Phil Kane wrote:

On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:01:08 -0500, Mike Coslo wrote:


Interesting! I've been at a prominent university for just about 27
years now, and I have never seen any case where the females outnumbered
the men in engineering classes, even though the university population is
over 50 percent female.

Certainly at UCLA, they have a different situation:


The UCLA Chancellor (Al Carnesale) is an engineering classmate of
mine (New York boy makes good....) I did my grad studies at UCLA in the
late 50s and the class profile was definitely all-white-male.


When we have the Bring your daughters (and sons) to work day, for the
last few years, none of the young ladies wanted to be engineers. Most
wanted to be lawyers.


My wife is a non-degreed electrical instrumentation and power
engineer (3 years of engineering school before she ran out of money
many years ago, the rest O-J-T) and one of her contemporary work
colleagues is a structural engineer who is one of the limited
number of folks nationwide who is an expert on antenna and powerline
tower construction.

For a while in college I hung around with one of the female
students who later became one of the real brains in defense
aerospace engineering, and after grad school I was engaged to
a young lady who was studying nuclear engineering.

This was over 40 years ago but they're out there if you look hard
enough.


I have often thought that the engineering "lifestyle" has been one of
the worst advertisements for the profession.

Become an engineer, and you get to:

Work long and uncompensated hours

be looked at as a major oddball by a large segment of the community. I
wish I had compiled a list of all the engineer disses I've heard over
the years.

And if you are successful as an engineer, you get to choose one of two
paths. Choose to enter management, and essentially stop being an engineer.


No, no, no. When I became a manager I got to do both, because
"they" didn't hire/assign a replacement for my engineering job.


or

Continue to be an engineer, and continue to be a subordinate.


I had the "joy" of being a subordinate to the same person both as an
engineer and as a manager. Makes it difficult to sort things out.

Guess who makes more money?


Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it. In reflection,
the small amount of extra money wasn't worth the stress and strain
that came with the ride-two-horses-with-one-saddle management position.

One of the many reasons that I took early retirement when it was offered.

I observe a lot, and one observation is that early retirement is seldom
a bad thing! A few less dollars per month, but so what?

- Mike KB3EIA -