Being spontaneous can be fun, but when it comes to choosing your degree and your future profession, you should certainly spend some time thinking about your choices. There’s a lot at stake, obviously, and the decision will have long lasting implications. If you have been considering engineering, you may not yet be sold on the prospects. However, once you see the top reasons for choosing engineering, you’ll see that it may just be the perfect choice and opportunity for you.
One of the foremost reasons to become an engineer is the many different opportunities, specialties and areas of focus that you can choose. There is well over a dozen unique engineering subfields, and from there, many more even more specific specialties. These areas can have you focusing on anything from electronics to aerospace to petroleum to marine vessels and on down the line.
This is fantastic because you get to always be doing exactly what you want. When most people think of an “engineer” they think about somebody building or fixing roads. That’s the civil engineer, and it’s a popular subfield all to itself, however, it’s just one small classification of engineers, and that’s a far cry from what most engineers find themselves doing.
Still, it may seem daunting at first which specialty you want to focus in. The good news is that with degrees in engineering you don’t have to make up your mind right away. You can take basic engineering, mathematics and science courses and see what you sparks you the most. You can then even combine multiple disciplines to provide a diverse skill set for yourself. For example, study both environmental and biomedical engineering, or materials and chemical engineering.
Of course, one of the best reasons to consider engineering is that the field is expected to grow at a faster pace than many others over the next decade, according to the BLS. There are tons of job opportunities, from the government to the private sector, from multinational corporations to small startups, and more, and all of them offer unique, exciting and cutting-edge careers.
All of this and we haven’t even got to perhaps the best reason of all to choose engineering, and that’s the salaries that you can earn. Salaries for engineering are amongst the highest for professionals of all kinds, and you’ll be amazed at what you can end up earning, even right at the start of your career.
For example, a computer hardware engineer has a median salary of over $95,000, while a petroleum engineer has an astonishing median salary of $108,000 annually! Even a more modest field in comparison, like mining engineering, will bring you a $75,000 median salary, and that’s at the low end of the entire scope of engineering.
There are definitely many different strong reasons to become an engineer. The high salaries are fantastic, and the job opportunities are both plentiful and exciting. You can specialize in anything that matches your skills and interests, and the sky is the limit in terms of what you can accomplish with an engineering diploma in hand.
