"Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!"
"Well, there is something to what you say. Having worked both in an engineering capacity and as a skilled tradesman, I've noticed that there is a distinct difference between between the two. Doctors and nurses are skilled tradespeople, like highly trained auto mechanics. No one is ever going to ask a doctor to design a better human being, any more than anyone is going to ask an auto mechanic to design a better car. This is not to say that it's easy to be able to instantly recognize the symptoms of disease (x), or the bad interaction of drugs (y) and (z); just that it's not a particularly creative field of endeavor. Engineering and the hard sciences (including programming) are less about being able to instantly reference huge volumes of memorized information, and more about taking a small amount of basic knowledge and putting it together in new ways."
