USNEWS：如何评估各类工程学位

“The No. 1 trait to have in engineering would be problem-solving, so you just have to love getting a problem and then tackling it,” says Jake Berkowitz, a college sophomore at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering in North Carolina. Berkowitz says engineering students need to be persistent enough to continue trying to solve a difficult problem even if they failed on a previous attempt.

Dona Gaynor, director of career management services at the Florida Institute of Technology, says engineering programs at colleges and universities tend to be exceedingly rigorous, so someone who has struggled in math or science courses in the past is probably not a good candidate for an engineering degree.

Nevertheless, though they acknowledge that engineering is difficult to learn, many engineers say they are glad they studied this complex subject, because it led them to fulfilling careers.

“Engineering is a way of solving problems, and engineers solve problems that change the world,” says Penny Wirsing, an environmental engineer and current president of the Society of Women Engineers. “If you think about anything, anything that is in your world today, there was an engineer involved in it somewhere. And so when I talk to students about engineering, I ask them, ‘Do they want to have an impact?'”

People determined to pursue either an undergraduate or graduate engineering degree have many options to choose from. There are a variety of types of engineering, each of which focuses on the conception and construction of a different type of technology. Engineering students typically are required to concentrate on a specific kind of engineering. For instance, they might specialize in aerospace engineering, a field that focuses on the production of aircraft and spacecraft, or petroleum engineering, a field where the primary goal is to design and build oil drills, natural gas pipelines and other technologies that assist the oil and gas industry. They could also focus on environmental engineering, a discipline which is devoted to inventing and implementing technological solutions to environmental problems, or materials engineering, which focuses on the creation of substances that can enhance quality of life, such as heat-resistant or corrosive-resistant metals.

“There are literally dozens of different engineering majors at various schools across the country,” Thomas Wolff, associate dean emeritus of undergraduate programs in the College of Engineering at Michigan State University, wrote in an email. “Sometimes called the ‘big four,’ civil engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering are the largest in numbers, and taught at most engineering schools. Following those, materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, aerospace engineering, etc. are common, but not at as many places, so national enrollments are smaller.”

Wolff notes that some universities house their computer sciencedepartments within their engineering schools, whereas other universities do not. “Beyond that, there are many other majors only found at specific schools, such as mining engineering, welding engineering, architectural engineering, etc.”