I have a BS and MS in math. Want to become a PEng. in Canada. BEng or MEng? 4

[trueblue221]

I am a math professor from the US. I have a bachelor's and master's in mathematics from a US university. I desire to change careers from a mathematician to an engineer (mechanical engineering). I am immigrating to Canada and would like to get an engineering degree at a Canadian university, and later get work and a PEng license in BC.

I would like to make the most efficient use of my time and money. Is it necessary to go back and get another bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, or could I just get a master's degree in mechanical engineering? And if a master's, should I get a MEng or a MAsc? I want to take the best path to a job and later a PEng in Canada.

(Please note that I have asked a couple of Canadian universities and they said that I would qualify for admission to either program even though I don't have a bachelor's in mech eng.)

 

[Ron]

Look at your end game.....licensing. Acceptance into a university program means little if you don't qualify for licensing at the end. Contact the provincial board of engineers and see if your conditions meet their requirements for licensing. In the US it would likely not satisfy licensing requirements, but Canada has a different licensing structure.

 

[moltenmetal]

B.A.Sc., not B.Eng., and definitely not a useless coursework M. Eng. You can't paste a M.Eng. on top of a non-engineering undergrad degree and expect to be treated as if you were an engineer- you'll be missing a huge amount of fundamentals even IF you can challenge or meet the course requirements for acceptance into the M.Eng.

 

[zelgar]

In the US you'd need to see if the engineering program is ABET accreted in order to be able to take the P.E. exam (depending on the State). You may find out that only BS degrees are ABET accreted, so getting a MS degree without a BS in engineering wouldn't allow you to practice engineering.

 

[moltenmetal]

You'll find that the provincial licensure bodies feel the same way that I do about the useless M.Eng. as a veneer.

 

[miningman]

This might be a lot more time consuming than you presently believe. You identify that BC is your eventual target province. So you really need to talk to APEGBC first ,. If you dont like what they say , talk to the other provincial Engineering associations . Once you get registered in one province, transferring is easy. Dont assume that US based education wil automatically be accepted up here. As part of your registration process , you will likely have to take between 2 and 10 confirmatory exams to confirm the academic quality of your education. I only had to take 2 , but they werent a cake walk. Once you have managed to get a job in Canada , you have to work as an EIT, under the direction f a P.Eng for 3 years before you can apply for your P.Eng. This is a 5-6 year process for you.

 

[jayrod12]

Depending on the university and the licensing board up here I believe a math degree would qualify you to take a Masters in engineering and skip the undergrad. Whether that qualifies you to become registered is another thing altogether.

 

[SNORGY]

trueblue221,

These links might be a good place to start...

http://www.apega.ca/apply

https://www.apeg.bc.ca/Become-a-Member

 

[SomptingGuy]

Is there a USA/Canada discrepancy here in what constitues a Bachelor's vs a Master's degree? From what I've read in these places, a US bachelor degree is more of an introduction to engineering, whereas the actual meat is in the follow-up Master's. It sounds (from Molten's comments) that a canadian Bachelor's Engieering degree contains the meat and a Master's would just be cheese on top. So hard to compare same-named qualifications from place to place.

Steve

 

[GregLocock]

As a slight aside I've known a couple of people who had Maths degrees and worked very successfully as mechanical engineers. And on a different tack, we did so much maths at my trade school, in engineering, that it would allow us to skip the first two years of a three year maths degree (reputedly).



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[moltenmetal]

Here, an M.Eng. requires a total of eight (8) grad level courses and a paper.

It would be possible, strategically, to select courses at a large enough university to satisfy this requirement, without actually needing to know much in the fundamentals of any particular engineering discipline.

At my uni, most of the 4th year courses are dual-certified as grad courses- and some of them are very, very easy to pass.

Many take an M.Eng. for that reason- if you go to a large enough school and take long enough to complete the degree such that there's sufficient course selection, you can get through without having to work very hard at all.

The regulatory bodies are onto this. It is a strategy used by foreign-trained engineers to avoid taking the extensive fundamentals exams that are otherwise assigned- or at least, it was a strategy that they used, until the regulatory bodies put an end to it. No matter- you don't need a license to practice here anyway, as an employee engineer anyway.

An engineer repleat with math but without the underlying physics and chemistry and related disciplines in an engineering context, is not really an engineer. I'd be far more satisfied with an engineer who did all those fundamental courses but didn't go beyond high school calculus, honestly. Not that the math courses are all useless- but most of the instructional time IS wasted, trying to get the students to the state of the art of mathematics circa the year 1700 or so.

I too have met plenty of people who function quite well in a limited engineering practice without a complete education in engineering fundamentals. Some people learn extremely well on the job. But without the grounding in fundamentals, it's tough for me to consider them on par with a graduate of an undergrad engineering program who has gained a similar number of years on the job.

 

[GregLocock]

I agree. I doubt either would have been able to walk into a /typical/ mechanical engineering job, but there's niches. As to the amount of formal maths in an engineering course, it is absurd and counter-productive. Most of the fancy analysis of structures (typically the worst over-uses of maths) can be replaced by more approximate methods in the real world. As the great JE Gordon put it (more or less) -the worst thing that ever happened to structural analysis was when it became a parlour game for 18th century mathematicians.

I work in a very mathematical field, yet most of what can be usefully done could be done with (UK) high school maths and amazingly fast computers. The major exceptions for me are statistics (another parlour game- based on one good piece of maths and a lot of crossed fingers, which I suspect can be entirely replaced by Monte Carlo simulations), and Fourier analysis, to which I know of no simpler alternative.



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[rotw]

Worked as mechanical engineer. Never used any math since graduation.
At most I used linear / polynomial interpolation but still with Excel and rules of thumb. At the end I am wondering what use I really made of the university program. Diploma to me was just an entry ticket and had nothing to do with the show itself. Some other people may relate to this or just tell us what their experience is, i.e. how far they did use the tools and math gained at school in order to do the real stuffs?

 

[SomptingGuy]

Other large and important areas of maths that weren't covered at high school for us were linear algebra and partial derivatives (partial differential equations). These were totally new topics at university and have played a large part in my daily life ever since.

Steve

 

[KENAT]

Ah Greg, glad I'm not the only one still stuck on the trade school comments.

I barely did any new maths in my first year at university having done Maths & Further Maths (Pure & Applied) at high school/A-level, I think it was my highest graded subject and I spent almost no time on it expect maybe matrices. Made up for it a bit in the second year and think we'd covered Div, Grad, Curl and all that before the folks on pure math degrees.

Taking advanced aerodynamics - or could have been considered as all the fancy math approximations/algorithms of Navier Stokes equations that don't quite work in practice - then built upon my increasingly jelly like mathematics foundation.

Being on top of the math should really help you so long as you're not one of the rare folks that's a whiz at equations etc., but can't correlate equations to real world situations.

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[EDub24]

I agree, check the licensing board. I will say that having an engineering degree is NOT required to get a PE license here in the US (at least in California). With that said it is difficult to get a license without a degree. You first have to have an Engineer-In-Training license which requires 3 years of engineering coursework OR 3 years of engineering work experience. Not having an EIT license will make it difficult to find a job but not impossible. My brother has a BS in Physics and he made a career change to a Civil Engineer. He sucked it up for a few years of being underpaid before he qualified to take the EIT exam and passed. To qualify for the PE exam you have to have 6 years of work experience if you don't have an engineering degree. Graduate coursework in an ABET accredited engineering program can account for 5 of the 6 years of work experience for the PE exam regardless of the undergraduate degree. My brother just recently passed the PE exam and is now a fully licensed Civil Engineer. Once again this is for California only, other states/countries might be different so check with the jurisdiction in charge.

 

[IRstuff]

"US bachelor degree is more of an introduction to engineering"

Not necessarily. Junior and senior year are supposed to have upper division courses that are same as the one the MS candidates take. A typical MSEE is a 1-yr program, which contains classes that aren't part of the typical BSEE course load, since the BSEE program at my school included a Technical Seminar Presentation and Written Technical Communication as well as project/thesis and humanities classes

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[TLHS]

The requirements for BC are below:

https://www.apeg.bc.ca/Become-a-Mem...icence/Engineer-First-Time-Applying-in-Canada

Regardless of the requirements for licensing, I would say you should really aim for a bachelors. It's where they teach you the fundamentals of engineering. I have no idea how you'd get real value from a masters without the fundamentals of things like statics, dynamics, material science, thermodynamics and similar things. If you did manage to select a path through a masters that you could succeed at, you'd either be doing a significant amount of study outside of the degree, to the point where you'd be learning the bachelor's material anyway, or you'd graduate without the necessary breadth of knowledge to actually function as an engineer.

Talk to the local universities. You might be able to reduce the number of courses you need to take significantly, given your existing qualifications. Hopefully, you could talk yourself out of the first year general courses and all of the math.

I feel like the people who are saying that they don't use their bachelor's degree are underselling the amount of context and understanding of fundamental information they got out of it.

Do you know what you want to do as a mechanical engineer?

 

[workForFood]

If a US engineering BS is just an intro compared to other countries, what do Canadian or UK students learn that we don't? The shoddy programs probably miss some stuff, but I feel like anything beyond my undergrad would be firmly in the subject specialist territory (AKA what a Masters or PhD is for), whether on the math/physics/cs/etc side or serious engineering side. Do you guys take differential equations in high school or nonlinear FEA senior year or something?

 

[KENAT]

"Do you guys take differential equations in high school ... something?"

Yes, junior year as I recall - at least that's when we started the topic.

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