Hi all,

i worked as a student with engineers in a Quality Assurance department at a local company.
Is it correct if I say that I worked as an Engineering Assistant?

 

only you know if that is true or a stretch of the facts. I would suggest you list the time spent as QC work. Quality control jobs pay very well.

 

If you were assisting engineers then you can state you were working as an engineering assistant.

Anything you put on your resume is a subject for follow up questions so be prepared.

 

I had a problem with this. I was a QC person. The engineers eventually made a habit of sending me all the new product designs and I would ferret out the mistakes before they went to production. After I received my annual raise (5 cents an hour), I said, "I'm working as an Engineering Assistant, how about giving me the title and the pay?" They said, "No" and I quit.

This story illustrates the problem you might have if you SAY you were an Engineering Assistant but the Corporation can't legally allow that for fear of having to pay you for the job you were actually doing. Tread carefully, it could get nasty.

 

I had a problem with this. I was a QC person. The engineers eventually made a habit of sending me all the new product designs and I would ferret out the mistakes before they went to production. After I received my annual raise (5 cents an hour), I said, "I'm working as an Engineering Assistant, how about giving me the title and the pay?" They said, "No" and I quit.

This story illustrates the problem you might have if you SAY you were an Engineering Assistant but the Corporation can't legally allow that for fear of having to pay you for the job you were actually doing. Tread carefully, it could get nasty.

But at that time I was still a student so I cannot say that I worked as an Engineer.

 

But at that time I was still a student so I cannot say that I worked as an Engineer.

Communication difficulty. You did not ask whether you might claim to be an Engineer and I did not describe anything about claiming to be an Engineer. I was talking about claiming to be an Engineering Assistant because I thought that was what YOU were talking about.

Your logic escapes me.

Are you saying your only two choices are to claim to be an Engineer or claim to be an Engineering Assistant?
I present the third choice: You were neither.

 

hi Dri'
What were you a studying as a student.?
E

 

I've had a few jobs where I was called a engineer of one sort or another but none backed it up with the pay or official title on any piece of paper.

I guess they felt it was more important that the customers thought I was an engineer than the payroll department that classified me as worker peon XYZ-2.

 

But at that time I was still a student so I cannot say that I worked as an Engineer.

The first place to start is with what the job title actually was. You can't go too far wrong with that. Remember that you can list the duties that you had and that will carry more weight with potential employers than the job title (except the increasing number of jobs opening where the applications are reviewed by a piece of software -- even human non-techie reviewers generally respond to a decent job description over a fancy job title, even when they can't understand either).

For instance, I worked as a cooperative education student at NIST and my job title was Engineering Student Trainee. But by the end of my time there I was operating independently (in fact, my next gig was working for them as an independent contractor). But I was still an Engineering Student Trainee. So this is what my resume says:

National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.) - Boulder, CO – May 88 / Jul 91

Engineering Student Trainee

Assisted Institute scientists in the development, design, implementation and analysis of research efforts relating to electromechanical effects in superconductors. Was responsible for the design and fabrication of two measurement systems.​

Similarly, because of the experience I got at NIST, I worked as a lab assistant back at school. Many lab assistants do little more than grunt work, meaning they take the data they are told to take and analyze it the way they are told to analyze it. So not very interesting on a resume. But my job was very different -- but the job title was the job title. So this is what that says:

Department of Physics - Colorado School of Mines - Golden, CO – Jan 89 / May 91

Senior Design

Developed a critical current measurement facility for bulk and thin-film high-temperature superconductors.​

Laboratory Assistant

Designed, fabricated, and tested the support structure for a high field superconducting magnet system including cryogen transport, magnet power leads, and electronic instrumentation.​

You need to be very careful about "promoting" yourself to a higher job title, even when the title you use is a more accurate reflection of your role there than your official title was. Imagine you are interviewing someone that says that they are an Engineering Assistant and when you call the person's former supervisor and say that you are considering hiring so-and-so that used to work there as an Engineering Assistant you are told, "Whoa, so-and-so worked here, but they were a Student Intern." Are you going to have a very positive view of that candidate at that moment?

Also, this can come back and bite you decades later. You may not think it could ever happen now, but in twenty years you might be being considered for a high-level position in a corporation or even running for public office at some level and people will dig up everything they can and if they find that a Student Intern claimed to be an Engineering Assistant, your career will almost certainly end right there -- it's happened many times and some of them have been so public that the person became largely unemployable.

 

Well were I'm from, when you start studying electronics you'll have to study for 2 years Electronic engineering and how to be an electrician to become a legal intern in both fields (yes they go through the same material for the 4 semesters then it splits into more specialized know-how).

I've never studied carpentry but I've been an assistant in that field more often than I would want to be reminded of.

Official title : Worker. :/ The pay pretty much what the title reads.

 

Yes. Now that you are leaving "school", your real education is about to begin. Welcome to the club.

 

One thing in your favor, if you live in the US there are three things a former employer will discuss when called for a reference: you actually worked there, your date of hire and your last day of employment.

If I personally get that call I acknowledge the person worked for usbut refer the dates to personnel so I do not give out any false info.

This is an industry standard. If you don't say anything you can't get sued over it.