<p>I will be going to Purdue this fall. I always wanted to be an engineer but my area of interest within engineering seems to be changing everyday. So can you please evaluate which will be best for me if I aim for an MBA in a top university after 3/4 years of working with a Bachelor's degree</p>
<p>1) Civil Engineering: I have seen a lot of people complaining about CE in collegeconfidential but otherwise this major seems interesting enough esp designing bridges.</p>
<p>2)Mechanical Engineering: Designing Automobile or Space shuttles would be a great experience.But what are the job prospects?</p>
<p>3) Industrial Engineering: Purdue ranks no.3 in the nation but i wonder why the better known Universities like MIT are not even in the top 10(i dunno whether dey hav a IE dept or not) Anyways the job of an IE seems confusing and the fact that it is related to management might help me with my MBA!</p>
<p>Which 1 of dese 3 Disciplines has the best probability to find me a job right out of school ? and which 1 would be best for me? Thank you!</p>
<p>MIT has some of the best industrial engineers in the world, they’re just in different departments for some reason (actually, I known the reason - MIT treats Industrial Engineering as a cross functional discipline). If MIT started an IE department and “robbed” professors from other departments to staff it, they would be Top 3 in about a year and would probably make #1 within 5 years. Of course, their other departments would suffer, though.</p>
<p>We know nothing about you other than the fact that your interests change daily and that you want an MBA eventually. That’s not much to go on. </p>
<p>You’ll find a job with any of those fields, as long as you keep your grades up and have some internships, so that shouldn’t be a major issue (especially if you eventually want an MBA, in which case you’ll need to keep your grades up anyway and are looking for a short-term job, not a career).</p>
<p>Thanks Banjohitter! I know MIT is best for almost all sort of engineering but the US news ranking for IE came as a surprise. The thing is Even the plan for MBA is not stable. Maybe at the moment I should concentrate on Purdue’s First Year Engineering and then decide as at the moment I dont know much about engineering.But the fact with Business related subjects is that I always hated them but somehow always ended up with top grades at high school with minimum efforts but on the other hand I loved physics And Chemistry but had to work hard for the grades but I am all set for engineering at the moment!!</p>
<p>In the next 5 years or so, hopefully the economy will be better.
Lots of my friends who went with EE, IE and CS make better money compared to my Civil friends. And today, only about of 50% of my friends who work in civil fields are employed.</p>
<p>Civil
Remember Civ E is more than just structural engineering, there are many subfields that encompass things people wouldn’t even have thought of (such as transportation engineering). Furthermore, realize that only a portion Civ E’s end up as structural engineers, this sub-field also requires an M.S., and is highly competitive in industry. </p>
<p>Mech E
what can I say, if you become an ME u will spend 5 years wondering how it’s possible this major essentially encompasses anything and everything out there. </p>
<p>Industrial E
big picture, systems engineering, operations, also tends to merge in significantly with business and thus hold the moniker ‘Imaginary Engineers’…jokes aside if you play your cards right you will be ‘managing’ engineers straight out of college with an IE degree </p>
<p>‘probability of finding a job out of school’
placement for any engineering major is typically 98%, that includes the entire class (half of which will be sub 3.0)…however if ur expecting something like an r&d position with Rockwell Collins or ‘design bridges’ then it’s a matter of how competitive you with respect to your peers</p>
<p>What do you want to know about it? The geotechnical engineers I know work primarily on foundations, support of excavations, and analyses of soils for underground work (such as transit tunnels).</p>
<p>So do they work in conjunction with many other civil engineers like structurals for projects? Would I get a good amount of Geology in the curriculum?</p>
<p>They typically work with structural engineers designing foundations. Entry-level geotechnical engineers do a lot of the fieldwork and will work with contractors doing boring logs. You can’t be afraid of getting a little dirty! One geotech engineer on my site who tested tiebacks would get splattered with grout so often. He had a knack for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, haha.</p>
What are the complaints about? Most of them aren’t valid, except for one, which I’ll get to later. If it seems like a bad job, don’t worry, it’s a very broad field with different working conditions - field work, office work, out of state work, local work, overtime/non-overtime work, structural/geotech/water resources work, etc. If the complaints are about salary, you don’t need to worry about it either. The BLS stats have just been released a few days ago, and in 2009, civil engineers had a mean annual wage of $81,180/yr:</p>
<p>Even starting salaries for grads fresh out of college are still quite high ($52,000/yr). While it is a bit lower than the salaries for most engineering majors, it’s enough to let you live quite comfortably.</p>
<p>The only valid concern is the difficulty in getting a job or even a minimum-wage internship. Right now, the job prospects for civil engineers are absolutely horrendous. Since last December, the construction industry has had an unemployment rate of over 20% for every single month - twice as high as the unemployment rate for all professions. Because so much of the civil engineering sector is tied to the construction industry, civil engineers are suffering too. I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but at my school’s career fair, only three civil engineering firms showed up, while back in the housing bubble days, 15-20 civil engineering companies were there. People are so depressed about their employment prospects that many of my classmates are calling their resumes “lotto tickets”. An interview is considered “getting the mega number right” (this rarely happens), and a job offer is considered “hitting the jackpot” (this only happened to a classmate I barely knew, and he was ecstatic for weeks.)</p>
<p>1.) The school I’m going to isn’t a bad one. Its acceptance rate was under 25%, the average SAT score of incoming freshmen was above 2100, and the average unweighted GPA of incoming freshmen was around 3.8. If job prospects are so bad at a good university, imagine how they’ll be at an average one.</p>
<p>2.) While it’s true that the job market is slowly improving, it’ll take years before most of the excess construction inventory is worked out. The odds of finding a job for civil engineering majors look like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Class of 2012: “pretty slim”</li>
<li>Class of 2011: “absurdly unlikely”</li>
<li>Class of 2010: “practically impossible”</li>
</ul>
<p>No, I didn’t make those quotes up; they were taken from an advisor in the engineering department.</p>
<p>“25 percent of graduates have found jobs, up from 19.7 at this time last year, according to a NACE survey released this week.”</p>
<p>That’s for all majors. For civil engineering, it’s expected to be quite a bit lower because of the extreme difficulties the construction industry is facing.</p>
<p>so as u said, that statistic isn’t for civil engineering…have u any job placement statistics for civil engineering grads? </p>
<p>While I agree with you certain fields within Civil right now are hard to get into; I must add structural engineers again only represent one portion of civil engineering branches. Furthermore, I have never seen numbers at any school less than 50% at graduation and 90% within six months after graduation; for any engineering major.</p>
<p>yea I took a look at that, but something seems odd…</p>
<p>under “total seeking employment”, for CE/ME/EE there are only two or three for Ph.d and around 30-60 for B.S…</p>
<p>I don’t see how they could have only a couple Ph.D’s, that seems not right. And two, for B.S. the numbers are normal but not for what’s one of the biggest engineering school in the nation. </p>
<p>All of this disciplines have good job potential and will earn about the same salary starting out. I will say that there are more jobs for IE out there since they’re knowledge can be apply almot anywhere.</p>
<p>There are not more jobs for IE for your reasoning. There very well may be more (I doubt it but I have no numbers) but mechanical engineers can work in more capacities and electrical engineers have at least as broad of a skillset.</p>