Civil Engineering is hazardous to your career prospects

College Majors Engineering Majors
41

<p>Negativeslope, you are an undeclared engineering sophomore but I guess you have enough experience to have the entire engineering industry figured out. I will tell you the same thing I told naixn92, your comments give you no credibility and no one is going to take you seriously. At engineering companies, secretaries will be some of the first people to go if jobs are being cut. An engineering degree gives you technical knowledge that will give you opportunities for advancement and the ability to do challenging work, not to mention that engineers and secretaries salaries are not even close. I mean, seriously, do you really think there is more demand for secretaries right now? Although, based on your comments, perhaps you are better suited to be a secretary.</p>

<p>Just because the BLS says that ME will grow more slowly than average doesn’t mean there is a surplus of MEs. The fact is that the number of engineers that graduate every year is not a huge number. There will always be demand for talented engineers. In a normal economy, legitimate engineering schools will have the highest job placement out of practically every other major. The universities I attended fo my BS and MS were in the high 90 percent job placement. You say the auto industry is not doing well but that is only a fraction of all mechanical enginners. This argument is commical and is more evidence of your complete lack of knowledge and experience in the engineering field. Why don’t you try finding a job in the financial industry right now?</p>

<p>Moreover, I’m tired of kids with zero engineering experience pretending to know what they are talking about. Perhaps being a secretary is a better job in your warped adolescent mind but we are talking about reality! Please stop wasting everyones’ time on this forum with your idiotic posts.</p>

42

<p>Lets be a bit more civil (no pun intended) in our discourse. </p>

<p>I’m opposed to Negativeslope’s mindset, more so then others here. But look, he gave you a TIME article among other media, and granted he’s heard horror stories that ultimately come from you (people in industry), and he is simply reacting to all this as one might expect; so how about taking this into consideration and instead deter his present outlook by suggesting ways to be prepared upon graduation.</p>

43

<p>Cyclone, my point is to simply maintain the slightest bit of credibility for this forum. It helps no one if people on here are posting things that they know nothing about. I simply ask that people not act as if they are experts when they have no qualifications. When it comes to engineering jobs, I think we should take it from people in industry and not kids in high school or underclassmen in college. I can’t stand by and let a high schooler say that MEs are not even needed. Sorry if I’m not sugar coating my responses to people that are merely wasting every ones’ time.</p>

44

<p>Out of curiosity, what’re your creds, ME76?</p>

45

<p>BS, MS in mechanical engineering from top 20 research institution.</p>

<p>Look, I’m not trying to pick on anyone, I just can’t believe that people on here actually believe that MEs are not needed or that being a secretary would be a better career move than pursuing engineering. All I’m doing is simply trying to seperate truthful information from a bunch of rhetoric that comes from uninformed people with no engineering degree and no experience whatsoever. I don’t post things about the job market for fields that I have no experience with. Seriously, every industry is hurting right now but that doesn’t mean that you are wasting your time by studying engineering. Some of these posts are doom and gloom and they might as well say that engineering will cease to exist in a few years. I can tell you that this is not the case and that engineering is still a very solid career choice.</p>

46

<p>

OK, so I haven’t gotten my degree yet and am younger than you, so that means I have no experience. What’s your perspective on this poster, then? (No, I don’t go the University of Delaware. A BME is a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, not a Biomedical Engineer.)</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-delaware/507373-ud-really-great-2.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-delaware/507373-ud-really-great-2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I have a BME from UD with a 3.225 GPA and I can’t get a job anywhere! Noone will hire me. In every job I ever apply to, they always want 5-10 years experience doing exactly what the job entails. And I still have $31400 of student loan debt from my WORTHLESS degree!</p>

<p>I did everything society told me to do: I stayed in school, I said “no” to drugs, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t gamble, I didn’t have unmarried sex, I went to college, and I got my education. And now my only reward is to be treated like an EX-CON!</p>

<p>I would be better off making a living by selling drugs or robbing banks. Or maybe I should hire a team of mercenaries to take hostages and demand ransom, like Ed Harris did in that movie The Rock. At least that way I would be able to pay my bills!</p>

<p>DOWN WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE AND COLLEGE!</p>

47

<p>what year are you? I think if you make a thread there’s a lot of people here that can offer you good advice if you give some details.</p>

48

<p>

It depends on what type of engineering you’re talking about.</p>

<p>2009 Unemployment rate for “Office and Administrative Support”, which would include secretary-type positions: 8%
Source: [Chart:</a> Unemployment Rate by Occupation, 2008-2009 | interactive charts by iCharts](<a href=“http://icharts.net/portal/app;jsessionid=35532C57722E846E84AA3053F0D96A94.icharts-app-1?service=external&sp=Y3LbwyM=&page=TeamChartDetail]Chart:”>http://icharts.net/portal/app;jsessionid=35532C57722E846E84AA3053F0D96A94.icharts-app-1?service=external&sp=Y3LbwyM=&page=TeamChartDetail)</p>

<p>3rd Quarter 09 unemployment rate for mechanical engineers: 9.5%</p>

<h2>Source: [Third</a> quarter engineering unemployment data show mixed trends | The Engineering Daily](<a href=“http://www.engineeringdaily.net/third-quarter-engineering-unemployment-data-show-mixed-trends/]Third”>Third quarter engineering unemployment data show mixed trends – The Engineering Daily)</h2>

<p>cyclone10, I’m a sophomore.</p>

49

<p>Ok, I concede. I think you should become a secretary because it will give you many more opportunities than becoming an engineer.</p>

50

<p>sophomore is good, you still have a lot of time to do a summer internship or even a Co-op, like in manufacturing or something; it doesn’t need to be exactly what you want but once you have that on your resume then next year you’ll be a junior and you’ll get a lot more interest from a variety of employers for a 2nd and even better internship. I hope your schools engineering career services can be of help, that’s a tremendous resource at most schools.</p>

51

<p>

Thank you for pointing that out, aibar. That’s why I said “construction industry” and did not touch “civil engineering field” at all.</p>

<p>

-> owned!</p>

<p>

Don’t forget that you need an MBA to become a secretary nowadays…</p>

52

<p>I have a friend who works as an administrative assistant for a Fortune 500 company. She only has a HS degree. Yet she has not been unemployed a single day, while myself and many of her good friends, many of us with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from top schools, have been out of work, sometimes for over two years, since 2000.</p>

<p>Of course this is just one data point, and I’m sure there are quite a few other stories of admins who’ve been in and out of work while their engineer friends haven’t missed a day of work over the same time period.</p>

<p>The economy is poor, and lots of people are out of work. This means that anyone who wants any kind of job needs to be able to convince the employer that they are the right person for the job. “Statistics” alone won’t do it, which is why I encourage people to get experience in the field they want, even if it is volunteer (like open-source software), as early as possible.</p>

53

<p>In the US, there are more applicants for engineering jobs than available jobs, when taking into account all of the people from outside the US applying for those jobs.</p>

54

<p>NegativeSlope, are you seriously using this perfectsplit person as an example to prove your point? You failed to mention how that person went on to spam the thread with garbage, spewing about all sorts of crap. Look at how he/she talks. I can’t imagine anyone with an attitude like that actually making a good impression at an interview.</p>

<p>I graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering last may, right in the middle of the economic crisis, and I had several job offers by the Christmas BEFORE I graduated. I don’t have a single classmate that I routinely talked to that didn’t also have a job by the time they graduated with their B.S. in ME. They went places like Northrop, Exxon, Lockheed, Arcelor-Mittal, and various smaller companies. There were very few horror stories about people being jobless in my graduating class. The only horror story I know of is one of my friends who got a job offer from Caterpillar, and then had the offer rescinded because they had a hiring freeze. He had another job lined up within 3 months.</p>

<p>Mechanical Engineering is NOT a dead field.</p>

55

<p>boneh3ad, did those friends of yours, including yourself, did they do internships with smaller companies or less ideal work like in manufacturing at first and kind of build up to getting those kinds of offers at graduation?</p>

<p>I guess what I mean to say is that getting an internship with those kinds of companies would be hard to get say if you were a sophmore, but easier once your a senior have some solid work/research experience and can show strengths in upper class work; is this true? </p>

<p>I had a real hard time getting my first internship but now that I have it under my belt and have taken more upper classwork my interviews have bumped from a few last year to the upper teens this year; I’m still not competitive enough for those companies you mentioned but I was just wondering relative to your classmates at urbana if this is typical or if I’m lagging? I know Urbana is a really highly regraded school too</p>

56

<p>My sophomore year I worked as a research intern at Halliburton and then the following two years I worked at Rolls-Royce, so I guess it all depends on your view point. Halliburton was less than ideal for me, but for some people that may be their ultimate goal to work for Halliburton or Schlumberger. Most of the rest of my friends had internships as well, and you could definitely tell the ones who had internships from the ones who didn’t based on the kind of jobs they got at graduation. Generally, the more internship experience you do, the better off you are getting a good job when you graduate.</p>

57

<p>[Civil</a> Engineer - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2009/12/28/civil-engineer.html]Civil”>http://www.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2009/12/28/civil-engineer.html)</p>

<p>As I saw last night in Civil Engineering, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ trade magazine, the civil engineering profession has made the “top fifty careers of 2010” list. It takes into account the recession and the BLS statistics.</p>

<p>According to the ACE Mentor Program’s statistics, there are approximately 250,000 civil engineers in the United States. Even with this recession, the construction industry is the second larges industry in the United States. By around the year 2015, the construction industry is projected to have one million job openings. The Baby Boomers are approaching retirement age–that’ll be about 11 million people leaving the workforce. The number of people who are going to enter the workforce is going to grow by only about 5 million. Engineering graduation rates have been flat, or even down in some cases-- engineering degrees represent only 18% of university degrees awarded, as compared to approximately 30% of degrees awarded in Germany and the UK. </p>

<p>FIFTY PERCENT of all buildings that will exist by the year 2030 haven’t even been BUILT yet. This is based upon projections produced by the Brookings Institute. Our infrastructure is literally crumbling, and we WILL be forced to replace it as it erodes, otherwise the country will no longer function.</p>

<p>For every FIVE people leaving the industry, only ONE new person enters it.</p>

<p>That means that in three to four years, even if you were to hire back all the employees who have recently lost their jobs because of the economic recession, there will still be a shortage of 1.5 million employees.</p>

<p>It’s bad right now, but it’s because of the current volatility of the market, the crisis of state government overspending, and the problem of banks not being willing to lend money in order to incentivize projects. This is just volatility. </p>

<p>In the long run, we are actually facing a critical shortage.</p>

<p>Sorry I haven’t been able to sit down and write this all out until now, but there you go. I’ve been really supremely busy at my civil engineering job.</p>

58

<p>On a more positive note, here are some stories of people I know who’ve found jobs soon after graduating. All of these show that you have to be pretty creative to get one, and even these people couldn’t get multiple job offers. The person who got the lowest GPA got a GPA of 3.4.</p>

<p>Person #1: Calls company XYZ and does a lot of research on it. He finds that company XYZ fears rival ABC because ABC has a good marketing department and excellent management. Person 1 goes to company ABC at the career fair and says, “You know, XYZ fears you because of your good marketing department and excellent management. I can help you improve those parts of your company by…” He got hired the next week.</p>

<p>Person #2: Looks up the names of chief engineers at company DEF. He can only get into contact with three of them, and he asks what they do and what they like about company DEF. At the interview, Person 2 drops the names of these people. He says, “Do you know Persons A and B? I’m a good friend of them, and I’m looking forward to doing these things that they do (describes what Persons A and B do). Person C happens to be a relative of mine (luckily, they had the same last names), and I love what he does at work”. As expected, he got hired.</p>

<p>Person #3: Stands across the street from the civil engineering building during orientations and the first few days of school. He holds a cardboard sign saying “Civil Engineering graduate from (name of college). 3.6 GPA. Hungry. Will work for food.” The department didn’t want people to be discouraged from taking civil engineering, and they couldn’t arrest him for trespassing because he was on public property. After a few students changed their majors (presumably because they saw the sign), the civil engineering department panicked and found him an entry level job at a civil engineering firm. The hours were long, the pay wasn’t too great ($35,000/year), but at least he got a job.</p>

59

<p>

That’s the exception, not the rule. From: [Dismal</a> job market for graduating U.S. students | Reuters](<a href=“http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55A02W20090611]Dismal”>http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55A02W20090611)</p>

<p>“Nationally, less than 20 percent of graduating college seniors who applied for a job this year have one, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That’s down more than 30 percent from two years ago when more than half of those who applied for a job had one by the time of graduation.”</p>

60

<p>

</p>

<p>I’m skeptical of studies of projected job growth based on baby boomer retirement. It may not happen as quickly as these studies forecast. There are several factors to be considered, such as job loss over the past decade leading to the need for additional time in the workforce to make up for lost salary; the need to earn additional money in anticipation of less Social Security and/or Medicare money available; the need to earn additional money to cover debts. These people will eventually leave the workforce, but the rate at which they go may be slower than expected, thus making it a more competitive landscape for people entering the field.</p>

<p>There is also the issue that companies will require more work, but be reluctant to hire many more people, so the people who are already working will just be required to work longer hours. People will eventually leave those jobs due to attrition, burnout, retirement, etc., but at a possibly slower rate than is being forecast.</p>

<p>

</p>