An Engineer's Life

Few words: As luck would have it, a boxer trained his whole life just for a few minutes fame on stage. Boxer’s life is something admirable.


You see, when you’re young, I’m sure your parent will inject this into your brain. Be a professional when you grow up whether a doctor, lawyer or an engineer. And hence, we without doubt filled this three in our ambition list every year. Engineer is somehow one of the top three jobs where every parent wanted their children to be. I’m not so sure with doctor or lawyer but an engineer?

I doubt.

Dear Parents,

To be an engineer, you have to study another year than most of the course out there but what you can earn is the same or even less than the other course. Let’s take business for example; many billionaires out there are successful businessmen, seldom are engineers. When you’re in form 3 doing your PMR, do you still remember the threat given by most of the teachers? “Get a good result if you don't want yourself ended up in an Art class” and hence we do everything we can just to not be in an Art Class.

Let me tell you what, the earning of those from Art stream be it a business, marketing or management is higher than us, engineer. You say engineer is a professional, yes we are but in term of financial, we are far behind than those from Art stream. I don’t understand why the teachers equalize Art Class with low grade; I bet some of them purposely fall short in their PMR.

Sadly speaking, to put this in work ecosystem, business student study to be an employer while engineering student study to be their employee.

Then, there is this professionalism issue. No doubt in the eye of society, engineer is a respected profession. Nevertheless, that is many years ago maybe in the 1970’s or 1980’s when there is still not much engineers. In 2011, engineers are everywhere. Yes, no doubt the professionalism is still there; that is when we do not tell them our salary. Once they know our salary, respect is still there but not for the professionalism but for the admiration of spending four years to earn less than other profession. Till today I still strongly believe that money represent everything including respect, you may say I’m a materialistic, but won’t everyone is like that today?

I bet Art Class students are laughing at us now.

Upon landing my first step in the job industry, I realize that engineer is just a title. You may be called as an engineer but what you did is just like everyone else. Being an engineer not necessary being someone wearing safety helmet reading plan like what describe in our kindergarten dictionary.

Realistically, being an engineer is no different than a normal office worker; you sit in the office waiting for lunch time, clicking on your FB when your boss is not around and happily going off work like everyone else. It’s sad to say but it’s true, if I were to put you in an office, you can’t differentiate who is an engineer and who is not because they look just the same.

As I’m saying this, I’m not referring to all engineers out there; I mean there are of course some engineers that can earn a lot more than Art stream student but I’m only saying this for the majority of the engineers out there. It might be wrong but that is what I observed as fresh graduate engineer.

The only good side of being an engineer is when you’re meeting your parents in law, you can always brag a little about your job since engineer in the eye of older generation is a well respected profession. Just don’t tell them your salary, nevertheless :)

Yours Sincerely,
Humble Engineer