Now that you know a little bit about who I am, I'll give you a brief update on what I've been up to since college, and then tell you why I think an engineering degree is the most valuable degree you can have...even if you don't embark on a career in engineering.
Last August, I began a job with ExxonMobil in their Gas and Power Marketing division, which is primarily responsible for running the company's global natural gas business (some people confuse the term "gas" for gasoline, which is not what the term means in this case). In my current role, I serve as the interface between a handful of our US production assets and the pipelines that receive our produced gas. On a given day I talk to people in the field, meet with customers, work with accountants, and spend lots of time manipulating numbers in Excel. For me, it's a great introductory role into an industry that fascinates me.
However, you might have noticed that the job I just described doesn't sound a whole lot like a traditional engineering job. In fact, I never do things like design separations or calculate the required surface area for a heat exchanger, which is what I spent my undergraduate career in chemical engineering learning how to do. I'm not the only one in this situation either. During and after my time at KU, I have made many friends who now work in diverse fields like sales, marketing, banking, medicine, etc. The variety of their roles is nearly boundless, the only constant is that they all earned engineering degrees that now set them apart in their chosen fields.
Despite what you may perceive from your exposure so far at KU, there are a nearly limitless number of career opportunities outside of traditional engineering research and design for those who complete their undergraduate degrees in an engineering discipline. More than anything, the engineering curriculum teaches you to take a very complex problem, break it into discrete, manageable elements, and create a workable solution. In the real world, the problems may or may not be technical challenges that require you to apply the knowhow you learned in engineering school, but almost all necessitate a version of the problem solving process I just described. Those who practice and become proficient at this are sure to do well in their careers, and the fact that more than 20% of Fortune 500 CEOs have engineering degrees (more than any other background) reinforces that point.
So what's my point here? If you're fascinated by the work you do in your senior design class or the project you're working on in a professors lab, then you are certainly in the right undergraduate program and there will be a great number of career opportunities for you once you finish school. But if you're worried about not totally loving your thermo or physics course, have no fear because there are just as many, if not more opportunities for you to apply your problem solving skills to non-technical problems. In summary, you couldn't have picked a more versatile and desirable undergraduate program than engineering, no matter what career you choose to embark upon!
Now for something completely unrelated, I suggest you check out Liberty Hall in Lawrence while you're still fortunate enough to live there. They show great, sometimes limited-release movies in an atmosphere that can't be beat (beer on tap in a movie theater, need I say more).
Until next week, happy studying!
Greg