AlexES16 said:
Hello thanks for making time to answer my question i really apreciate it, becouse I am really having a hard time choosing my career. You being an electrical engineer could you tell me some important tips about the career and which fields are more essencial to society.
As an electric enginner you could work in several places (I think all of these qualify as being important to society). In any of these, you could work on projects, building, operation and maintenance.
- Power generation;
- Transmission lines;
- Substations;
- Industry plants such as: oil rigs (onshore and offshore), oil refining, petrochemical, paper and pulp, mining, ore refining, textile, food industry plants, siderurgy, automobilistic industry, airplane industry, sanitation (water pumping and water treatment stations, mainly), machinery manufacturing, etc;
- Hospitals, Public Buildings, Large Commercial Buildings, Subway, etc.
Actually, almost any kind of industry depends on electric energy. Any plant that isn't auto-sufficient (that has enough fuel or energy to be autonomous) will need electric energy. And here in Brazil, even plants that are auto-sufficient, can actually generate more than they need and they sell the rest to the grid. So electric enginneers will be needed in almost any industry.
If you like the legal side of things and still wants to do electric engineering, you could also work on:
- Electric sector regulation (fiscalization of electric sector agents)
- Depending on your country regulations, you could also work on electric energy market (buying and selling electric energy)
There also another honorable one: teaching.
As for the tips:
- Learn everything your teachers throw at you (and more if you can). You may not know its importance now but you should learn just for learning;
- An electric enginner shouldn't only know electromagnetics. You should learn well at least the following: classical mechanics and thermodynamics. An electric engineer always interfaces with other enginners (you can't do anything by yourself), such as chemical, mechanical, civil, etc. And you have to "talk the same language". I mean, for example, you can't get lost when:
-- A mechanical engineer talks of exergy or entropy;
-- A chemical engineer talks of gibb's free energy;
-- A civil enginner talks of bending moments of a structure;
- Learn well mathematics: analytic geometry, linear algebra, calculus, statistics, numerical methods, differential equations, complex variable calculus, just to name a few. Even you don't end up applying all of it, it'll be worth learning because it'll teach you how to think as an engineer;
- Your career doesn't start after you gradute. I has started already. To learn all the stuff I mentioned, you have to already know a bunch of high shool math, physics and chemistry. Also, some interesting job opportunities may come from colleagues or teachers. In the future, your colleagues will be in the same stage as you and they will know other people that you don't. So you should try to be a good student at university.
You can ask, have you done all this yourself? Well, no. I learned the hard way. I work on a oil company and I had to learn thermodynamics recently. I can garantee: it was way harder than when I was at the university.
Hope this helped.
Cheers!
