Why would you be a civil engineer when you can be a financial engineer?
Posted by Stephen Cline on July 5th, 2010
If you wanted to be a civil engineer and ended up being a financial engineer, you may have the US economy to thank for it. The country is facing a huge shortage of qualified civil engineers as well as natural scientists and an over abundance of financial engineers. And what do the financial engineers have to show for the millions that they earn in salaries and bonuses? You have financial derivatives that have all but wrecked the US economy and brought it to its knees. These have also severely threatened the global economy as a whole.
If you look at what went wrong with the idea of becoming a civil engineer in the last two decades or so, you will get to know the reason for this trend. People who got into financial management (and later mismanagement) started earning top dollars in Wall Street, which could not be matched by those who opted for natural sciences or engineering based professions. It has become rather an aspiration to get into the ‘high’ world of finance. Given the lows that the economy had to face due to the world of high finance, everyone seems to be ruing the decision to promote these financial engineers way above their true worth.
Tags: civil engineer, US economy
A looming shortage of civil engineers? When and where? Economic crisis or not, a financial engineer is still much better off than an unemployed civil engineer competing in a completely oversaturated job market. Sorry, but there is no apparent shortage of civil engineers anywhere in this country at the moment.