Which engineers use university-level education regularly?

I have been told that most engineers just use CAD for almost everything, so I am just curious which engineers, jobs, companies or sectors in the industry apply their university-level knowledge in their day-to-day activities.

Reply 1

_Case

6

Research - so R&D positions. They are more common in university but corporate can have positions where they hire out engineers with PhD's.

(edited 3 months ago)

Reply 2

grey_boredom

OP

10

Original post by _Case

Research - so R&D positions. They are more common in university but corporate can have positions where they hire out engineers with PhD's.

Do know which companies?

Thanks

Reply 3

mnot

Universities Forum Helper

20

Original post by grey_boredom

I have been told that most engineers just use CAD for almost everything, so I am just curious which engineers, jobs, companies or sectors in the industry apply their university-level knowledge in their day-to-day activities.

Incorrect, design engineers use just CAD, most engineers use a far more diverse array of tools, especially engineers involved with product innovation and r&d.

Most engineers I know conduct analysis using specific analytical software (like CFD/computational fluid dynamics) or experimental tools or use advanced programming tools (using tools like matlab, python, excel) or often combining tools together.

(edited 3 months ago)

Original post by grey_boredom

I have been told that most engineers just use CAD for almost everything, so I am just curious which engineers, jobs, companies or sectors in the industry apply their university-level knowledge in their day-to-day activities.

I'm not sure about the English education system but the Scottish one doesn't really cover anything related to engineering at school during highers, so most engineers will likely use at least some concepts taught in university very regularly. If you mean more advanced or mathematically challenging knowledge or material, such as, for example, deriving equations or solving differential equations by hand, I'd say that's very rare, and most likely the preserve of analysis engineers or maybe those working in R&D.

Ultimately, few real world mathematical problems you're likely to come across have a closed form, analytical solution available because actual engineered components and systems rarely take the form of the idealised versions in textbooks, so solving them won't be the same. If you need to do some sums, it's often the case that a simple mathematical solution already exists (e.g. equations for pretty much all configurations of loading on beams have probably already been derived so you'll likely use a simple, algebraic equation rather than calculus to derive one yourself), or you have to use empirical formulas, which again are often very simple mathematically, even though they may have lots of numbers and terms in them.

(edited 3 months ago)

Reply 5

_Case

6

Original post by grey_boredom

Do know which companies?

Thanks

Huawei and Airbus come to mind first its a huge list. As stated by the others assuming I've understood what you meant by engineers just doing design. It's not specifically just design at corporate level, engineering is very broad. You can be doing CFD/FEA Analysis, structural analysis, coding controls systems on MATLAB. The list goes on... When you reference university level work there is not usally a solution initally at first thats where the research side comes into play to create a solution for a problem that doesnt exist yet.

(edited 3 months ago)

Which engineers use university-level education regularly?

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