resource each day. We need gasoline for our cars and natural gas or propane to heat our homes and cook our food. Petroleum engineers are the people responsible for finding fossil fuels around the globe, designing systems to extract this gas and oil and then monitoring the extraction to ensure safety. If you drive a car, take the bus, fly in airplanes or use just about any type of vehicle, a petroleum engineer has created a way for fuel to power these various modes of transportation.

Another interesting type of engineering is nuclear engineering. These engineers are responsible for a myriad of different tasks. Some nuclear engineers work at power plants, dealing with the day-to-day maintenance of nuclear reactors. Others work in the medical field in a laboratory, creating new diagnostic tests for a host of serious diseases. Still others design weapon systems or find ways to safely deal with nuclear waste, and many nuclear engineers work at private labs or universities researching atoms and nuclear fission.




About the Author: