Mature wannabe

[Fred Gassit]

Hi everyone,

I have been a pilot my entire working life but always worked with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. I have treated flying as part of my practical experience building to make me more useful when I "settle down."

The question I have relates to my age, time has flown and I am approaching my 36th birthday, I worry that I have overdone the flying thing at the expense of getting on track with my ultimate goal.

On balance, would a 40 + year old graduate have overplayed their hand?

I realise I am approaching this contrary to the typical path but wonder (hopefully) whether my industry experience would somewhat compensate for my oldness.

I have 7000 odd hours and have been extremely lucky to have flown in an experimental civilian flight test programme. (medium turboprop) The majority of my airborne experience is special mission and I've been involved in building aircraft, including my own. I also have one of those aviation degrees which I weighted towards Physics/Maths when I realised its worth.

Is there any chance a useful engineering career can be salvaged from a C.V. like this? Realistic employment prospects?

Thanks in advance, (love visiting this forum)

[john_tullamarine]

I don't see any problem at all. Main concern is, are your existing academics suitable to get you into one of RMIT, Sydney, or NSW (presuming you are, indeed, in Oz) ?

Then, the main decision is whether you

(a) look at doing the undergrad work full time or part time

(b) are more interested in Industry or academic work following graduation.

If you are looking at

(a) Industry, the need will be to get a couple of years work experience somewhere - shouldn't be too much of an ask - and then you should be able to market your flying etc., experience to get into areas more aligned to your specific interest. I would reckon that the airlines would have an interest in, say, the ops engineering areas for starters.

(b) academia, the need will be to start the post grad grind .. Masters and PhD.

[McAero]

Maybe we can just "swap jobs".

Problem solved! :ok:

[Genghis the Engineer]

I largely agree with JT - there are jobs out there (http://www.sfte.org/index.php?page=html/links/jobs) that you can almost certainly do now. However, an aviation degree is relatively lightweight and there is much mileage in seeing if that can get you entrance into a suitable aerospace engineering MSc, rather than going back to bachelors again.

7000 hrs, flight test experience and then a suitable MSc - yes, you are definitely employable in some really interesting jobs.


Then you need to find by whom and in which job of course!

G

[flash8]

I would argue that a 3/4 year full undergraduate Aeronautical Engineering degree would be wasting precious years.

With your existing degree (you do not state discipline precisely but I assume "Aeronautical Technology"'ish) I would expect that you will have little problem entering an M.Sc. programme - that would not be the issue here - what would be is entering a heavyweight programme with significant quantitative content.

Arguably your length of time away from study coupled with the lighter initial exposure to Math/Physics may see some admissions tutors reluctance in this respect (the maths can be brutal) but I expect with your other experience you will arguably be better qualified than many of them in other relevant respects.

My serious advice is to only really look at one year MSc programmes from decent institutions and preferably with "Engineering" in the title (implying some decent quantitative content).

Under no circumstances do I personally recommend you repeat a full undergraduate degree (but if you really wanted to I expect you could get 1 or 2 years of exemptions).

In fact with your experience (from what I can see) it might be possible to enter some of these Postgraduate programmes without a first degree.

My opinion only :)