OOps, not an engineer.

I do biogeography. It's a sort of hybrid between physical geography and ecology. You deal with endless databases and huge image files. Lot's of "if-then-else" type searches just to get data in a useful collection then there are these humungous analysis packages: We use SAS (http://www.sas.com/) and Fragstats (http://www.umass.edu/landeco/research/fragstats/fragstats.html) pretty heavily.

My younger brother is the engineer. He uses a package sort of like Autocad on the graphics & database side but with comprehensive modeling called, "ProEngineer" (IIRC). He started out in AutoCad but finds ProEngineer much more capable on the analytic side, which is where he spends a lot of time. I don't understand his stuff so I have to leave it there.

B