Aeronautic Design
A Career In Aeronautic Design
As a child, you probably spent many classroom hours perfecting your paper airplane to be sleek, fast, and certainly out fly your peer's planes. If airplanes became an obsession, a career in aeronautic design is definitely worth looking into. Aeronautic designers plan, design, and watch their creation become a life-size, working model. Aeronautic designers can work for the military, space exploration, commercial airline companies, and even private companies.
Aeronautic design engineers must be creative individuals. Not only do they plan the designs of air or space craft, but they must also be willing to go back to the drawing board time and time again. While an aircrafts design is important, the materials must also be able to stand up to the force of the wind and altitude. A top heavy plane can crash, so balance is another important feature. Men and women in this field create their design, build a smaller scale replica, see how it works, and then often make numerous changes to ensure the air or space craft works properly and is as safe as possible.
Planning for a career of this nature must start in high school. A degree in aeronautic design takes four years to receive, but to even make it into college, a number of courses must have been completed on the high school level. Colleges look specifically for students who have taken all four years of English, Algebra I and II, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus. The majority of today's colleges want to see that a student has taken at least two years of a foreign language, two or three years of art, economics, history, computer science, psychology, and public speaking. Colleges also look at a student's activities after school. Running for student office, working on the school newspaper, playing sports, or being on the yearbook committee are all important.
As aeronautic designers often earn upwards of $50,000 a year to start and the career forecast is excellent, students with an aptitude for math and science may want to consider a job designing aircraft. It's a rewarding career with plenty of room for advancement.
