Most engineering jobs suffer from a lack of prestige and aren't routinely overpaid - that's true of what might progress from your BEng or the JAR-66 course.
Both have potential to lead to a very rewarding job - if you make them. Equally, the BEng has potential to lead to an incredibly dull "backroom boy" job spending the rest of your life analysing undercarriages, and the JAR-66 has potential to offer a life of working night shifts in the back of a godforsaken hangar in the back of beyond changing and fixing those undercarriages.
Also don't go expecting the JAR-66 course to be an easy ride any more than your BEng is; professional aeronautical education is very hard work and equally the first year of both courses will contain lots of very dull (but necessary) basic theory that at the time seems rather pointless.
So, if you are looking for an easy ride, stay out of aeronautics. If you genuinely want to work on the design and development of aeroplanes, stick with your BEng. If you genuinely want to work on the maintenance of aeroplanes, go with the JAR-66. But either way, I'm afraid that the next 3 years are going to be hard work whilst you study a lot of things that seem pointless at the time - and both will require an element of luck and a lot of application to get the job you want afterwards.
Good luck, whichever you go for. Working in this business can be tremendously rewarding if you work at it - there are a lot of LAME's making good money and enjoying their jobs (albeit that it seems to traditional to whinge), and speaking for myself I finished a BEng, still use the theory most days, and get a lot (including a great deal of flying) out of it. The really good news is that neither area of work routinely uses anything like the amount of theory on a daily basis that you cover in the courses, particularly university courses.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 5th March 2004 at 16:32.