Re: outboard engineer
+1 on #15 about engineering.
My father recruited electrical, mechanical and chemical engineers by the hundreds for work in the electrical generation business. Many of his close friends had their doctorates in Chemical Engineering, and they mostly worked in pollution control. They've been unable to clean up the coal fired steam plants very much, as a real fix is simply not affordable.
Incredible resources were applied to fight the ecologists in case they pulled up another snail darter which could close down a new dam or steam plant project--at a potential loss of $100's of millions. Their mechanical engineers worked in the steam plants--trying to patch together units slated for scrap 50 years ago.
With present politics, they're pushing automobiles to be running on electricity and/or crossovers to meet the proposed 56 mpg requirements. That will put a load on our electrical grid--which is barely able to keep up with current generation demand on these hot Summer days.
In the future, we'll need real Electrical Engineers working in power production and in power construction building new power lines, substations, etc. Unfortunately, so many electrical engineering students end up working in the computer field or in the computer gaming world--businesses that change weekly. So many engineers are so smart, OCD and monomaniacal that they're really unable and unwilling to work in the real world--meeting needs of a changing society.
Like it's said, we have so many mechanical engineers--not all of which have jobs in their chosen fields. We also need engineers to design and build new nuclear plants--as all the original nuclear plant designers have long since retired (and mostly died.) There again, politics have gotten in the way. Our government doesn't push in any direction--no new oil fields, no drilling in northern Alaska, no new nuclear plants and no more oil derricks in the Gulf. Wind generation won't work, despite 10% of U.S. steel production going into windmills and their blades.
And, we need lakes to run our boats on--which are largely coming from the success of our power companies.
