Features

By participating in a high school engineering program, students can build a solid foundation in STEM, form professional networks, and gain a clearer sense of their academic and career paths.

Many students take on debt to finance their education. The current US student loan debt is an astounding $1.863 trillion (including federal and private loans). Unsurprisingly, student loan debt is the second-largest source of debt after mortgages. Full or partial scholarships offer some relief to students seeking higher education in the United States.

Data centers power everything from streaming video to AI chatbots, and the industry building and running them cannot hire fast enough. AFCOM’s 2025 State of the Data Center Report surveyed data center managers and found 58 percent named multiskilled data center operators their top area of growth, with half predicting rising demand for data center engineers specifically.

Professional licensure is a valuable asset, particularly for engineers who want to work in public safety, government projects, consultation services, or management and leadership positions.

Estimates project a need for as many as 50,000 new workers across the semiconductor sector to meet the demand the CHIPS Act is building toward. But the pipeline to fill those roles is still taking shape. “If you really understood where all the different places are that you bump into semiconductors in a given day, you’d be amazed,” says Dr. Janes. “Your vehicles already have hundreds of chips in them. It’s kind of a smart-everything environment right now.”

Materials engineers study, design, and manipulate the properties of materials. Their work can enable entirely new products, or help to improve existing ones. This is a deeply multidisciplinary field, bringing together principles of physics, chemistry, and engineering. And several of the research challenges it’s facing are related to the most pressing challenges in the world.

Understanding the biochemistry of how a neuron fires is one kind of problem. Understanding what the pattern of firing across thousands of neurons actually means, what movement it encodes, what intention it represents, and how signals in one part of the brain relate to signals in another, is a different kind of problem entirely.

So when is all this going to happen? When will quantum make its bold leap into commercial applications? It depends on who you ask and it depends on the conditions in which you ask. Like a quantum particle, the answer can appear to be in multiple states at once until it’s finally measured.

Boosted by advances in generative design and the optimization power of digital twins, mechanical engineers have a vital role to play in building a more sustainable world.

For most engineering students, the path after graduation looks pretty clear. Land a job at a firm, put your technical skills to work, and build a career from there. But a growing number of engineering grads are eyeing a different path, one that trades a predictable salary for the uncertainty and possibility of building something of their own.