.....I come from a middle class family with aspirations to make a high 5 figure/6 figure salary eventually, so money is important to me as well as job satisfaction (working in a technical math/science field).....
If a high five figure breaking into six figures is your aspiration either path will get you there in nuclear or nuclear related work,...
The typical six and out into ops as an NLO can be pretty steady and predictable,...and limiting,...
If you want to settle down into a good job with good benefits and pretty much stay at home for 30 years and raise 2.3 kids with a stepford mom plus a better than average chance of a decent retirement that's not a bad route,...
You can even get your college paid for should you elect to squeeze that engineering degree in later and expand your horizons a bit,...
All that and be pretty sure you will enjoy the idealized American middle class dream of a nice home, two car garage, pontoon party barge for the summer holidays, sending the kids on to higher education, and a change of life muscle car under a tarp parked in the add-on carport,...
An engineering degree (and those have their own hierarchy, starting somewhere at civil and topping out somewhere at chemical) can get you all of the above with a significantly greater commitment on your part:
- the Navy will force you to succeed or punish you; the engineering school could not care less if you fail out
- Navy Nuclear Power Pipeline is intently focused on a condensed syllabus and specific curriculum of theoretical knowledge and practical application; the engineering school is, in simple speak, a lot broader and a lot more involved both in syllabus and curriculum
So, it is really up to you, you have to balance how much you want to invest and what you want your options to be as life moves on,...
If you six and out you will most likely achieve that lifestyle description you mentioned earlier without all that great an investment on your part,...
If you go through an engineering discipline you will achieve the same with a greater personal and financial commitment, plus the greater likelihood of failure while incurring those financial commitments which will remain even after your failure,...
Should you succeed in gaining an engineering degree you future prospects will be enhanced,.... statistically,...
Many if not most, of the highest paid people you may ever get to know do not acquire hard degrees while in university, some of them do not even possess higher education degrees of any sort, other than their honorary ones...
The people with the hard degrees tend to work for the most highly paid people,...
Then again, those hard degrees will help you fall back on a government job should all else fail,...
You never know when "they" may pull a Kewaunee, Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee, Crystal River, et al on ya',...
I am interested in entering the nuclear/power industry, and I just wanted to ask a question for those working in the industry right now. If you had to do it all over again, what path would you take?....
To answer your original question,...
The NNPP is the most likely success path to get into the nuclear reactor generated, electricity to the grid business,...
You get trained, you get paid while you get trained, it's pretty easy to earn the NEC, you will demonstrate the ability to earn and keep a security clearance, the ability to perform in an applied engineering environment, and the ability to follow policies, protocols and procedures,...
The engineering degree will demonstrate you are smart and capable, it does not demonstrate the ability to earn and keep a security clearance, the ability to perform in an applied engineering environment, and the ability to follow policies, protocols and procedures,...
If it did, those two PhD's would not have blown out their own eyeballs working within the government laser lab while knowingly violating all posted and proscribed safety rules for working with said laser(s),...
Ergo, commercial nuclear power reactors are not research labs, you get credit for being smart enough, you do not get extra credit for being extra smart,...