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Unread 16-04-2012, 23:21
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AKA: Kim O'Toole Eckhardt
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Re: Help finding a good career

Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesBrown View Post
My advice is to find something you enjoy doing that is a bit more narrow to be your core focus.
This is a very good place to start. When I was in high school, I wanted to be everything from a glaciologist (who wouldn't want to have to ski & get paid to do sciency work??) to an art teacher (my more "creative" side), and several things in between. When a FIRST team started in my school, I found I liked engineering too... and it made it even harder to find what I wanted to do. I liked working on mills & lathes, I liked learning CAD, I liked designing crazy parts, I liked running the student leadership team, I liked designing our team's patron book, I liked storyboarding our animation, I liked wiring up the robot, I liked coaching the drive team, I liked doing strategy... on and on. I basically lived and breathed everything in FIRST.

Anyways, I saw engineering as a very stable and potentially challenging career. For some reason, mechanical engineering seemed really intuitive to me, software engineering made me think I would be behind a computer screen all the time, and electrical engineering seemed like a challenge I didnt quite have my arms wrapped around. So I chose electrical engineering.

I went to Clarkson and started a FIRST team there, and found that I really loved their honors program - at least one class per semester you were thrown in with the other honors students, students of all different majors, and got to work to solve some really big problems in teams. I was really drawn to the team atmosphere and found I thrived best working with others.

My senior year I interviewed with 30 companies on campus, in everything from RF Engineering to Digital Hardware to MEMS to Systems Engineering. The last one was entirely an accident, but I found that it intrigued me the most. Harris offered me two jobs - one in digital hardware (what I thought was what I really really wanted to do), and one in Systems Engineering. In the end, I chose the latter because for exactly the reasons you state, I loved being able to do a little bit of everything, and it would take my team skills and big picture thinking to really be successful at it. I've done everything from power supply design, to supplier outsourcing, to data sheet design, to requirements development to product fielding, customer support, user manual writing, networking architecture, etc etc... So that's an option...

Though I think I would caution against getting a degree in Systems Engineering. It can be very academic feeling, and it sounds like you might be better off starting with a focused engineering degree and then tackling a Systems or Product Engineering style job. So like James suggested, find an area that interests you enough that you can spend 4 years working hard at it... and then branch out and find what you really want to do in life
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Kimberly O'Toole Eckhardt <3
Principal Systems Engineer & Program Manager
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Excellence - is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.
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