College Crunch

Engineering is a practical yet creative career path. It applies scientific and technical knowledge to bring together natural laws and physical resources in the design and creation of structures, materials, processes, devices, or systems that meet specific criteria safely.

Online Engineering Degrees

A concept as timeless as time itself, engineering’s already-diverse fields is made even more diverse by the addition of new disciplines that respond to specific technology or trends. Continued discovery and expansion of human knowledge through time have resulted to the many branches or disciplines in the field of engineering. Today, universities and colleges have engineering departments offering bachelor’s and other degrees in a variety of engineering disciplines.

Here are some engineering fields and career paths students can look into for help in deciding which degree program to pursue:

Mechanical Engineering

Considered by many the most difficult of all engineering fields, mechanical engineering is a discipline that applies physical principles in analyzing, designing, implementing, and maintaining mechanical systems. Core concepts students are required to learn involve thermodynamics, kinematics, energy, fluid mechanisms and mechanics. Mechanical engineers or MEs are employed by various manufacturing firms that make cars, airplanes, water jets, etc. Ford, Honda, Toyota – automakers are perhaps the most popular employers of mechanical engineers.

Electrical Engineering

Electronics engineers are experts in dealing with electricity, electromagnetism, and electronics. With the commercialization of electronic telegraph and the electric power supply, electrical engineering became an identifiable field and now includes a variety of subtopics like control systems, telecommunications, power, electronics, and much more.

The electrical aspect of this field of engineering deals with troubleshooting large electrical systems like power transmission and electrical lines. The electronics side is in small scale electric units or circuits, such as in computers similar devices and integrated circuits. Power and utility companies employ thousands of electrical engineers. Tech industries like cell phone manufacturers employ thousands of electronics and communications engineers; the IT industry has a lot of them as well.

Computer Engineering

This field of engineering brings together two of today’s most powerful disciplines, electronics and computer science. Computer engineers are basically electronics engineers with further training in computer technology especially dealing with software-hardware integration and software design. Where there are mobile devices, you’d find computer engineers.

Big microchip manufacturers like Texas Instruments employ computer engineers in their design teams to write software for microchips embedded in many electronic gadgets-makers like Nokia. Besides micro-controllers, computer engineers dabble with analog sensors, circuit boards, even robotics research. Many computer engineers in the U.S find overseas employment especially in Japan.

Civil Engineering

For people wanting careers in public works, civil engineering is the career path to pursue. From design to construction up to the maintenance and eventual demolition of physical structures like office buildings, bridges and highways, civil engineering is the oldest engineering profession, next to military engineering. It is also perhaps the most pervasive engineering field as every individual, organization, and associations whether private or public, would have need of civil engineers. Individual homeowners need one for building their homes; government levels for various infrastructure projects and private organizations require them for their own construction projects.

Civil engineers normally further train in various sub-disciplines to develop a specialty. As the green economy gains popular support, structural, environmental, geotechnical and other sub-engineering professionals continue to be in high demand.

Chemical Engineers

Chemical engineers are experts in chemistry and physics as they use principles in these two scientific fields, employing it with mathematics to convert chemicals into more useful substances. Chemical engineers are usually employed by large manufacturing companies like Unilever and P&G to design and maintain their product chemical processes. In a world where very little remains unchanged, the search for better and new products never ends. Chemical engineers have excellent R&D prospects as they work to pioneer new materials and techniques.

There are many other branches and engineering disciplines, often more exotic-sounding that the usual ones. Geodetic, aerospace, biochemical, metallurgical, ocean – these are just some of the many branches where applied sciences require engineering experts to derive practical benefits.