ME vs. MET: Which Path is Better for a Career in Weapon Design?

[russ_watters]

This has gotten too personal so I'm locking the thread, but there are a couple of key points I want to reiterate:

I never said the two were the same, what I did say is that many METs end up getting the same jobs as MEs do. How old are you and what is your industry experience? I'm 40 and have worked in the fields of die casting, design engineering, project engineering and product management with a focus on new product development.

[separate post]Back then the METs were forced to have to wait 7 years to take the PE test (I think). I'm not sure how that has changed these days.

Yes, an MET can "end up" in engineering jobs, but the fact of the matter is that it is a more difficult career path and there are explicit limits to how far it can take you in some directions. I know a successful engineer at about your age who is a PE and owns of an engineering company with no degree at all, but today I'm pretty sure all states requrie an engineering degree as a pre-requisite for a new PE - that's a change in the last 20 years or so. So if you want to be the president of engineering in an MEP firm, you must have an E degree. It simply can't be done with an ET degree anymore (barring some very odd inverted responsibility situation such as a 40 year old PE doing the drawing stamping for a 60 year old president of engineering who has no official responsibility). In other words, someone starting out with an MET degree was better-off 40 years ago than one starting off with an MET today. Some of the career paths available then have since been closed.

You're taking this issue personally, but you shouldn't. We're talking about general realities, here, not about individual cases. I know of a guy who didn't finish college and went on to be the richest man in the world - that doesn't mean that people shouldn't finish college. The general reality is that an ME degree is more advanced than an MET degree and will tend be viewed that way by people doing the hiring - particularly for the first few years of one's career. It's a competitive market and it's easy for a computer to filter-out applicants who don't meet the minimum requirement for a job.

I also didn't see salary data posted anywhere above. Here's some:
MET: $43,144 - $69,090
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Mechanical_Engineering_Technologist/Salary
ME: $52,046 - $73,024
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Mechanical_Engineer/Salary

You can get more specific with a search, too.