When I was a sophomore in high school in 1955, I decided that engineering would be my career. It did not occur to me that I should choose among the many branches of engineering - they all seemed to offer good jobs and good money.

During my freshman year at Stevens Institute of Technology, I was told that the four-year bachelor's degree would give me a BS in Engineering - my master's degree would determine the specific branch. So again, I did not have to make a choice during that year.

During the sophomore year, the engineering degree seemed too far off in the future and the chance to earn money now led me out of college and into the working world of telephone repair at Western Electric.

A year later I realized that the degree would be important, and I changed jobs to become an engineering technician at a controls company and also enrolled at Newark Institute of Technology in the evening program. NIT did require me to make a choice and I chose industrial engineering for my BS degree. A year later, when the engineering courses became harder and night school lost its novelty; I switched to business administration at Rutgers. After one term in 1961, I realized that a business degree did not guarantee a good job at graduation, and I went back to engineering and completed my BS degree in 1963.
As luck would have it, the college was not authorized to award the industrial engineering degree until the following year, so my degree by default was the BSME.

Campus recruiters were after the graduates and I chose Combustion Engineering as my first engineering employer. The company built utility size boilers worldwide and the lure of travel made that job appealing. Within a year I had settled on field boiler start-up because I felt comfortable dealing with people and solving problems on the fly.

Two years into my career, I landed an industrial marketing job with a natural gas distribution utility in the Pacific Northwest. Another night school stint gave me an MBA to add to the BSME. The marketing position turned out to be my final job and led to retirement 35 years later.

The point of this story is that the BSME was the qualifier that got me through the door to a job offer. The final career path may never include traditional mechanical engineering work. In my case the ability to understand how mechanical processes operated and to be able to interface with plant engineers in a marketing environment, were the critical tools that the BSME gave me.

I chose to use my engineering education to get me a job offer, and then chose work in a non-engineering area because that's what made the job an enjoyable profession.
So take heart - engineering may not be for everyone, but it's a great tool to open other career paths!

Werner A. Gerling, Gerlingw@asme.org