The Weights and Scales of Engineering Choosing which career paths to take in life can sometimes prove to be a challenge, it’s always a good idea to weigh your options and try to narrow your choices down to a select few. It’s important to look at the similarities and differences between which careers you’re interested in. For someone like myself that’s interested in an engineering degree there are a lot of different things to consider. While there are several different types of engineering degrees presently made available to college students, two of the most common are civil and mechanical engineering. Although some believe that a civil engineering degree is the most practical route to go, I believe stability wise that the mechanical field is the better fitting degree, not only for the student, but for the economy and also world. Civil engineering is a field of study that deals with the design, planning, construction, maintenance, and upkeep of society's infrastructure. This field has also been referred to as “building science”. Civil engineers work with dirt, gravel, concrete buildings, bridges and construction. This field is the second oldest engineering discipline. Most of the civil engineers work is done on the work site, outside, and sometimes even in the harsh weather element. This job is definitely not for someone that doesn’t like to be outdoors or to be outside of an office environment. With the range of work options being narrowed to strictly outdoor structures, dirt and concrete work, there’s not much room to break the monotony of the same thing day after day. On the other hand mechanical engineering is a broader discipline in which offers you a large range of mechanical designing options that deals with machining. Mechanical engineers can design and build engines and machines for everything ranging from a jumbo jet to a pocket watch. In this field of work it’s common to use a lot of mechanisms, steel arms, levers and etc. for working on automobiles, machine tools, pumps, and things of that nature including even guns. Often the work is small scales and very precise. Most of the work is done indoors in a more structured office environment. In this field it’s common for the person to take on more of a leadership role where they direct lower level engineers and interns on the plans and designing of products, for example in a machine shop or a factory specializing in CNC (computer numerical control) machining. Most engineers have a four-year bachelor's degree in their field of study, with either engineering discipline you choose you will need to take similar basic engineering courses; physics, calculus, differential equations, etc. Then the last year or two is composed of classes more specific to the specified mechanical or civil discipline. Because mechanics is something you will use heavily in both fields, the curriculum will be similar. Although there are a lot of topics that will not include mechanics, conceptually both fields overlap especially at the research level. When it comes to salary, the annual compensation is all fairly similar, although in todays’ economy mechanical gets paid slightly higher wages than civil. Both jobs have an opportunity for travel and international work. Stability wise, Civil engineering would seem very heavily dependent on the economy. When the economy is bad, funding and money gets tight, and building and home construction slows down quite a bit. Therefore a Civil engineers job may slow way down if not completely go away when construction slows down. Civil engineers are limited to living near areas with a lot of building construction. Mechanical engineers seem have more job stability, as they are not as affected when building construction slows down because they have job opportunities in almost any sector of the economy. This provides the mechanical engineer with a so called upper hand on the demand for products seeing that so many things are mass produced in a factory setting. Mechanical can open doors in management, consulting and even finance. For more general business roles it seems that civil is not as well respected. There is an old joke I’ve heard several times about engineers, it is as follows; what is the difference between civil and mechanical engineers? Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets. As you can see from the joke it appears there has been a bias for mechanical engineers over the years. I personally have seen an ongoing rivalry between the two fields when I’ve asked a mechanical engineer what the difference between them and a civil engineer was, the response I received was, “Mechanical engineers design objects that destroy objects designed by civil engineers, not always but frequently” they also refer to civil engineers as being “overpaid architects” When choosing between the available degrees, you have to take your own personal situation into consideration and choose what the appropriate path is for you. Even though both career choices are rewarding, fulfilling, and satisfactory I believe that because of the exceptionally broad range of job availability, prestige, and for the financial, economic and overall stability in your life that the mechanical engineering degree would be the better of the two options.