Mechanical Engineering Overview - Overview PDF - PowerPoint - Podcast

	MS, Electrical Engineering, University of Texas BS, Electrical Engineering, University of Texas
	Training Manager, developing and delivering training programs.
	Joe has seen many changes in a 30-year career -- today's engineer needs to be flexible and able to communicate effectively. His company is like many others -- fewer levels of management, more responsibility at the team level, and a need for engineers who do different kinds of work. Joe's career is an example of on-the-job continuing education, experience and interdisciplinary flexibility. Until ASME interviewed him for this CD/ROM, his current supervisor boss was unaware that he his formal education was in electrical engineering.
	"In the past, there were groups of specialists that were very narrowly focused, and they had a supervisor, and there were several supervisors at that level, and these specialty groups were organized into a somewhat more general group, and so on. Today, though, there tends to be a supervisor that has many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of work, in the same group."

"We're organized differently, today, than we used to be. We have fewer levels of management. Which means that there are more different kinds of work going on in each group. Today, though, there tends to be a supervisor that has many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of work, in the same group. But the reality of that is that each person has more different kinds of work going on around him."

"I'm out of town, visiting the people in the divisions, pretty frequently. I might be out to a drilling rig, for a day or two, from time to time. So, lots of variation. No one day is ever the same as another."

Q: You've had a thirty-one-year stint? How did you look at our career, in terms of job security, back then?
Magee: I really hadn't given it a lot of thought. The paradigm, in those days, was that you went to work for a big company, and stayed there all of your career, unless something happened to change your mind. It was a totally different paradigm from the one of today, where people expect to change jobs, several times, in their career. So, without giving it a lot of thought, my basic plan was to stay for my whole career, unless something unexpected happened.

Q: And how many more working years do you anticipate?
Magee: Well, I would really like to stay seven more years. I would be sixty then. That would be full retirement. And I would be very happy if I can have seven more years of interesting, challenging work, so that it doesn't become a process of hanging on to the end. That's really what I'd like to do.

Q: Are you fairly confident that you will have those seven years, here at Shell?
Magee: I'm pretty confident. As much as anyone can be, these days. The company is doing well, right now. I'm in Drilling Operations; it's my area. And we have a lot of drilling activity, and the forecast is for there to continue to be a lot of drilling activity. So, I think that there should be a place for me that I can contribute, for six or seven more years. Yes.

Q: Tell me, what is your degreed area?
Magee: I have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, from the University of Texas, which I got in 1964. I have a master's degree in electrical engineering, also from the University of Texas. I got that in 1965.

Q: And, yet, I hear that a lot of the things that you do involve work as a mechanical engineer.
Magee: That's very true. That's very true. And when I first went to work for the company, I had a little bit of anxiety about that, that I was somehow wasting some of the things I learned in electrical engineering, and so on. And, over the years, I've decided that that really was a kind of an unfounded worry. Because, really, the engineering method, engineering thinking, quantitative problem-solving, and so on, is the same. In different engineering specialties. Shell has always had people with different degree backgrounds doing similar jobs, or the same job. In the job I was in, there were others who had mechanical engineering degrees; others with civil engineering degrees. Others with electrical engineering. So, although it was a real worry for me, right at first, it did not turn out to be a problem. One thing that did help me was, some of the electives that I took outside my degree area have turned out to be some of the most valuable courses I took in college. I took courses in fluid mechanics. And we had a course in machine design. We had a course in strength of materials. A course in engineering economy. Present-value calculations. Some of those were the most valuable single courses I took, looking back on it.

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