First, it is important to understand that most of an officer's job is to manage projects and people. Even if you are a 62 - Developmental Engineer, it is unlikely for you to do any actual design. That isn't to say that assignments like that don't exist, just that they are few and far between and usually go to the top engineers. I recently spent a week in LAAFB at the Space and Missile Center, where I worked with the Aerospace Corporation ( a Federally Funded Research and Development Center) in order to create conceptual satellite designs. It was pretty awesome. We were handed a problem and used their design tools to come up with a viable solution. However, the program was simply for exposure to a process, not to give us a glimpse of what 62s really do. What is that you might ask? Well, to put it simply, the 62s pretty much acted as the middleman between the contractors who build the satellites and the civilians (at Aerospace) who are the real experts. In that particular situation it seemed like an Aero or Astro degree was only necessary to give an officer sufficient technical background to understand what these entities were reporting. They manage the relations between these two civilian entities and the acquisitions department of the Air Force. Granted, I only experienced a small snippet of the Developmental Engineering career field but what I saw was a bit disconcerting for me, someone who originally wanted to be a 62.
So that is some commentary on the 62 career field, as someone who pursued a degree in a very specific engineering discipline.
For a systems engineering major you are more interested in the integration of many different systems. So maybe you'll have electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and aero or astro engineers on your team developing something. Your job as a systems engineer is to ensure the integration of the all those engineering disciplines into an effective team. What does that sound like? The answer is management. Only this time your technical background isn't as focused as say an astro engineer. For example, during the concept design phase of a satellite at the Aerospace Corp, many experts gather together and takes seats at various substations. There is one for power management, thermal controls, Attitude determination and control, communications, structure, propulsion etc., each with its own expert. Every substation is dependent on each other. Structures needs to know how much fuel is going to be brought along to account for necessary space and impact the structure size, that impacts how the control guys are going to deal with moving a particular satellite, which dictates how much power is required from solar arrays and where this power is going to dissipated, which in turns impacts the necessary thermal controls on the spacecraft. You can see just how complex designing a system can really get. That is why there are systems engineers in charge of aggregating and filtering all the relevant information routed to them by the various substation experts and forwarding that info to the other substations.
Where a USAFA Astro Engineering major will be qualified for 62E1B - Developmental Engineering Astronautics, a USAFA Systems Engineering major would be qualified for 62E1G - Developmental Engineering General.
Again, note that each job really boils down to project management. If you rate degrees on a scale of least technical to most technical and most management heavy to least management heavy then it might look like this:
Management < Systems Engineering < Astro Engineering (or other focus)
That's the quick and dirty of it. All of this is information I have gathered through my one research, interviews with officers, and experience on academic trips. Take it with a grain of salt. I am sure there are many out there who can tell it like it is from a much better vantage point.
that the pilots are the ones who make the rank because, we ARE talking Air Force here, but a little disappointing that engineers are in that situation. And, AFrpaso, it looks like not many have the opportunity to work in their field with a physics degree; it would be nice to know how many actually graduated with the degree and were placed elsewhere. So many decisions to make and hard to do without much knowledge on the subject. If one majors in physics and does not become a pilot and is not selected for physicist/nuclear engineer, then what jobs are they offered? Again, I am not familiar with any of the AFSC jobs....still learning all the Air Force lingo, so I am willing to be educated. If anyone knows of a post that explains the jobs offered to AFA graduates, I would appreciate it.
