Engineering, Architecture and Built Environment· Intermediate level

Choose based on what gets built and maintained where you intend to work, not only on what sounds interesting.

Civil and structural work follows construction and infrastructure spending. Electrical follows power generation and distribution, and increasingly renewable installation. Mechanical follows manufacturing, mining and building services. Environmental follows water, waste and regulation. Mining and geomatics are significant in parts of Ghana. Computer engineering follows electronics and telecoms.

Architecture, quantity surveying and construction management are separate professions with their own training, and quantity surveying in particular is often overlooked by students.

Pick a main and a backup. For each, find out what the work looks like in the first two years, and how much of it is on site.

This is the most important check in this pathway, and students skip it.

In Canada, engineering is a regulated profession and the title is protected. Becoming a professional engineer normally requires a degree from an accredited engineering programme, a period of supervised work experience, and a professional practice examination, before registration with the provincial regulator such as Professional Engineers Ontario or the equivalent body in your province. Studying on a non-accredited programme means a longer and harder route to registration later.

In Ghana, engineers are registered by the Engineering Council, and there is a national professional engineering institution alongside it. Check what programme the Council recognises before enrolling, and confirm the institution is accredited by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission.

Architecture works the same way in both countries: an accredited professional degree, a supervised internship period, examinations, and registration with the provincial or national architects body.

Check accreditation on the regulator's own list, not on the school's marketing page.

These are different jobs, not different grades of the same job, and each has a ceiling worth knowing about.

The degree route leads to professional engineering, design responsibility and eventually sign-off authority, and it takes the longest.

The technologist and technician route, through college diplomas in Canada and HND programmes at technical universities in Ghana, leads to applied work: testing, inspection, drafting, site supervision, maintenance and commissioning. It is shorter, more hands-on, and there is often a top-up or bridging route into a degree afterwards.

Compare on: length, cost, how much practical and laboratory work is included, whether there is a placement or co-op, what job title you can hold at the end, and whether the route bridges upwards.

Be honest with yourself about whether you want to design or to build. Plenty of people are happier on the technologist route and only discover it after three years of theory.

Move from making something to specifying it.

Pick a real problem with a measurable constraint: a rack that must hold a stated weight, a rainwater collector that must fill a stated volume, a shading structure for a stated area, a small solar-charged light that must run for a stated number of hours.

Write the brief: user, requirement, constraint, and how you will know if it works. Sketch at least two options. Do at least one calculation, even a rough one, and state your assumptions. Build it. Test it against the requirement, not against your hopes. Then revise it once and test again.

Document all of it, including the calculation that turned out to be wrong. Engineers are trained to show their working precisely because the working is where errors are caught.

Compare on the things that affect how you learn: laboratory and workshop facilities, whether there is a co-op or industrial attachment, class sizes in the first year, and what the school says graduates do.

Ask a mentor which parts of their degree they actually use, what they wish they had learned, and how they would test whether someone is suited to their discipline.

Ask them to review your design brief and to point out the assumption they would challenge first.

Then plan the term: the subject to raise, the brief to finish, the programmes to contact, and your next review date.