I guess it depends if you are willing to give up something you enjoy for money? Personally I enjoy engineering and finding novel solutions to difficult problems and so forth, much as more money would be nice I am not sure if I would sell myself down the river for a job where I would have to work from 7 in the morning till 9 in the evening

I enjoy both math and engineering, perhaps math even more..but I always figured the opposite. (that no one would actually want to hire math people and engineering is more marketable).

It seems to be a common sentiment on this thread that at least for computations, the trend is the other way around

Interesting, how many people respond to these career questions. I suppose it's because everyone has something to say about it, being in the same game.

Unfortunately, answers are often biased, predictably towards ones own field of expertise. I don't see how most of the replies in this thread answer your question, David, but in my opinion TwoCents pretty much nailed it. I read from your question that you are more of a happy programmer than a physics enthusiast, although you may have some of both interests. So, who are the people who actually write CFD code?

There certainly are some mechanical engineers and some mathematicians, but if you're thinking of commercial giants like Ansys CFX/Fluent or CD-adapco, the bulk of them will have a degree in computer science. I would say that every CFD expert, regardless if engineer, applied mathematician, physicist or whatever, knows how to write code, and many of us are quite good at it. However, we are no experts at programming in the same way a computer scientist can be. What a lot of people don't realize is that writing a research program on your own is quite different from writing a commercial software package in collaboration with a lot of other software designers. Will a mathematics expert develop his own subroutines for a newly created algorithm? Maybe, but more likely the math expert will develop the algorithm and someone else will implement it. The mechanical engineer or physisist will most likely apply the code and interpret the results. If you want to do all of the above, you may find happiness in a small company, which cannot afford to have highly specialized employees, and everyone has to work on everything. Even then I would recommend getting a CS degree, if your main interest is in programming. Also keep in mind that with the relatively mature CFD codes today much of the coding that's still being done has little to do with new algorithms and much with user interfacing, code-to-code interfacing, and other CAE tasks.

does a chemical engineer compete vs mechanical , aerospace and mathamaticain ????????

Chemical engineers are also professionals related to fluid mechanics issues, so, I can't see what's wrong about a chemical engineer working with CFD.

It's true that there's a short number of chemical engineers working with CFD (I'm one of them ;-). I guess it's due the methods employed in CFD. Most of them were proposed by mathematicians, physicists, civil and mechanic engineers while the computational methods proposed by scientific computing people, but it can't be a restriction for those that are interested in this area.

I think, I'm lucky because in my university we're seldom worried about which graduation people should have to apply a MSc or PhD in CFD. We have an interdisciplinary program in oil and gas that drag people from several areas, including geologists, chemical, civil, mechanic engineers, weatherman, oceanographer, etc... all sorts of graduated people to propose solutions (including CFD solutions) for the oil and gas's world.

Have you ever though about a civil engineer working with petroleum system subjects? What about a geologist working with CFD?! We have such kind of weird combinations and I can tell you that the results are very impressive.

As I said before, first of all you should go through what you like or what you're good at. It's the first step to get success in any area.

Regards

Renato. I chemical engineer working with CFD ;-)

all these cases related to chem engg, but my question is that can he work as aerodymist using cfd results ? it sounds wierd. mech engg can work as aerodymist , aerospace is branch of mech engg. but no idea abt chem .....

Keep in mind that it doesn't take a CS person to write software code for CFD analysis. Almost anybody with a engineering or math background knows how to write CFD software. If you want to program for the rest of your life then go to CS. As for me, I didn't want to work on programming code for the rest of my life, so chose applied mathematics. I learned enough software skills here to write several CFD solvers. Be an original, it's something that is lost in today's world.