Hey Y'all,
I am a humble third year student at a university and I am always interested in the questions posted on this platform. I wanted to share some advice that I've received over the last couple years that has really helped me to develop in parallel with my undergraduate studies. I have been saying for several years that I am not at all interested in a masters degree. I am in college in order to prepare myself for the profession of engineering. I am a firm believer that the reputation of a school matters less than the reputation of the department. Furthermore, the institution you attend matters less than how you apply yourself while you're there--taking advantage of the resources they offer--the library here at CSUN has a database of more great technical books than I could ever read.
For some, the most important thing is that you just get the degree and get a job--and I won't argue that success and happiness can certainly be attained by way of that path. For those of us that aspire to be a cut above, to achieve greatness, or even just to achieve something great, we worry that something more is at our fingertips and we look carefully for that which alludes the common engineer--again, not that common is at all bad, its just not for us. I will close with the direction I got from professional engineering career coach Anthony Fasano at
The Engineering Management Institute and what I did with it.
Anthony encouraged me to get an internship in the specific discipline for which I was aiming and to develop a software skill relevant to that industry, which for me is water resources engineering. At the time, I had stumbled onto GIS, a geographic software, and learned that it is used all across the country by municipalities, and many private companies as well. Since my
interview with Anthony, I have taken two courses in GIS and completed a GIS internship. The confidence that I have, now that I will be competitive as a Civil Engineer I upon graduation is priceless. To add to that, during my internship I was lucky to work with a few engineers that were open about their strengths
and their struggles. I mention this detail because it has led me to strengthen my programming fundamentals. Much of the work at the firm was geared to repackaging data which entailed using tools across different platforms. During my free time, I am currently completing a
stochastic modeling course at
edX because building a Jupyter notebook is a great way for an engineer to practice python. Although the engineers I worked with were highly competent and indeed very good at what they did, I now know that having a strong foundation of basic algorithms and data structures will be invaluable, especially if I ever change my mind about a graduate degree--by the way UCLA has a very attractive program in water resources/environmental engineering.
I have gone from being skeptical about too much schooling to a lover of learning. If you don't already, I encourage you to start listening to podcasts.
How do/did you make yourself more attractive as a Engineer-1 candidate?
------------------------------
Carl Humphrey S.M.ASCE
Oxnard CA
(805)982-0189
carl.humphrey.294@...https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-humphrey-b0130a67/------------------------------