Personal viewpoints on some career paths for engineering students

Disclaimer
This entry is totally my personal viewpoints, so it could be biased, incomplete, or sort of midleading. I write it in English for a larger readership and am sorry for any inconvinience causing by this.

Abstract
This article will discuss some possible careers for engineering students, including Consulting, Quantative Financial (Quant). It will try to identify the engineering's disadvantages and advantages in these careers, as well as the possible effect on life style.

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In addition to traditional enginering related careers(industry and academia), there are some other possible career paths for engineering students, including consulting, quantatative financial (Quant), and lawyer. These positions seems quite attrative as they genereally come with very good compensation. For example, it is not uncommon for a Quant to get $150,000/year or higher, and a entry-level salary in a big law firm is about $65/hr. I don't have any data for consulting, but it should be something similar. In addition, all these jobs are pretty challenging so it could bring you more fulfillment than a dumb job does.

As these jobs are attractive, they naturally have relatively high requirements for the applicants. For a consultant, in addition to your strong analytical and problem solving skills gained from engineering training, you also need excellent communicaiton capabilities to work with all kinds of people. For law, you need to take LSAT and apply to law school first. Only after that can you consider your mext move. For a quant, very strong programming (usually C++) and mathematical skills(stochastic processes, ODE/PDE, thing like that) are required. As a result, many quants are from Physics, Applied Math, EE and CS as they have these skill sets. And for most positions, you will face fierce competition and you have to beat others if you want to get the job.

Engineering students have both disadvantages and advantages in these career paths. I think a general disadvantage is that we are not specialized on any of these, for example, we may have relative less knowledge on business than those commerce/economics students, or we don't study law in our curriculum, or we don't know much economics as an MFE does. But these should not be real problems as long we can learn by ourselves. And what's our advantage? Our engineering background. There are IT consulting, which you specialized in one IT field and provide service to others. This business model works because many companies do not need to hire very skillful IT employees most of the time, so they will ask for some outside help when it is necessary and they are willing to pay more unit cost for that, because in total they still saves money. Or in the business of law, a big part is patent, Intellectural Property(IP) and other technical related stuff. Nowadays, if a merge or acquisition happens, a lot of legal efforts are spent on patens or IP, and these merges or acquisitions ususally very BIG --- for example, Alcatel and Lucent(13.5 Billon EUR), AMD and ATI(5.4 Billion USD), or the acquisition of Freescale (17.6 Billion USD). Imagine you get 0.001% of that --- well, I am kidding :P. Back to the topic -- our background will definitely help us on that, as we have better capabilites to make correct technically judgements.

And how will these careers affect our life styles? If you are just an employee of a normal technical company, your life should most of the time be regular, 9am to 5pm, and enjoy yourselves during the weekend. However, for all these three careers, it is not very easy to achieve that. A consultant's work schedule could vary a lot, depends on the project they are working on, and they may need to travel a lot, which may become not very pleasant after you have had enough. To work in a law firm or as quant, it is pretty normal to work from 9am to 10pm --- as a result, the salary is not that much as it appears to be, as the work time is longer. Most of the law firms and financial institutions will pay you for lunch and dinner, no matter what you orders, but they "prefer" you to have lunch at the work place to minize your time for meals --- after all, your time ($50/hr, for example) is much more expensive than a meal (what the hell can you order and make it cost $30 for a meal?). These will probably get better when you climb up in the hierarchy, but that's beyond my visibility and the scope of this article.

So in conclusion, as the cliche says, every thing has its pros and cons. A career choice will directly affect your economic status, life style, etc. and I hope this article could be somewhat useful, as I am trying to be as objective as I can.

References/Sources
* Talk with a friend working in a law firm
* Quant Board, at mitbbs.com (Chinese)
* Information Session on consulting
* News reading on WSJ, EETimes and Forbes
* Personal work experience

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Life is an opportunity to do something.