Hey everyone, I just wanted to ask for some help finding a good career to pursue. This was my first year in FIRST, and prior to it, I wanted to get a double bs in IT and business management, since that seemed like a nice niche. However, FIRST got me wanting a job that was less behind a desk and had more variety. On my team, I was the programmer, the electronics guy, the engineer, and the captain. I’m not the best at really any of them, that’s just not my things. I just like having the ability to do anything I want/ need to do. And I’d like a job follows along those same lines. But I just don’t know where to start. In addition to that, I also need a college program to get started with it (something preferably in the Midwest). Any ideas? Experience? Advice?
I’m interested also because I’m in the same boat you’re in. I am captain, programmer, engineer, draftsman, marketing manager, graphic artist, and photographer. I have no idea what degree to go for or even what job would fill most of my interests.
You guys are bot going to run into the same problem when you get to college. There probably isn’t going to be one degree that covers everything you want to do. There are some programs out their that try to cover all aspects of robot (or other product) development (WPI has their new program but I’ll get to that later). My advice is to find something you enjoy doing that is a bit more narrow to be your core focus. In my case that was embedded software. Make that your major and then minor, or atleast take classes in other disciplines that will help you develop in your other areas of interest.
Once you graduate you are going to have to look for the right company (or right department at a company). Many of the biggest companies will try to get you to specialize in something, working you on one project or family of projects for the time you are there. You may be better off in a smaller company where you will have a chance to apply your self outside of your job description. That said don’t count big companies out, some have the corporate culture to support cross discipline work, others may not push for it at the corporate level but a good manager will let you apply your talents where ever they can benefit the group.
Personally I majored in computer engineering. I got a job doing embedded systems programming and FPGA design. In the first few weeks I was here my manager realized my strengths and interests stretch outside of this area. In the past 15 months since I started what was designed to be a Embedded Systems Programming job I have also done GUI design, Electrical Hardware design, mechanical layout for control boxes, Computer vision, 3d Graphics, and IT Networking support for our field operations. This isn’t common in my group, most of the other engineers stick to one thing (i.e. Hardware design or User Interface software) but my manager saw that I had interest in branching out and gives me the opportunity when it arises.
I think other engineers will agree that it is more about the company than the position.
I was actually going to suggest a Comp Eng degree. And there is at least one school in the Midwest that offers it–South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, at the far end of South Dakota from the OP. I happen to be working with 1 EE, 2 Computer Science, and 1 Computer Engineering student (along with another two ME seniors) for my senior design project–a robot.
A “good” career choice will minimally satisfy these criteria:
a. You must be good at it.
b. You must enjoy it.
c. There must be demand for it.
2/3 isn’t good enough, and beyond that, the sky’s the limit!
Meant to respond to this thread a couple days ago, but have been busy…
In addition to what [JamesBrown] and [pfreivald] said,
I would suggest talking to some of your mentors who are close to the fields you are considering. If there are none on your team, try asking teams near you or find other community members (your team’s mentors and parents may be able to help you find somebody even if they don’t know the field directly). This will allow you to have a more in-depth conversation than you will get online, which IMO is what this kind of question requires. During the conversation, focus on discussing what kind of things you like doing the most (you may enjoy many different things, but which are your absolute favorite), but more importantly, figure out why you enjoy these activities.
The next step from there is I would think it would be helpful to do a couple of job shadows. My high school required us to do at least one as part of our graduation criteria, but even if yours doesn’t have a similar program, there’s no reason why you can’t do it on your own. Try to find some people who work in the fields you are are interested (hopefully you’ve done this already from the previous step) and ask if you could accompany them or somebody who works at their company during their job one day. As long as their job isn’t classified, usually they’re pretty willing, but it usually takes a couple of weeks to a couple of months to set up. This will help you see first-hand what kinds of things somebody in that occupation does on a day-to-day basis.
In my senior year of high school I was in the same boat as both the OP and the 1st reply…
I ended up going to an almost entirely engineering school thinking that EE or ME was what I wanted to do. Turns out… it wasn’t… Now I am a 2nd year Anthropology major at said engineering school. Even though I was involved in almost all aspects of my robotics team, like the two of you, turns out it wasn’t the engineering or the robots that I was interested in; it was the interactions of all the different people.
My advice figure out why you like doing whatever you like the most… There are so many different elements to a FIRST team; just limiting your gaze towards the technical side of things is an injustice towards the diverse culture we live in.
Also don’t pick something just because you are good at it. You have to remember that you must love what you pick, or doing in everyday will spoil that activity for you and drive you insane… Like engineering for me.
You also don’t have to decide right now. Many schools don’t require you to declare a major until your second or third year. I would advise taking classes in many areas your first year. This will enable you to make a more informed decision of where your interests lie. Also taking a wide range of classes wont hurt you in the long run, most degrees require you to take courses in many other areas to give you the experience of approaching a problem from another angle. Plus it helps to get them out of the way early, so you don’t end up taking a class in an area that you find extremely difficult while working on a senior project.
Bottom line is figure out what you love the most and why you love it, then don’t let anyone stop you from doing it. No one can tell you what you should do to be happy and successful other than yourself, as we all measure both things quite differently.
My two cents… and a shot at a semi-non-but-kinda-still-STEM-approach
I’d change the order:
a. you must enjoy it
b. you need to be good at it
c. there needs to be a demand for it
In my 30+ year career, one thing I have learned is that if you truly enjoy your work, you’ll be good at it. As evidence, think back on school classes where you got an excellent grade: Wasn’t that a class you enjoyed? And vice-versa - poor grades are usually in classes you don’t like at all.
Not to mention, who wants to earn a living for 45+ years doing something they don’t like doing?
I agree that most larger companies what you to know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing (almost). I work for a large car company, and I know a guy whose entire 40 year career was designing positive battery cables. Not the negative ones, just positive. Talk about specialized! But he knows it inside out & backwards, probably better than anyone on the planet, and he just loves what he does.
So find out what it is you enjoy doing the most, like in your spare time or as a hobby. Then find if someone will pay you to do that, or at least something similar. Then find a job doing that.
That all being said, it’s not unusual for a HS senior to not know the answers to all that. Don’t fear, as you get exposed to topics in college, and by talking with people, things will become clearer. Most people also have to work for several years before they zero in on what they really want, so don’t fear that part of the process either.
Don’t worry this is only the first bump in the road, you have some time yet to decide what major you want to study under. Wait until you start getting internships under your belt and start eliminating and narrowing down studies withing your given field. Spend as much time as you can in internships/co-ops and make friends with your advisers and you will have plenty of confidence in making those lasting decisions when it comes time to graduate from college.
I’m currently at this stage and having issues, small companies don’t know what FIRST is and the big ones don’t much respect my degree. Finding a direction in robotics/automation design from the mechanical side is not as easy I though it would be.:o
I would say that the order of importance doesn’t matter, because you need all three in order for it to be a “good” career. Eliminate any one of the three, and you’ve got yourself an unsatisfactory and/or unsuitable career.
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 
Here’s something I’m looking into for college:
Engineering -> Mechanical engineering -> Mechatronics
Mechatronics is basically robotics. It’s engineering with everything in it. You have mechanical, electrical, software, etc. Though you don’t need to do everything, some people do. You get to stay in robotics, and you get the openness of being a mechanical engineer who programs a machine you did the electrical for but never built. Or you can do a little of everything. Once of my friends who graduated from the team last year said she does mechanical engineering, and works on the software, wiring, and building of 1 specific part of the machine, whether it be a mechanism, or a drivetrain.
I’m not sure it really matters what your college degree is as long as it is in the right ballpark. Something to consider is that there is a small pool of “really awesome” jobs. For example, thousands if not tens of thousands of students take orbital mechanics every year, but there are almost certainly less than 1,000 people that do orbital mechanics as a full time job. I think that most engineering jobs are actually pretty cool, but if you walk into an engineering degree absolutely set on a specific position, chances are fairly good you’ll be disappointed. I didn’t even know my job existed when I started my freshman year of college! :eek:
My standard advice is do Formula SAE, Formula Hybrid, AeroDesign, DBF, Concrete Canoe, Steel Bridge, etc. They are a much better approximation of the real world than your classes are, and they give you a ton to talk about in interviews. Even more importantly than giving you something to STAR about, you actually learn a lot about engineering and people. But you’ve done FIRST, so you probably knew that.
I learned way more in my 3 month internship than I did in my first two years of college, and I’ve spent most of my last year waiting to start working. However, I can safely say all of those 3 months would’ve been totally lost on me if it wasn’t for those two years of groundwork.
I actually attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and have a Mechanical Engineering degree with a concentration in Mechatronics. This is one of their degree paths that you can choose to take in their Mechanical Engineering major. After my affiliation with FIRST when I was in high school I knew that robotics is what I wanted to do. I really enjoyed the mechanical design and testing as well as the electrical aspect of robotics. I had no clue about programming but it definitely has grown on me. Mechatronics is definitely a bit of everything that I loved doing when competing in FIRST.
Cheers
What course should I take, if I want to learn more about robotics?
That depends a LOT on where you’re going and what you’re interested in. Here’s why, and what you want to do…
- Robotics is often a graduate-level program of study, if it’s offered. You need your undergrad education–maybe minor/concentrate in robotics if you can. (Also note that robotics is not all of engineering. I spent 5 years building R/C aircraft in college…)
- Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science are all valid ways to get more into the robotics side (computer engineering builds the computers that computer science programs and electrical engineering wires together; mechanical folks have to make sure that nothing breaks while it’s in operation).
- So, here’s what you want to do: Make sure that whichever course of study you take, it has at least two of the other three I mentioned included. Where I went to college as a Mechanical, all the MEs had to take a basic C++ course and a basic circuits course. Then we all had to join the electricals for a class in Mechatronics.
Mechatronics is where you’d be looking. The thing is that you need the fundamentals first. Get those, then you take courses “outside” your major to get the skills for robotics.
As a computer engineer (and computer scientist) I would like to clarify a little.
Computer Science- Focuses on software and firmware with very little work in hardware. This can range in level anywhere from low level hardware control languages up through high level theory and algorithm design.
Electrical engineers- Focus on hardware design, including computer design. Hardware design can range anywhere from PLCs through Electric power. Electrical engineers traditionally work only in the hardware realm. However you would be hard pressed to find an EE program anywhere that you can make it though without a working knowledge of programming.
Computer engineers- Cover the gray area where software meets hardware. The CompE curriculum usually reflects this, during the first 2 or 3 years time is split almost equally between CS and EE courses. From a career perspective a CompE could work on anything with a software/hardware interface. Designing hardwae or writing software. CompE isn’t a brand new discipline but it is relatively young. The interface between software and hardware has become very blurred and their is increased demand for people who have a firm grasp of both sides.
Mechanical Engineers- Break things and blame it on the software/electrical guys (I kid)
Lons story short CompE is a subset of the combined CS/EE curriculum. I know that some companies (mine included) are still trying to work out what CompE’s are really capable of. With the exception of me every one in my department is a Programmer or an Electrical engineer, when there is a project that requires hardware and software they are paired together and each do their part. When I was hired I was used almost exclusively as an EE, I slowly started taking over the embedded software parts of my projects, and now when schedule allows I am asked to handle the project completely, from board design through GUI programming.