engineering or physics? i hate math =(

That's true. Eventually it doesn't matter much what the degree says, its more your personal capabilities. And if you can't analyze and solve the problem you'll be practicing transportation engineering with 80k in school loans. I just find that my path allows me more freedom then my engineering buddies whom always seem to be constrained by this committee, that project deadline, ISO this, ISO that. Actually, one engineering friend did get to use his creativity -- he had to present dependency reports in weekly project impact meetings so he ported a HUGE 4-yr microsoft project plan into an access database and wrote some pretty impressive queries.... It really was pretty cool, not trivial but I digress...

 

Hmmm.... I think this is more of a matter of the company's product line and environment.

Last company I worked for was really big into ISO crap. They weren't initially, but they hired a bunch of ex-Lucent people. A couple months later the team grew from 20 engineers to 150. All of a sudden I was in meetings all the time with so-called experts telling me what to do when they haven't designed anything for years. It was an absolute waste of time.

This company has a much smaller engineering team and our paper work is minimal. We have maybe 1 meeting every other month. If I got a question or need to coordinate with someone, I just talk to them. That stopped happening at the last company.

I think working in a smaller company you could have more freedom if you are a good fit for the company. In a bigger company you can get lost in the mix. You don't have that option with a small company. You are always in the spotlight for good or ill.

It also depends on the products that the company creates too. I have had the opportunity to work on some pretty cool stuff. Several products I actually designed both the hardware and software. That was fun, but not as much fun as my current work.

It's a much better environment and much cooler product line.

 

I have a question for all you physics and engineering types out there: How much statistics did you get in your training and use in your work place?

I ask because I went through years and years of deterministic mathematics in school but the stuff I use the most, every single day, is statistics. I even went back to college and took a bunch of statistics courses (paid for by my employer) because it is so useful.

Health, economics, and finance are data driven fields. I am swimming in gigabytes of data. Statistical methods are the only thing we use to analyze and model our data.

I get 8 or 10 calls a year from recruiters trying to fill statistical analysis positions around the country.

When ever a junior staff member asks me for advice about what to study to advance his/her career, I always tell them statistics and econometrics.

Just thought I would throw that out there.

 

As far as I know every engineer needs to take statistics for engineers and scientist. Most likely, they will get more statistics in their other courses as well.

I did encounter a bit of statistics in my Computer Science courses. For example some data structures and algorithms are better suited for larger data sets, but would be overkill in terms of processing power on smaller data sets. Statistics is useful in explaining that concept. Statistics can also explain why certain Computer Science problems are hard to solve or unsolvable.

On the job statistics can be quite useful for calculating failure/reliability rates or to determine whether or not a design idea is worth pursuing.

I think it is even more useful to the head of a department or manager who needs to determine project feasibility and the technologies used in that project.

 

I can tell you any physicist worth his weight is pretty good with statistical analysis. Quantum theory, as you may know, is a non-deterministic theory...it only gives you outcome probabilities. Statistical analysis sort of goes hand in hand with quantum systems.

We measure the states of our superconducting quantum circuits by running the same experiments thousands and thousands of times (per second), generating huge histograms of data, which tell us about the quantum mechanical state of the system.

 

Sounds awesome. Experimental physicists get to use some amazing machines.

 

So true. We use a helium 3 dilution refrigerator that cools our chips down to a temperature that is about 50 times cooler than the most remote regions of outer space. Pretty cool stuff.

 

Have you tried using that to crash cool your wort?

 

I would, but a single cool-down uses about $1000 worth of liquid helium!