r/ChemicalEngineering • u/MistakeSea6886 • Sep 21 '23

Salary What’s the most profitable career path?

I’m a freshmen Engineering major that is taking gen Ed’s. I am thinking of switching to chemical engineering next year. I really like ChE but but want to pick a profitable career path, which is why I’m on the fence between it and Computer science. I did research and found that petroleum engineering is very profitable, and ChE can pick it pretty quickly. However with the way the world is going(more green energy), are renewable energy jobs such as nuclear power plants going to experience a boom in demand and become more profitable?

32 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

86 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Catalyst_Elemental Sep 25 '23

Go into consulting. There’s an industry built on managers who failed up and are in over their head.

1

u/MistakeSea6886 Sep 25 '23

I don’t really know what consulting is. Is that just giving advice? What major should I even study for that?

3

u/Catalyst_Elemental Sep 25 '23

Companies like Deloitte or McKinsey love chemical engineers. But basically managers hire you to do some sort of analysis of some aspect of the business… and usually the product of that report is just confirming whatever biases or preconception that manager had and steadying their hand before they go through with the project. Then… if / when the project fails, they can just blame the consultants or at least comfort themselves saying “well it should have worked according to this analysis” . There’s a saying “no manager ever got fired for hiring McKinsey”