CIT Career Center at Carnegie Mellon

Explore Careers:
Careers in Engineering and How to Decide on a Major

Whether you are clear about your major or are currently deciding and evaluating your major, there are some basic steps that can help you be more satisfied and successful with choosing a major in engineering.

Meet with your CIT Career Consultant

Lisa Dickter and Carol Young are your CIT Career Consultants. Meet with us to help walk you through the process of choosing a major.
Please call 412-268-2064 to arrange a 45-minute appointment. The Career Center is located in the University Center -- Lower Level.

Lisa Dickter, CIT Career Consultant dickter@andrew.cmu.edu	Carol Young, CIT Career Consultant caroly@andrew.cmu.edu
Meets with students majoring in: Biomedical Engineering Chemical Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Mechanical Engineering	Meets with students majoring in: Electrical and Computer Engineering Engineering and Public Policy Materials Science and Engineering

Getting Started On Choosing A Major

You are not alone...

It is not easy to decide
It is not all set in stone
You are NOT deciding what you are going to do for the rest of your life
Use what you pay for!

Opening Thoughts

Many students “fall into” engineering because they are good at math and science. This does not mean you will like or be good at engineering!
What aspects of engineering do you like the most?
Do you like to work with people, data and/or things?

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Know Yourself:
Careers in Engineering and How to Decide on a Major

Your Interests:
What do you like (ideas, thoughts, passions, classes, hobbies, activities, what gives you energy)?

Your Skills:
What are you good at (jobs, classes, hobbies)?
What do friends/family think you are good at?

Your Values:
What makes you happy (beliefs, lifestyle, material objects, family/relationships, etc.)?

Self Assessment Tools

The Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The Career Center offers two assessment tools to help you narrow your preferences in terms of a career. The assessment tools are:

Strong Interest Inventory
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

If you are interested in taking one or both of these tools, please make an appointment with Lisa Dickter or Carol Young your CIT Career Consultants by calling (412) 268-2064.

Why take the Interest Inventory?

to objectively identify interests
to provide a framework for organizing interests into the world of work
to help identify relevant occupations that may not have been considered before

The Interest Inventory measures interests that are:

vocational
avocational (leisure, recreational)
environmental (working, living, playing)
reflective of preferences for types of people (co-workers, friends, significant others)

This inventory is used to help you understand your interests in a general way and to show some kinds of activities and work that you might enjoy. It lists many jobs, activities, school subjects, and you are asked to show your liking or disliking for each. Your answers will be compared with the answers given by people working in a wide range of jobs, and your scores will show how similar your interests are to the interests of these people. Remember, this is not a test of your abilities; it is an inventory of your interests.

Why take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)?

To identify your preferences
To understand your preferences
To discover how your preferences apply to a career decision

The MBTI measures valuable differences that result from:

the way people like to take in information
where people like to focus their attention
the way people like to make decisions
the kind of lifestyle people adopt

Each of us has a set of preferences by which we live. There is no right or wrong to these preferences. They simply produce different kinds of people who are interested in different things and are drawn to different fields. This tool identifies valuable differences between people, differences that can be the source of much misunderstanding and miscommunication.

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Careers For Engineering Majors

Know Your Career Options

Talk with your CIT Career Consultant
Talk with your Academic Advisor
Talk with professors, alumni, friends, people in the field
Read career-related books
Check out the Engineering DVDs from the Career Center library:
- Careers for Chemical Engineers
- Careers for Civil Engineers
- Careers for Electrical Engineers & Computer Scientists
- Careers in Materials Science and Engineering
- Careers for Mechanical Engineers
Read the course catalog: Do the junior/senior level courses sound interesting to you?

Chemical Engineering

Did you ever wonder:

How they make milk chocolate so creamy?
How laundry detergent can bleach whites, brighten colors, and remove dirt all at the same time?
How fat-free food products are made to taste the same as fat-full ones?
How they turn crude oil into gasoline?
How beer is made or liquor is distilled?
How milk jugs, balloons, and car bumpers can all be made out of a material called plastic?
How to make 2000 pounds of toothpaste all at once? (and how to get it in those tubes?)
Why your knuckles get so cold when you're riding a bike?

What do you learn in Chemical Engineering?

Chemical engineers use knowledge of chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, and computational analysis to develop and commercialize new products and processes.
These new products range from petroleum, plastics, paint, integrated circuits, magnetic tape, and pharmaceuticals to cosmetics and food.
You will study heat transfer, chemical reactions, economics and optimization.
You will learn methodologies for systematic design, control, and analysis of processes.

Jobs in Chemical Engineering

As a Chemical Engineering graduate, you might get jobs redesigning production lines to change the product mix, tracking quality control problems, analyzing the safety of a processing plant, or designing processes to create new consumer products, including food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
If you follow a project from start to finish, you may design a chemical processing plant to fill a customer’s need, write a proposal, and then sell the concept to the customer.

Salaries, Employers and Graduate Schools

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Civil And Environmental Engineering

Did you ever wonder:

Why the Tower of Pisa leans?
Why some strings of traffic lights are timed and others are not?
Why the wind doesn't break tall buildings in half?
How they built the Liberty Tubes?
How they get water to the top floor of the Empire State Building?
What happens to the water after it goes down the drain?
Why Pittsburgh roads have so many potholes?
What they do with the paper, cans, and bottles after they pick the recycling up from the curb?
Why the pyramids are still standing?

What do you learn in Civil and Environmental Engineering?

Civil and Environmental Engineering focuses on problems of civilian infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, buildings, water systems, and their sustainable design.
Your classes will expose you to environmental studies as well as to statics, fluids and solids.

Jobs in Civil and Environmental Engineering

After graduation, you may design and construct buildings, roadways, theme park attractions, or water delivery systems.
As you advance, you can become the project manager of any of these projects, overseeing the delivery, scheduling and use of materials.
You can also turn brownfields (contaminated, unusable, former industrial sites) back into land that can be built on again.

Salaries, Employers and Graduate Schools

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Electrical and Computer Engineering

Did you ever wonder:

How a cellular phone works?
How a compact disk works?
How a Pentium computer chip works?
How e-mail and the internet work?
How hard drives store information?
How your calculator works?
How radio towers work?
Whether you could build an OS better than Windows.

What do you learn in Electrical and Computer Engineering?

Electrical and Computer Engineering covers a wide range of topics, including hardware, software, analog and digital machinery, and programming.
You will start by learning the fundamentals of analog and digital circuits.
Later, you will learn about more specialized topics, such as processor design, telecommunications networks, and data storage.

What areas can you focus on in Electrical and Computer Engineering?
ECE courses are broken down into 5 basic areas:

Applied Physics -- classes deal with electrical interference and data storage (magnetism)
Signals and Systems -- electromechanical controls, error correction, information processing
Circuits -- digital and analog circuit design
Computer Hardware -- processors and computer component design
Computer Software -- similar to computer science, but with less theory

Jobs in Electrical and Computer Engineering

After graduation, you can design and test microprocessors, perform quality testing of semiconductors, or design the next generation computer processor.
Some ECE jobs are more customer-service oriented, such as designing custom software for a client, giving technical support, and training customers to use your company’s hardware and software.

Salaries, Employers and Graduate Schools

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Materials Science And Engineering

Did you ever wonder?

Why plastic makes a cracking sound when it bends?
Why rubber bands snap?
Why superconductors are so super?
How are pop cans made?
Why the Titanic sank?
Why concrete, wood, and metal break in different ways?
Why is silly putty silly?
Why if nothing sticks to Teflon, why does Teflon stick to the pan?
Why some things are welded together and other things are held together by rivets and bolts?

What do you learn in Materials Science and Engineering

Materials engineers design and research materials for any application. They apply the tools of basic and applied science to the refining, preparation, processing, and manufacture of materials and devices.
From superconductors to aerospace to heart valves, materials research and development affects every industry and discipline.
The discipline of materials science and engineering draws heavily on basic sciences such as chemistry, mathematics, and physics, as well as engineering fundamentals, to refine, prepare, process, and manufacture materials which are useful for the technological needs of society.
The development of new materials, and the understanding and control of the structure and properties of new and existing materials, are essential parts of this discipline.

Jobs in Materials Science and Engineering

As a materials engineer, your job might include designing lightweight components to lower fuel consumption, designing and developing thermal protection materials for aircraft and space vehicles, or using simulation to determine failure modes.
You might also be involved in determining why a failure happened (like a plane crash or machine failure).
You can conduct research on long-term material degradation or perform experiments to find new relationships between materials properties.

Salaries, Employers and Graduate Schools

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Mechanical Engineering

Did you ever wonder:

How the brakes on your car work?
How to design a spacecraft to explore the Milky Way?
How the transmission of an automobile works?
How your heater works? or your air conditioner?
How to design the acoustics for concert halls?
How prosthetic limbs are manufactured?
How the robotics-assisted devices work in orthopedic surgery?
How a wheelchair works the way it does?
How to design an efficient manufacturing technique, such as an assembly line?
How to heat your pool through solar heating?

What do you learn in Mechanical Engineering?

Mechanical engineers (MechE's) design, develop, and manufacture machines that produce, transmit, or use power. Wherever machines are produced or used, there are mechanical engineers.
From a seemingly simple object like a doorknob to complex robots and spacecrafts, almost every area of everyday life has been influenced by a mechanical engineer somewhere along the path from invention to installation.
Mechanical Engineering is concerned with the design, analysis, and manufacturing of machines and devices.
Typical course work will start with solid and fluid mechanics and then progress to thermodynamics, heat transfer, dynamics, and numerical methods. Mathematics and physics backgrounds are important in this major.

Jobs in Mechanical Engineering

Jobs for Mechanical Engineers include designing and testing automotive components, designing robots for manufacturing plants or for space applications, and improving consumer appliances by increasing the functionality or reducing the weight and cost.
You might work in non-destructive evaluation of aerospace equipment or designing the control system for an automated wheelchair.

Salaries, Employers and Graduate Schools

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Four Year Roadmap

Career Planning Throughout Your Undergraduate Years

At some point all students will be asked, "What do you want to do after graduation?" In order to make decisions about your future career plans, it is helpful to gather career-related information; evaluate your interests, skills, and values; and gain work, extracurricular, and leadership experience. Career planning, then, is a decision-making process, not a singular event. To help students with the process of career planning, this roadmap includes helpful suggestions for your first, sophomore, junior, and senior years.