Career Advice Needed

Mr.Graduate engineer,

Just know yourself that the first engineer was a man with common sense and efforts. Your so called degrees will be valid and come to operation only in due course of your experience. Your journey is just started and think of what you can learn about and improve your self on understanding of what you have learned and the real world of practice. If you are confident of being a sound engineer having extra ordinary capabilities, prove it to yourself and then to others.

After all man made degrees and prejudices. One got to be really worth about being called an engineer, that is professional talent and hands on work. Assess where you stand at now?

I think you'll find that you can learn a lot by getting your hands dirty, even if it seems beneath you at the moment. In the end it will make you a better engineer and eventually manager.

Hi dear Guest,

such your feeling I'd gone by since about four years ago,..........

you have just two options, either * you have to put up, and get rid of your "self-admiration", in this case you'll bear fruits later as Mr. Stevem commented.....Or * you quit and go for another business which match you desire............

hope this helps!!!!!!!!!

Go to graduate school.

Please help me find a good one!!!

If you truly desire to put your skills that you learned in college to use, get into the r&d side of things. Otherwise, suck it up.

This is the world of engineering.

Recent Grad,

I hope you come back and respond and don't think people here are being harsh on you. However, their comments are valid for working in the power generation industry. I'm around your experience level and graduated college about 2.5 years ago as a mechanical engineer (I still wear diapers). However, I grew up working with my hands as a mechanic, welder, and other "farm boy" stuff. I got into the power industry because during college I did a summer internship at a power plant--I would try to spend at least half my day asking operators and maintenance men questions so I could learn from them.

After school, I took a field engineering position and traveled around doing lots of stuff in plants including commissioning, boiler inspections, outage work, etc. Recently I've hopped on with a very small island utility and have been chasing fires because no engineers here have my plant experience. I've always gotten along with tradesmen and usually bump heads with most engineers. I have a reason for this, if you want to be a good power plant engineer and be respected, you have to learn the ropes and do the time. If you never got your fingers dirty or spent time in operations, you are useless to many people--including people like me that move up quickly because of our experience.

If you want to ever "be in charge", the best thing you can have is field/operations experience. That's how it was in the "old days". Many cultures drifted off track with MBA's and all that BS, but it's being corrected. It's hard to make capital improvement decisions if you don't understand the operations of a plant.

Not only that, if you have enough knowledge to "understand the board" and even run it (with help from others), you will gain the respect of the operators and other tradesmen. Their respect is much more important than those above you; they workers are the ones that actually get stuff done and being able to talk to them for input and observations when problems arise will allow you to get your "real engineering work" done faster, better, and cheaper.

It all ties together in the end. But if you don't have the plant experience, you'll just become another cubicle monkey engineer...and in the deregulated power generation industry of many countries, you may have trouble making a living.