> A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test
At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.
A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.
On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.
As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.
imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.
This is how PEs should be certified. Sadly, licensure of PEs varies by state.
In Florida, the title of "software engineer" requires a license. To obtain the license, you only need to pass the national engineering (I forgot the exact name of the organization) exam for software engineering. The national exam was withdrawn some years ago. I wrote the Florida Engineering Board about it, suggesting that they needed to update the requirements.
Their response? Florida doesn't distinguish between PE specialties; prospective software engineers should just get a PE license in another field. They suggested electrical engineering.
So in Florida, the PE signing off on your buildings's wiring might be a chemist, or the PE supervising a bridge construction might be only trained in electrical engineering.
Texas has a similar thing going on (technically), but you still have to pass an NCEES[0] exam, which is not easy.
Also, if (in Texas) you stamp something outside of your area of expertise and it comes up in a review, it's viewed as if you never had the stamp in the first place[1]
At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.
A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.
On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.
As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.
imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.