@oyb
see me see wahala o. who is in charge of constructions, a doctor?
if a building is to be collapsed,who undertakes dat duty, a lawyer?
it just seems u passed thru skool when u don't even know engineers are in charge of construction and even demolition of buildings. oyb, U see say u be the olodo, which skool u go self??

engineering cannot be compared with medicine

I think the topic should be something like this
"Aviation(Pilots/Aircraft Engrs) and Medicine (Doctors)- which is more challenging"

Hw can u compare med nd engineering. Av u seen med students read, can u compare it with hw eng students. Med students in my skul write 4 m.b exams, if u fail d courses, dey remove u frm med skul, eng students enjoy, do u av any idea hw many muscles are in d body nd deir origin, insertions, blood nd nerve supply, functions. Do u know a med students must know all of histology, neuroscience, neuroanatomy, embryology, anatomy-muscles,viscera, physiology-deals wit functions, a bit of pharmacology, biochemistry. All this are done under 18 months b4 writin deir 1st mb exams, den pathology-deals wit pathways of diseases, pharmacology_deals wit all drugs nd deir history, minor surgery in yr 4 alone, paediatrics nd ob & gyn in yr5, surgery nd community service in yr6. All of dis is done in med skul, den practice dt drains u. Guy pls dnt compare med students nd med students, if u r good at maths nd physics u will do well at eng. bt bein good at biology nd chem does nt guarantee u will make it in med school.

NO COURSE IS CHALLENGING WE CONSIDER ONLY THE VOLUME OF COURSE OUTLINE OF THE COURSE !

Medicine on its own is not challenging at all. It just that the course outline is too much.
What is the course outline ? : THE HUMAN BODY - IS THE MOST COMPLICATED THING ON EARTH. GOD HIMSELF SAW IT AND MADE IT THE LAST IN CREATION. DO U KNOW THE NUMBER OF NERVES IN THE BODY, THE MEDICAL STUDENT IS EXPECTED TO KNOW IT. AND MANY MORE.

MORE OVER, NOTE THIS STATEMENT:
BEING INTELLIGENT DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU CAN DO MEDICINE
DOING MEDICINE DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THAT ENGINEERING STUDENT;
BUT IT ALL DEPEND ON THE
LOVE FOR THE COURSE IN QUESTION.

FOR ME DOING ANY COURSE (EVEN THE MOST SO CALLED SIMPLEST COURSE) THAT IS NOT MATHEMATICALLY INCLINED IS NOT GOOD FOR ME WHEREAS SOME PEOPLE TELL U THAT ANY THING THAT HAS TO DO WITH MATHEMATIC IS AN ENEMY TO THEM. U SEE !

THESE TWO COURSES ARE NOT TO BE COMPARED BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT IN THE SAME CLASS. I REST MY CASE HERE.

in US , its worse, you spend 3-4 years in college as an engineer

who told you the average engineer in the US finishes in 3-4 yrs.  it takes 4.5 to 6years for most.

I would say Engineering but am obviously biased.

As an example, a friend who was so mathematical inclined in his academic pursuits, had A's in almost all his science and engineering courses, but had back logs in the biological and social sciences and the humanities.

No disrespect to anybody but aren't the social sciences like Sociology and Psychology easy?

TPIA - the graduation rates for colleges of Engineering are pretty low, most people by their first or 2nd year have already switched to finance,accounting or business administration. Most colleges of Engineering in the US graduate at the most 40% of their incoming freshmen students.

Both PROFESSIONAL courses are equally challenging

bawomolo:

who told you the average engineer in the US finishes in 3-4 yrs.  it takes 4.5 to 6years for most.

I would say Engineering but am obviously biased.

ouch.

bawomolo:

who told you the average engineer in the US finishes in 3-4 yrs.  it takes 4.5 to 6years for most.

I would say Engineering but am obviously biased.

talk true; if engineering hard like that you won't be able to spend so much time on NL

oyb:

talk true; if engineering hard like that you won't be able to spend so much time on NL

I plead the fifth

chyk91:

Hw can u compare med nd engineering. Av u seen med students read, can u compare it with hw eng students. Med students in my skul write 4 m.b exams, if u fail d courses, dey remove u frm med skul, eng students enjoy, do u av any idea hw many muscles are in d body nd deir origin, insertions, blood nd nerve supply, functions. Do u know a med students must know all of histology, neuroscience, neuroanatomy, embryology, anatomy-muscles,viscera, physiology-deals wit functions, a bit of pharmacology, biochemistry. All this are done under 18 months b4 writin deir 1st mb exams, den pathology-deals wit pathways of diseases, pharmacology_deals wit all drugs nd deir history, minor surgery in yr 4 alone, paediatrics nd ob & gyn in yr5, surgery nd community service in yr6. All of dis is done in med skul, den practice dt drains u. Guy pls dnt compare med students nd med students, if u r good at maths nd physics u will do well at eng. bt bein good at biology nd chem does nt guarantee u will make it in med school.

I have to agree there. Moreso the lifetime career demands are a lot more steep for doctors than for engineers.
You see a 5-year-experience engineer already in a management position, and managing large volume projects. However, for doctors in most countries 5 years means you may just be rounding up your residency, and preparing for a career in your field of specialisation.
In all other professions, engineering included, the higher you go, the lighter your load. After a number of years you move into management, and the skill set is quite different. Medicine however presents the inverse as the case. The higher you go, and the more qualified you become, the heavier your workload. That is why you see senior consultant surgeons (literally) handling the the most complex surgeries, working longer hours than the more junior guys, and usually combining teaching with research and general surgical practice. Unless you happen to work in an academic or research institution, that rarely happens in Engineering. Most of the time, the tracks are distinct. You are either in practice, doing research, or teaching.

Thats why I said the only thing that can be compared to Medicine is "flying"/piloting chikena

Good to see the likes of Eyohimself, bawomolo and oyb contributing here.

Engineering and medicine are both challenging, albeit in different ways. Medicine is more regimented - you do as you've been taught, not much room for innovation. It's the nature of the field. The fear of "killing the patient" will keep one constantly in check. You are never encouraged to think outside the proverbial box, you live and die inside the box. You cannot challenge "established" ideas because there exists a hierarchy of expertise based on age, which suggests that the older guys must know more than the younger ones. Medicine does not provide for much intellectual curiosity - you read about the procedure, observe others do it, then do it yourself. Even from it's history, it's always been a form of apprenticeship, you observe the "older expert" do it, and then you can one day be an expert. A calculated field with well-defined steps that dictate ones' advancement. The more docile one is, the more successful that person will be as a doctor. Intellectual rebels, those who like to think outside the box and challenge the status quo will not survive medical school. You have to love being in check and accepting all you're taught as "truth". When you're done with residency and put in like 10 years post-residency in the field, then you can start thinking of challenging so-called "established" ideas.

Whereas in engineering, challenging the status quo is encouraged, and being an intellectual rebel is the dream of most engineers. Knowledge is synthesized, analyzed, toyed with, and exchanged as a commodity of interest. Ideas are routinely tested in all manner of ways, including employing "destructive tests" - tests that guarantee the destruction of the object of interest! There is much freedom to experiment and toy with ideas, so long as they meet the following standards (the four E's): Efficient, Economically-viable, Ethical and Environmentally-friendly. In all these, the eternally beautiful language of mathematics serves as the navigator in the uncharted region of novel ideas!

Honestly, engineering shouldn't be compared to medicine because in the grand arena of knowledge, medicine is a subfield of engineering, even if a less exciting subfield. How is it a subfield? Well, let us establish that both are applied sciences. The fundamental subjects like chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc. are tributaries into the large river of applied sciences. Of the rivers of applied sciences, "engineering" is the main river, and medicine is just one of the distributaries. That is why the term "engineering" can be used in conjunction with almost any other aspect of human endeavor - software engineering, biomedical engineering, business engineering, financial engineering, social engineering, military engineering, food engineering, etc.

The above illustration is made clearer by analyzing the different facets of the enterprise of knowledge that man has steadily established over the course of his existence on this planet. The enterprise of knowledge mimics life in that there are distinct identifiable stages from the "beginning of life" to the "end of life". Let us use what I call "the product model" to examine this. The product passes through the following stages:

* Conception of ideas
* Development of conceived ideas
* Design of the product
* Building/construction of the product
* Maintenance of the product
* Specialized maintenance as the product ages
* Retirement of the product
* Destruction of the product (if need be)

Not all stages are necessary for all products.

While engineering prepares one for all of these stages, medicine prepares one for only the maintenance and maybe retirement aspects. Considering the human body as a product (not designed or built by man, but still a product all the same - created by God or evolved through natural selection), medical doctors are taught a subpart of what engineers are taught - the maintenance of a complex product. This maintenance stage, just one out of several stages, forms the core of the knowledge enterprise in the medical filed. Medical doctors learn what parts make up the product and what they are called (anatomy), the function of these parts of the product (physiology), what and how things could go wrong with the product (pathology), the mechanism behind how the product can be "fixed" by introducing other products (not built/developed by them) into that product (pharmacology), etc.

From the above brief illustration it is abundantly clear that medicine traverses only a subset of the knowledge enterprise that engineering comprises. The pre-product aspects of the enterprise are not included in the curriculum medical doctors pass through.

RichyBlacK:

Good to see the likes of Eyohimself, bawomolo and oyb contributing here.

Engineering and medicine are both challenging, albeit in different ways. Medicine is more regimented - you do as you've been taught, not much room for innovation. It's the nature of the field. The fear of "killing the patient" will keep one constantly in check. You are never encouraged to think outside the proverbial box, you live and die inside the box. You cannot challenge "established" ideas because there exists a hierarchy of expertise based on age, which suggests that the older guys must know more than the younger ones. Medicine does not provide for much intellectual curiosity - you read about the procedure, observe others do it, then do it yourself. Even from it's history, it's always been a form of apprenticeship, you observe the "older expert" do it, and then you can one day be an expert. A calculated field with well-defined steps that dictate ones' advancement. The more docile one is, the more successful that person will be as a doctor. Intellectual rebels, those who like to think outside the box and challenge the status quo will not survive medical school. You have to love being in check and accepting all you're taught as "truth". When you're done with residency and put in like 10 years post-residency in the field, then you can start thinking of challenging so-called "established" ideas.

Whereas in engineering, challenging the status quo is encouraged, and being an intellectual rebel is the dream of most engineers. Knowledge is synthesized, analyzed, toyed with, and exchanged as a commodity of interest. Ideas are routinely tested in all manner of ways, including employing "destructive tests" - tests that guarantee the destruction of the object of interest! There is much freedom to experiment and toy with ideas, so long as they meet the following standards (the four E's): Efficient, Economically-viable, Ethical and Environmentally-friendly. In all these, the eternally beautiful language of mathematics serves as the navigator in the uncharted region of novel ideas!

Honestly, engineering shouldn't be compared to medicine because in the grand arena of knowledge, medicine is a subfield of engineering, even if a less exciting subfield. How is it a subfield? Well, let us establish that both are applied sciences. The fundamental subjects like chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc. are tributaries into the large river of applied sciences. Of the rivers of applied sciences, "engineering" is the main river, and medicine is just one of the distributaries. That is why the term "engineering" can be used in conjunction with almost any other aspect of human endeavor - software engineering, biomedical engineering, business engineering, financial engineering, social engineering, military engineering, food engineering, etc.

The above illustration is made clearer by analyzing the different facets of the enterprise of knowledge that man has steadily established over the course of his existence on this planet. The enterprise of knowledge mimics life in that there are distinct identifiable stages from the "beginning of life" to the "end of life". Let us use what I call "the product model" to examine this. The product passes through the following stages:

* Conception of ideas
* Development of conceived ideas
* Design of the product
* Building/construction of the product
* Maintenance the product
* Specialized maintenance as the product ages
* Retirement of the product
* Destruction of the product (if need be)

Not all stages are necessary for all products.

While engineering prepares one for all of these stages, medicine prepares one for only the maintenance and maybe retirement aspects. Considering the human body as a product (not designed or built by man, but still a product all the same - created by God or evolved through natural selection), medical doctors are taught a subpart of what engineers are taught - the maintenance of a complex product. This maintenance stage, just one out of several stages, forms the core of the knowledge enterprise in the medical filed. Medical doctors learn what parts make up the product and what they are called (anatomy), the function of these parts of the product (physiology), what and how things could go wrong with the product (pathology), the mechanism behind how the product can be "fixed" by introducing other products (not built/developed by them) into that product (pharmacology), etc.

From the above brief illustration it is abundantly clear that medicine traverses only a subset of the knowledge enterprise that engineering comprises. The pre-product aspects of the enterprise are not included in the curriculum medical doctors pass through.

That was some impressive prose.
Personally, I think the human body is far more advanced and more complicated than any machine or product built by man.
I will only ask one question sha. Are you guys even practising engineering at all? I mean, all the engineering grads who are passionately defending the profession on this thread. 'Fess up. How many of you don't work in a bank, consulting, or whatnot?
Cos apart from oil & gas, engineering doesn't pay good wages in this country o.

AjanleKoko:

That was some impressive prose.
Personally, I think the human body is far more advanced and more complicated than any machine or product built by man.
I will only ask one question sha. Are you guys even practising engineering at all? I mean, all the engineering grads who are passionately defending the profession on this thread. 'Fess up. How many of you don't work in a bank, consulting, or whatnot?
Cos apart from oil & gas, engineering doesn't pay good wages in this country o.

AjanleKoko,

Thanks.

My view on engineering and medicine respect no borders. My views are global, to say the least. Agreed, in Nigeria, there is not much engineering going on, mainly because successive Nigerian governments have lacked the vision to invest in engineering education. Unlike medicine that has readily available "products" (humans) to "carry out "maintenance" (the entire gamut of medical practice) on, the man-made machines, devices and systems needed for proper engineering education are not available.

Nigeria is a developing nation and only a well-developed workforce of engineers can guarantee any hope of her becoming a "developed" nation. The nations we refer to as developed or advanced (Germany, US, Japan, France, etc.) all have one thing in common - technological advancement; and of course the profession at the center of technological advancement is engineering!

Let me just add that I respect what medical doctors do and recognize their importance in any society, however, I just don't think comparing engineering and medicine is a fair comparison because engineering is just much broader. A fairer comparison would be medicine and network management (a subbranch of software engineering). I hope the reasons for suggesting that comparison are self-evident!

Wow,

I'm percieving some brilliant minds in here, too late to start serving out individual praises now, gaining some fresh insights here,

I'll just digress briefly to tell Zerocool how most countries grow.

they can't even make an ordinary tv set all dis yrs until LG made d first nigerian tv. it is the foreigners dat run most of the engineering firms & also invent new tins in d country

U dont need to come up with some sub-inventions when u can franchise with brandnames, what u do is make ur country condusive enough for foreign investors(u boost ur economy). It is possible for panasonic, sony, LG and even Nike or addidas to plant their bases in a country, it creates employment opportunities/eliminate delivery issues to sorrounding consumer countries

LG dint just create a Nigerian TV, they strived at making their product more rugged/marketable by taking power fluctuations into consideration.
When ur faced with such erratic power supplies experienced in Nigeria up till this very second u dont scream at the medics, u push the challenge to the very people responsible, Engineers (eliminating political influences, solving that shouldnt be a problem, though a major Engineering challange!).

As much as medicine is challanging, engineering is simply the act of creation. Ofcourse engineering is braoder and deeper and therefore more challenging. In fact medicine is an act of engineering. Peace out

@ Topic: Challenging for whom, if I may ask? Is it for the undergraduate student or for the practitioner?

What are the criteriae for comparison? Did we take into consideration such confounding variables as personality type of the individuals choosing the courses, their socio-economic background etc

I chose ‘Medicine’ because I always wanted to be a Doctor, even before I got into secondary school. I doubt that I’d have been able to become an Engineer, simply because it doesn’t appeal to me as a profession and not because I wouldn’t have been able to handle the mathematics and so on involved. I’m sure any ‘Engineers’ here would probably say the same. Did I find training to become a Doctor challenging? I certainly did, but I can’t say how challenging Engineering is, because I don’t know. Likewise an Engineer can’t come and say how ‘challenging’ medicine is because s/he is not in a position to say. Only somebody who has actually studied both would be able to pass an informed (but still not very accurate) judgement,

Those who think that Medicine is not creative and does not challenge the status quo, with all due respect, don’t know what they are talking about!

I am a Specialist in Psychiatry. In my field we are currently identifying the genes responsible for aggression and love. We have localised the part of the brain that makes us to 'desire' things, to 'hate' things, to 'believe' in things and we are on the verge of bringing forth pharmacological and instrumental interventions that can obliterate memory or awaken lost memories. We have been able to change human personality for decades using surgery and pharmacology, but we have acquired skills to use 'talking' therapy to quieten restless human 'spirits'.

We are mapping the human ‘soul’ and the very nature of man, and we have learnt how to control emotion, will and human intelligence.

Yet Psychiatry is just one of the many subspecialties of Medicine that are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding. And you dare to say that we are not creative?

If you love solving problems Engineering will appeal to you. If you like taking care of people. you are empathic Medicine is a natural choice

all courses are hard and good,eg vet. med. is very difficult,u do anatomy,physiology,biochem of various animals including marine animal,optometry is also very difficult ,it is a combination of anatomy ,physiology,bcm,physics,etc,
medcine is hard too but in naija ,theytry to make people fail,
engenering to me is much more difficult if u think of calculux,schrodinger wave equations,engeinering maths,think of math 101,then u go know better

Without a doubt, ENGINEERING.
More so if it is electrical/electronics/communication.
Computer is a little easier.
Mechanical and Civil seem to be easiest.

Loads of maths that doctors can't think of.
Doctors don't have a developed analytical mind, and after years I'm still undiagnosed because of their lack of critical analysis and too much dependence on hear-say/readings .
We would have found a 1000 times more cures (and the docs be amazed), than book reading and memorizing people.
Now I know tons of medics, and I'm doing a research where they are a part of it , so I know the difference.

There are however some smart people out there. But all equipments and imaging were done by engineers, all chemistry done by chemists, doctors just do such research as bring in 100 people and summarize their findings.

^^^
just to add control system design caculaions to that mix.
wow i still can't blv i actually survived 'em calculations. lol

jay bee:

^^^
just to add control system design caculaions to that mix.
wow i still can't blv i actually survived 'em calculations. lol

haba control systems design is not that hard now,

CSD for electrical/electronics no be for the faint hearted oh. even took the liberty of studying it for me MSc.

na wetin hard for there

what was you degree in?

haba control systems design is not that hard now,

Dude! that thing was brain cracking, abeg
i still dey thank Baba God i passed the course.

control systems design  is all about differencial equations. once you know the basics of DE to at least the second degree plus Laplace transformations for the harder stuff. it becomes a piece of cake.

Also this seems to be the case in most part of Electronics Eng. na so so Differencial Calculus. Master it and EE becomes much much easier

"vet. med. is very difficult,u do anatomy,physiology,biochem of various animal"

Nope nope, these are the easiest things to study. Infact a 10th grader would be able to finish them in the same time.
Medicine is not supposed to be, but is , Memorizing.
Except for some one who has previous physics undergrad background, it's all easy.
Yes pharma-chemistry ones sound awkward, but again it's memorizing.

Engineering = using head (analysis)
Medicine = Memorizing (cause and effect relationships, and medicine names, go for any problem and they'll first try to give it a name for the disease)

Of course medicine wasn't supposed to be that way , but sadly it is that way. If the doctor has previous physics/mathematics background then I can count more on them than the others with biology background only. That said about 5% of the medical professonals are smart enough to be able to work with us and find solutions. The press is always pressing "micracles by medicines" but they are actually talking about "engineering miracles through imaging, through technology, through equipments, through genetics, through nanotechnology, "nah it wasn't doctors who made electronic microscope.

The maths is the only thing that pushes us towards precise thinking, and to tell you the truth almost 90% of medical professionals would be out of job and replaced by Automation if the states didn't require a licence to practice it. They are dumb people with god-complex. Yes they work longer but so do the bar-attenders. They would not pass any engineering courses given time to study whereas we can pass , like the tenth grader, all of their courses given the same study time.

If you ar trying to invent in any of the fields, thenyou can tell which is challenging

In practice Engineering and medicine are complementary
Engineers prevent and doctors provide cure
What do you think of these:
A faulty airplane
A failed building structure
A collapsed bridge
Contaminated public water supply
A nuclear fallout.
Power outage
Network failure.
Contaminated petroleum products
And the list goes on
If the engineers dont prevent these the doctors wont be able to handle the resulting casualty .

Very impressive arguments and juxtapositions here!!!

I can’t really say which is more challenging since I really can't substantively compare both. But I can say without a doubt that to become a doctor is more grueling and demanding. Also, all “doctors” are not created equal.

Doctors               ($128,000- $219,000)  – 4 years premed + 4 years med school + 3 residency
General surgeon ($212,000 - $437,000)   - 4 years premed + 4 years med school + 5 residency
Neurosurgeon    ($277,000 – $709,000)  - 4 years premed + 4 years med school + 6 residency
Heart surgeon    ($227,000 – $650,000)  - 4 years premed + 4 years med school + ~9 residency


To be honest, I think being a general practitioner (regular doctors) is not that prestigious and it is reflected in how much they get paid. Here’s a little secret, not all doctors are well off. Their six-figure salary might seem a lot but not when considering the amount of hours they put in. In other words, their pay rates are not that impressive.

Further, depending on the kind of electrical engineering work you do, it could definitely be a life long learning process. As someone who has worked on things considered “black magic” in the engineering world, I can tell you electrical engineering problems are as difficult as they come. However, you don’t need the same amount of schooling as doctors to solve a problem, you just have to be very smart and have a very good foundation to build on. Your success in engineering mainly depends on your understanding of the theoretical fundamental principles and how you can extrapolate them to explain and create real world solutions…easier said than done. Another thing, studying engineering only teaches you the building blocks you need to solve a real life problem.

I think both professions are needed because a country can't become developed without engineers and without doctors, all the engineers will die at a very young age before developing anything substantial.