like a ph.D level? just curious.
like a ph.D level? just curious.
No.
I recently worked with a guy who was a tremendous engineer and only had a business degree, and only because Texas Instruments forced him to go to school. I was constantly amazed at what he could do with electronics.
Similarly my father, before he retired, was widely respected as one of the top engineers in his company and was offered a vice-president position in a major defense company (he declined). He had only 2 years of college (in chemical engineering) and made his way up through the ranks, starting in the USAF, then working as a technician and eventually retired as a chief engineer after taking a demotion from program management so he could get away from paperwork and back to engineering.
My uncle, who has a 4 year degree, owns a company manufacturing specialty microwave products. He makes a ton of cash and swears that the longest week he has worked was 48 hours (if you knew him you would believe him since he enjoys his leisure time).
In constrast, I have a 4 year degree, have done some masters level work, and have 14 years experience working for a major defense company. While I have had a degree of success and am considered to be "smart" by my managers, I don't have 1/100th the engineering smarts of my father, uncle, or my colleague which I described.
If you want to be a brilliant engineer, you have to have a passion for it and practice it all the time. It is just like anything else (running for instance), the more time you put into it the better you get.
I would say being creative and passionate about the subject matter is far more important than being "brilliant" (meaning possessing of a extra-ordinary level of inate intellegence). You have to be reasonably sharp, but once you hit a certain point in terms of IQ I think tenacity and curiousity (which fuel passion and creativity) become far better predictors of success.
That said, some engineering fields have erected significant institutional barriers to entry in an effort to keep wages inline with inflation (blame globalization). Make sure you understand the education, & experience requirements of your chosen field because, unfortunately, the days of working your way up from the mailroom are coming to an end in many of the engineering disciplines. A degree can be worthless when it comes to making you a better engineer, but you may need that piece of paper to be allowed at the table.