electronic or mechanical

totothejuggler

Hi

I'm doing first year undenomiated engineering in NUIG.

Any way we have to pick what course were gonna do next year and im kinda having trouble deciding. I find both electronic and mechanical very interesting mechanical slightly more so. I know that if I did mechanical I would love to go into the biomedical end of things and the same with electrical I'd like to do the bioelectrical sort of stuff.

I know there is a huge demand for electronic engineers these days but i didn't feel i was that good at the module we had.

I was just wondering if there is any one out there in either areas that could give me a bit of information whats its like in a day in the life of situation in either fields. what kind of salaries either job gets and that sort of thing.

thanks

jonnyfingers

I did Electronic Engineering in UL, graduating in 2004. I found it an extremely broad course, as such at the end of it I knew a little about a lot, but I wasn't an expert in any particular field. As for employment I moved into hardware troubleshooting first, diagnosing faulty data storage servers through Hex code. From there I moved to a contact lens company where I troubleshooted PLC code, dabbling a bit in SQL on the database side of things.

I've since moved to another contact lens company in the UK where I'm a controls engineer, again programming machines through PLC code as well as developing Scada interfaces. It's interesting work and I'm happy.

Others from my year went into a wide variety of careers, some work for Intel on the chip side of things, some work for large gas companies in production engineering capacities. Some have retrained and become pilots, others have become accountants.

I have a lot of friends that studied Mechanical Engineering in UL also, and again they all went into different careers. Some became production engineers in the same contact lens company as me, their role primarily being studying machines and coming up with ways to improve their performance. Some went into aeronautical engineering jobs, others became accountants, maths teachers.

I guess my point is that I felt electronic engineering, and I suppose mechanical engineering, equiped us graduates to move in numerous career directions. There is no "electronic engineering" or "mechanical engineering" job per se, you are given the skills to apply yourself in many different areas.

So to help to choose I would pick based purely on which course has the modules that interest you the most. The truth is you probably have no idea where you're going to end up job-wise, unless of course you have a dream job in mind and in that case you should pick the course that would suit you most for that job. But for now pick what interests you.


Edit: As for salary expectations I started off on €24,000 out of college, rising to €28,000 a year later. From there my contact lens job was a 3-shift role so I was around €36,000 basic with a 25% shift bonus.

Over in the UK salaries are a bit less, as they're not that inflated as the ones in Ireland were (Celtic Tiger and all that!). But with around 6-7 years engineering experience, nearly 5 in my current field I'm on around £41,500 (€50,000) so not too bad.