WHY is Engineering NOT regarded as a profession like Medicine or Law??

Wow... talk about establishing a false fact and then riding it to death. Did you ever talk to a doctor in the ER? Do you have friends who failed the bar for the umpteenth time and will never recoup their expenses on their law degree? No? Maybe you should. Not sure what you need strong "engineering societies" for. What would they be doing, exactly? I happen to be working as a design engineer, but I am not a licensed EE, so I couldn't even install a light switch in your home. I'm sure you know the difference between a licensed engineer and an unlicensed one, don't you? If you are so envious, why did you not become a doctor or lawyer yourself? Just curious.

Engineering, at its root, is the application of science or experimental data arrived at with the scientific method to the physical world to assist individuals or groups of people. By that definition, someone who designs and sews clothes may be an engineer. Many doctors are engineers. While engineers should be a set of people that are recognized for their talents in the application of science, in reality the group of engineers is arrived at by subtraction. For instance, doctors tend to perform their engineering with respect to the human body. Back in history, they gravitated to one another. Until about 200 years ago the data doctors needed hadn't been systematically collected, so they tended to fair little better than the no action alternative until about 200 years ago. Doctors didn't really up their percentages of successful treatment until antibiotics were discovered. So doctors, although they should be a branch of engineering, would take umbrage these days at being lumped in with engineers. To expand on this concept of engineers as defined by subtraction, think about how rather large buildings used to be heated by central furnaces that somehow got their heat distributed to all the rooms in the large building without a pump. How did the designers do it? They sent steam up pipes that were arranged to allow the condensate to fall back down the same pipes to recollect at the boiler. They balanced heat also to the size of the room and the distance of the steam from the boiler. This application of science was clearly engineering to the first people who did it, but it quickly became part of the trade once a mass of business people mastered the considerations. The people who picked it up then tended not to have any ideas about how to apply this system to related fields because they weren't necessarily educated about the broad principals involved. So engineering has been reduced to the set of people who need generalized training in order to tackle new problems with new solutions (people at the cutting edge of engineering), and to the set of people in certain areas of design and construction oversight where the participants have fought to keep their membership limited to those who possess the ability to manipulate numbers and make judgments to protect public safety, such as in bridges, buildings, roads, rockets, automobiles, etc. I think engineers have to constantly broadcast to the other professions that anyone who can make a case that their profession applies science and protects lives should be let in. For instance, the designer and tester of the computer software that keeps some of these military jets aloft where simple human control would not suffice is really an engineer. I hope engineers can keep up with the changes that are coming otherwise the term could become an anachronism split from the reality of the modern application of science.

Ok first of all, you have to have a license to become an engineer, same as a doctor or a lawyer. Lawyers have the BAR, we have the Fundamentals Examination, an 8 hour exam required for a license. I would LOVE to see a lawyer or a doctor pass an EIT/FE examination. Pay has nothing to do with it. Engineers can make a hell of a living. Obviously the engineers who go for the MS or PhD will make more...but I am proud to be an engineer, and would not feel inferior in any way to doctors or lawyers. We are all smart in our own way.

The reason goes back in history. Law was a respected profession for the upper classes. (An alternative to the church or the military). And seeing as how the upper classes made the laws, it paid to know about it. Medicine, because it involved a lot of learning and only the rich could really afford it became a profession. Any position that could get you in that close contact with the King was respected by the upper classes. Engineers however were jumped-up little tradesman. "Anyone" could have thought up what they did given time. Because trades didn't earn much, this flowed on to engineers. Note: There are some places where you need to be registered to work as an engineer. Also - not all lawyers get the pay you see on the tele. Think of small country practices where the main work is wills and conveyancing. Think of Dennis Denuto!

Well, there are Professional Engineers, but they spend most of their time working with Medical Institutions, so the difference between Engineering and Medicine is pretty much undefined in those cases. So the people who work with non-medical equipment, mostly regard it as a career, rather than a profession.