Hi Xiaoyun, I am interested in becoming an NRE. As an NRE yourself, could you share your experiences with your job? I think it would help me in deciding with my own future career. Thank you!

Hi Gillian,

Work at NR is no different from any other engineering firm. You work 40 hours a week and you get the weekends off. We don't do a lot of hands-on engineering. There's a lot of reading, writing, and meetings. Based on your major, you could be placed into sections at NR that deal with fleet support, managing the shipyards, or new developments. For chemical engineering, there's not a lot of opportunities for new development work at NR. You'll be doing a lot of fleet support or dealing with the regulatory sides of things. The work you do alone consists of a reading assignment. It's almost like writing a book report. You read the engineering report, you write a summary of it, and you present the summary in front of your colleagues and your boss. Sometimes, you'll be able to provide some engineering direction via comments back to the labs. The only example of group work at NR I can think of is meetings. For example, you could go with other people at NR to attend an annual meeting at the labs where you ask them questions about the state of projects they are working on. I've seen a lot more women now at NR than before. It seems NR is trying to meet a diversity quota or something. My advice is for a female engineer who wants to be an engineering manager, NR is a nice place to work. It pays well and you get to live in DC. A caveat is that the engineering knowledge and skills you gain at NR is not really transferable.  But NR does pay money for you to get an online engineering masters degree through.

Xiaoyun