If you take the position that a "Professional Engineer" license, by statute, gives you absolute authority to do as you please, the jury will be shown how neither engineering school curriculum, nor the PE exam, have the slightest aquaintance with the electrical trade. Indeed, you'll be lucky to find a college bookstore that sells the NEC.
Actually... the PE Power exam is HIGHLY specific about power, covering a lot of extremely difficult power engineering principals as well as knowledge of NEC. There are elective EE courses in power engineering, too, that many prospective EEs will take. Not all will, though, just those going into power, just like power EEs don't generally take semiconductor engineering or electromagnetic fields and waves. The principals behind power engineering are a lot simpler than some of the other fields, and are generally covered in basic 1st year circuitry- the math just gets SO much easier when theta is always 60Hz!
Code is not emphisised because it's not as important during education as the engineering principals that underly it when you get to the types of issues the PE will be involved in. Codes differ from locality to locality and can always be looked up- engineers are expected to go far beyond this- and it's not like EEs are thrown right to the jackals; there is mandatory 4+years engineering experience required before one is allowed to even TRY to sit for the PE, ensuring real-world experience is gained in addition to the book learning. If knowledge of code was all that was required to be an EE, you'd see every 20-year master electricians sitting for the PE exam so they could become an EE PE. It's not like that though, there is a completely different skillset involved.
The Inspector and Electrician looks at that conduit with 12 wires in where NEC says only 11 are allowed and says "NO!" The engineer looks at that conduit and says "Why does NEC say only 11 are allowed? Is it because of installation difficulty and risk of damage to the cables? Lets test the cables and see if any are damaged..." and so on.
[This message has been edited by SteveFehr (edited 02-11-2007).]
