 Is a marine engineering major or a marine engineering degree worth it? That's what we're going to be talking about today and we are going to jump right into it. What exactly is marine engineering? Marine engineering is all about researching, designing, constructing, and developing anything that floats in the ocean, so any type of marine vessel. This is going to include ships and submarines and any sort of parts that go inside of them. This is going to be very similar to maritime engineering or naval architecture. There's going to be a lot of engineering of course but you're going to have mathematics, science, and a good amount of drafting as well. Now at this degree you could become a marine engineer of course and naval architect. You could also work on all kinds of different shore side supervisory or managerial positions. In a lot of these careers you would of course be testing the naval equipment making sure the components are working and that they're not going to cause the ship to sink in the middle of the ocean. There's going to be a lot of budgeting preparing contracts, scheduling ships coming in and going out of different ports. There's a lot of routine maintenance that has to be done with ships and it has to be done in a timely manner so you're going to be working with a lot of contractors and making sure everything is scheduled properly. Now whenever I talk about these degrees I like to go over four different sections and the first one we're going to be talking about is going to be earning potential or salary. Now when you graduate with this degree according to pay scale you're going to make around $74,000 a year starting out and $125,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare this to a really high paying degree and a very low paying one and you'll see that it is on the higher side. If you become a marine engineer or a naval architect you'll expect to make around $92,000 a year. If you look at how much they make over a lifetime you'll see the engineering degrees in general make about 3.5 million which is the most out of all different majors. Now this is according to the latest census and so this data is now and then maybe 40 years back or so so this might not necessarily be true 40 years into the future. But overall without a doubt this is a very high paying degree. I'm going to give this one a 9 out of 10 when it comes to salary. Next on the list we're going to be talking about satisfaction and I divide this one into job satisfaction as well as meaning. Now meaning is how much you think your career positively impacts the world and according to pay scale this one has a 64% and again you can compare this to one that has a very high meaning score and one that has a low meaning score and you'll see that it is on the higher side. Now when you look at meaning score with a specific career of marine engineer you'll see that it's around 53% which again is above average slightly and then when you look at job satisfaction you'll see that it's 75% which is definitely above average and again you compare it to one that's really good and one that's bad. So if you're someone who really loves ships, sailing, being out on the ocean, all that sort of thing this can be a really good one for you. You're probably going to enjoy your job and it's going to have a lot of meaning for you as well. Now when it comes to job satisfaction versus meaning and which one's more important that's going to be different from person to person. In my experience job satisfaction is better on a short-term basis but meaning might be more important in the long run. Now when it comes to how much people regret their college majors engineering is the third least regretted type of college major only around 15% of people regret it and the main reason is because usually if you want to get some of those really high up their jobs right off the bat you're going to have to get an advanced degree so probably a master's. Now I always like to mention here that sometimes it has more to do with the industry you're in the company you work for the people you work with your location etc in terms of how much you enjoy doing your job as well as meaning sometimes even and so keep that in mind this is extremely subjective for one person it could be one out of ten for another person it could be ten out of ten. I'll say this one is kind of similar to aerospace engineering in that if you're someone who really loves airplanes you know aerospace engineering might be great for you if you're someone who really loves boats being out on the ocean submarines if that's you know something that you're really passionate about this could be a great direction for you to go. So with that being said I'm going to go ahead and give this one an 8.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next on the list we're going to be talking about demand maybe the most important one because at the end of the day when it comes to careers it's all about supply and demand. Now with this one if you want to become a marine engineer or a naval architect unfortunately I have some bad news for you right now there's only around 11,800 jobs available and it's growing at 1% over the next 10 years so that means only another 200 jobs are going to pop up or be created over the next 10 years which is not great but with that being said there's not that many people graduating with this degree it's a relatively rare major so that is a plus side and on top of that there are a lot of other different career paths you could end up going down some of them loosely have something to do with marine engineering like you might be working on a shore you know managing things making sure the correct repairs are done to the ship correct upkeep for instance and then some career paths you can go down that pretty much don't have anything to do with marine engineering but just the fact that your engineering degree is so well respected will get you into the door. Now of course 2020 is throwing the stats off quite a bit but with that being said 2018 for instance STEM degrees were some of the least likely ones to have people who are unemployed but with that being said STEM degrees are known for being pretty good when it comes to unemployment most people who get STEM degrees end up getting a job and engineering degrees are going to be one of the better STEM degrees overall so you likely as long as you do your due diligence will not find yourself jobless. Now with that being said when you look up the term marine engineering degree on monster.com only around 816 job postings pop up that have that as a keyword in their description. You can compare that to one with a ton of demand like computer science or one that doesn't have much demand at all like anthropology and you'll see that it's definitely on the lower side there's not a lot of employers out there that are looking for people who have marine engineering degrees this is a pretty specific degree and what I mean by that is it'll teach you skills that are extremely specific and that might pigeonhole you just a little bit but the good thing is that engineering degrees tend to be relatively well respected overall and so even if you don't end up working as a naval architect or a marine engineer people will likely hire you for jobs that might even be totally unrelated when you look at the degrees that are in demand by the biggest companies out there engineering almost always comes in as number one or number two even when companies aren't specifically looking for people who graduate with this major when they see that you have a marine engineering degree they're probably going to think that you're very smart and very hardworking and so they'll give you a chance but overall I have to be honest with you guys when it comes to demand it's not going to be one of the better engineering degrees out there it does kind of pigeonhole you a little bit so I'm going to give this one a seven out of ten next we're going to be talking about x factors and this is anything that I didn't mention before that I think is still important so first thing I want to talk about is I'm going to go back to the whole how much money you make over a lifetime thing and like I said before engineering degrees will make around 3.5 million over a lifetime but it gets even deeper than that you can make good money as an engineer pretty much no matter what career path you end up going down so if you look a little further down the list for instance if you end up going into arts and media you still make around three million dollars over a lifetime even though most people make less than average and you see this for pretty much every career you end up going into engineers tend to do very well or could be the practical problem solving skills that you learn as an engineer tend to transfer over to just about anything you end up doing now when it comes to skills zip recruiter doesn't have a specific skill of marine engineering the closest one would be mechanical engineering and that has a 77 out of 100 and again you can look at a really good one and a really bad one and you'll see that it's definitely on the good side of things additionally this is one of those degrees that is not very likely to be automated so according to willrobotstakemyjob.com there's only around a 1% chance that a marine engineer or naval architect job is going to be automated same thing goes without sourcing in my opinion a lot of the time with engineering type jobs you do need to be there in person you need to be able to touch things talk to people who are there you have that technical expertise but you also have a deeper understanding so you're almost like the person who is the middleman between a scientist and a tech person right so the technician that goes in and fixes stuff and a scientist engineers almost have both of those people's skills and then you add a little bit of practical creativity in there because a lot of the time engineers will imagine something in their head and then they have the skills to make that become a reality you know right in front of you now another thing I'll mention about engineering is it is one of the degrees that create the most millionaires and I believe the reason for that besides the fact that it pays really well is because of the fact that it teaches you practical problem solving and it leads a lot of people to become entrepreneurs later on in life there's pretty much no ceiling on how much you can make as an entrepreneur you can scale your business as high as you want to and so they're more likely to become millionaires of course I think that's the main reason but you know the high salary doesn't hurt either but with that being said I always like to make sure to tell you guys that engineering is very very tough okay I was in a scholarship hall with around 50 guys I think maybe five to ten of them were engineers and you know another 10 of them were business majors the business majors had a lot of fun okay they were partying all the time they're having lots of fun the engineers did not have so much fun I'm just telling you that right now and then I was somewhere in the middle with my science classes engineering always ranks as one of the most difficult majors it has one of the highest dropout rates and not just because people decide that they don't like to do it like a lot of the other majors there's a high dropout rate because people literally can't do the classes like they they drop out of the classes because they're getting f's so with that being said when it comes to x factors I am going to give this one an 8.5 out of 10 so some of the pros here the salary projection is great I mean you're going to make quite a bit of money if you're able to get a job this is an ocean related career so if you're someone who likes being around the ocean and you know likes being on ships maybe you're passionate about sailing something along those lines it could be great for you there are a lot of offshore and shoreside jobs for people who graduate with this one a lot of those offshore jobs tend to be really well paying so for instance if you work on an oil rig some of the cons here are that it's a very rare degree okay very rare I think less than a thousand people graduate with this one every year and so not that many schools are going to offer it some of the best jobs are going to require more studying and experience maybe a master's degree for instance and there aren't that many job openings employers are not out there actively looking for someone who graduated within a marine engineering degree however if they see that you got this degree it's going to be well respected so you're probably going to be able to get hired so overall here the score is going to be 8.25 out of 10 this is a good one for the right person now if you are the random miscellaneous things I didn't mention here a lot of the time if you are a marine engineer that's on the ship itself it's going to be kind of like one of those sci-fi movies where you're the engineer on the ship where basically the engineer for whatever reason is a mechanic like you're going to be actually working on the ship while you're on it there's a lot of engineering jobs out there that are kind of desk jobs you're not necessarily touching things but you'll likely be very active as a marine engineer if you're working on a ship or maybe on a submarine so it's a lot more hands-on than a lot of other types of engineering degrees and on top of that if you are working on a ship that means you're going to be away from families you'll probably be working during the holidays etc now with that being said there's a lot of onshore jobs as well where you'd be working at some kind of dock behind a desk and you could argue that many of these jobs could be done by someone who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree so that's kind of a downside a little bit of a red flag depending on what career going for there's probably also going to be some pretty extensive licensing and certification requirements but yeah if you'd like more help doing research and you don't want to wait around for me to put out a video go ahead and check out my college degree ranker down in the description below it is in my opinion the best college degree resource that you will have when you're doing you know research on which degree that you want to go for if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil youtube algorithm hit that subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments 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