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by richk449 2437 days ago
You have an engineering degree, but you wouldn’t call yourself an engineer?

What do you call yourself?

1 comments

An engineering graduate, or an engineer-in-training. You can call yourself an engineer once you have several years of experience, pass some exams on law and ethics and whatnot, and get a professional designation.
Do the ethics courses focus on when you’re allowed to call yourself an engineer?
That is downright ridiculous, sorry. You are an engineer, just not a "certified" or "accredited" one for some sub-set of tasks/things/requirements. The fact that we have to even discuss this as if saying you're an engineer is some ultra-taboo because people might "mistakenly" allow you to do mission critical or potentially dangerous work without asking for your specific accreditation is disturbing and Orwellian-like policing of plain language.
No, it’s why actual engineering isn’t currently suffering the influx of unskilled dilettantes like software is.
Getting an engineering license doesn't require much in terms of skill beyond what you'd learn in undergrad.
The work experience requirement is pretty important, though. That's how you learn the practical side of the field.

I have a degree in EE, but there's a 0% chance I could safely design electrical equipment. In school they taught me how to analyze circuits, but I know nothing of the electrical code, let alone practical matters like mechanical stresses on wires. Without somebody to learn from, I would learn a lot of things the hard way—when the design fails.

You learn those things the same whether you will get an engineering license in the future or not. The engineer exams don't actually test this kind of knowledge.