Choose your Engineering Discipline carefully (Part 1): Smart Career Tips for Prospective Engineers!
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General Engineering might be an option available to you but about 98% engineering aspirants around the world opt for a particular engineering discipline that can give them leverage in their chosen industry or sector. Big Four Engineering Disciplines that are most popular today are: 
Quite a broad discipline, Civil Engineering basically focuses on infrastructure, buildings, structures, and public works. The potential in this field is virtually unlimited. The key specializations in Civil Engineering that you can opt for are:
1. Construction Management: Construction Management focuses on engineering and management skills needed to complete construction projects, envisioned by architects and other engineers, successfully with optimized use of time, money, and resources, and ensure compliance to all specified regulations.
2. Environmental Engineering: Also a popular specialization under Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering is all about sustainability of natural resources of our planet and preserving and protecting our environment. Sub-specializations of Environmental Engineering include:
a) Air Pollution Control
b) Water Resources Engineering, which focuses on raw water supply, optimizing and monitoring use of water, irrigation, flood control and hydroelectric power plants
c) Sanitary Engineering, which specializes in wastewater treatment as well treatment of municipal and industrial water
d) Recycling and Solid Waste Disposal
e) Hazardous Waste Treatment and Disposal
f) Natural Systems Modeling
3. Geotechnical Engineering: Geotechnical Engineering focuses on soil and rock analysis and offering engineering solutions to projects like laying foundations of buildings, making earthen structures, building roads, dams, underground facilities and tunnels etc.
4. Structural Engineering: Structural Designing focuses on designing and building anything that is stationary - from buildings to dams to bridges.
5. Surveying: Surveying is about measuring earth's surface or making a map for designing and construction projects as well as legally defining properties of individual owners.
6. Transportation Engineering: If Structural Engineering teaches one to build roads, Transportation Engineering teaches them how to design them. All types of transportation systems and facilities - from streets and highways to airports, railroads and ports - are designed by Transportation Engineers.
Ever since, Man first used lever to push up large rocks and invented wheels, Mechanical Engineering has evolved into one of the other broadest Engineering Disciplines along with Civil Engineering. In fact, at many places it does overlap with Civil, Chemical and Electrical Engineering. Machines and devices, structures and mechanical systems, and systems to convert energy into required form are all bestowed by Mechanical Engineering. Mechanical Engineers may choose to further specialize in:
1. Solid Mechanics: Engineering specialists in Solid Mechanics study behaviour of solids when subjected to stress, vibrations, pressure or load and vibrations and use it to design and manufacture different structures or machines for related uses.
2. Fluid Mechanics: Engineering specialists in Fluid Mechanics study behaviour of liquids and gases and design and develop machinery and systems that use it to perform specific functions such as fans, pumps, piping systems and turbines.
3. Thermodynamics: Engineering specialists in Thermodynamics are supposed to be experts in energy conversion devices and systems. It is Thermodynamics that is needed for Air Conditioning systems and heating devices as well as run engines and even power plants.
4. Mechanical Design: Last but not the least, Mechanical Design is the field that lay people know as Mechanical Engineering, i.e., it is about designing mechanical concepts based systems, machines, devices and products.
Electrical Engineering is quite a broad discipline and all electronic devices or electrical systems fall under this category. Electrical Engineers can specialize in many of the popular upcoming fields such as:
1. Communications: Communications Engineering concerns itself with transmitting andprocessing information via wires, cables, radio, satellites, and fiber optics.
2. Computer Engineering: This is such a broad discipline in itself these days that we have chosen it as one of the Big Four Engineering Disciplines and have covered it in detail below.
3. Digital Systems: Digital Systems Engineering is also a sub-specialization of Communications but it concerns itself only with digital-based communication and control systems.
4. Electric Power: For those who want to work in power plants, Electric Power is the engineering discipline to go for where students study about generating, transmitting, and distributing electric power.
5. Electronics: This engineering discipline studies how to produce, detect and control electrical signals in different devices and circuits for various applications.
6. Robotics and Control Systems: Quite fascinating and very useful in different industries, Robotics and Control Systems concerns itself with making machines and systems that can perform or monitor various automated processes by minimizing human intervention, saving time and money, and minimizing aberrations.
Also a sub-discipline of Electrical Engineering as well as Computer Science, Computer Engineering is a very vast field and concerns itself with integrating hardware and software components to design sophisticate computer systems. They key areas in which Computer Engineers can specialize are:
1. Artificial Intelligence: One of the most highlighted engineering discipline in science-fiction movies, Artificial Intelligence concerns itself with simulating human intelligence, learning and reasoning abilities in systems and machines.
2. Computer Architecture: Computer Architecture is about combining electronic or optical components to build powerful computing systems or design new instruction sets for computers.
3. Computer Design and Engineering: If you are interested in microchips, computer circuits and other electronic computer components, Computer Design and Engineering is for you.
4. Computer Theory: Focusing on various fundamentals and theories on how computers solve problems and how human intelligence can be simulated, Computer Theory is a support function for other areas of computer engineering.
5. Information Technology: A very popular discipline these days, IT is about developing and managing information systems to support a business or an organization.
6. Operating Systems and Networks: This engineering discipline concerns itself with developing language of computers so that they interact with each other.
7. Robotics: Robotics, under Computer Engineering, is specifically about designing computer-controlled robots that can perform repetitive industrial tasks.
8. Software Applications: It is Software Application that enables us to use computer for a specific area, such as in the field of education or medicine. These applications enable us to work in the language we understand.
9. Software Engineering: Generating computer programs to process logic and arithmetic queries is the expertise of a Software Engineer.
IT and Software Engineering are the two most popular Computer Engineering disciplines these days.
Read about ‘Choose your Engineering Discipline carefully (Part 2): Other Major Engineering Disciplines' here.
Source: Ruchi Shrimali (Shiksha Team)
