Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
(OP)
I'm a senior year BSEE with 2 co-ops at a nuclear plant under my belt. I'm really torn between entering the electronics industry (circuit design, analog, etc) or the power industry (high voltage). I feel like I'm getting pulled by some strong force into power, as I've had some cool experience now with high voltage stuff. It's too late to get more co-op experience working with electronics before I graduate, BUT if I do choose to "pull out" of power I can specialize really hard in electronics with my next 2 semesters and graduate with a bunch of electronics coursework completed-- but no experience in it. I feel extremely conflicted as I enjoy both industries, but I'm drawn more to the (relative) glamour of electronics and am afraid I'd be miserable working in the relatively stagnant power industry.
Does anyone have any thoughts or guidance for someone who's been mulling this over for about a year now?
Does anyone have any thoughts or guidance for someone who's been mulling this over for about a year now?





RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
ScottyUK usually has something to say on this topic as I recall.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
Similarly for medical electronics; you will join and starve with a hundred startups, and the one that manages to survive going public or being swallowed will probably send your job overseas anyway. So sorry; just business, etc.
Relative to that, power may not look so bad.
Either way, learning a little of a couple of Asian languages wouldn't hurt. Got any electives open?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." L. da Vinci
- Gian
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
Maui
www.EngineeringMetallurgy.com
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
Yes, power is in huge demand after a massive under-investment in both infrastructure, plant and personnel in the 1980s and 1990s. Suddenly all the experienced folks in the industry are retiring within a few years of each other: there's an entire generation - my generation - almost completely missing from the industry. That self-made problem is creating huge problems for the utilities as they try to recruit personnel to replace their core engineering staff while they try to rebuild their aging hardware assets at the same time. It's a tall order and they are privately panicing about the lack of experienced power engineers, which is why they are poaching each other's staff and driving salaries upward. It's a good time to be a power engineer, and for my generation it's making up for the poor salaries and dire employment prospects which we survived early in our careers when telecoms was king and power guys were ten-a-penny.
Go with power: it's reasonably well-paid, going to be needed for the foreseeable future, and it's hard to offshore too.
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
What happens when it becomes so well-known that there's a need for power engineers that too many go into the field, and than all of a sudden there's way too many of us? Doesn't that happen a lot in industries (e.g. what happened with IT in the mid 2000's).
RE: Dazed and Confused About Career Direction
Wow. I have ** never ** heard that about a power class before.
Most folks think that, between transmission lines and rotating machine theory, power is yet another advanced maths class. Most kids of my generation figured that a difficult course with high fail rate and lousy employment prospects was a really bad combination. Now it should be a difficult course with a high fail rate and decent prospects for the survivors. If it isn't still tough then there's something wrong because I don't recall the theory changing much since the days of Tesla, Parsons and their peers. Today's grads aren't getting smarter, put it that way.
Engineers who actually understand synchronous machines at a detail level are incredibly rare, and good protection engineers are thin on the ground. Just a couple of ideas if you look to specialise.