<p>Does doing a co-op look good to grad schools?</p>
<p>How does that look compared to doing research? Better? Worse? The same?</p>
<p>Also majoring in civil engineering if that makes a difference.</p>
<p>Why do you want to go to grad school? Usually it’s because one wants to do research. It’s a research degree. They look for interest in, and ability to do, research. A co-op doesn’t hurt but probably doesn’t help (and if given the choice, I’d do research with the extra time).</p>
<p>Starbright-- in civil engineering, if you want to go into structural engineering, you’ll need at least a masters’ degree in order to work on anything of significant interest.</p>
<p>A co-op, like any research or work experience, looks good to grad schools. Either is good. Maybe research is better if you’re really interested in doing research, but either will give you an advantage.</p>
<p>Listen to Aibarr, much better answer than mine!</p>
<p>Oh, poppycock! 
Your answer is right on the money for virtually every other engineering field except perhaps civil/structures, which I’m only assuming the OP is going into, and it’s good to know a person’s motives for grad school, either way… A walk in the park, it ain’t.</p>
<p>Cranstonjdc, what subfield of civil engineering are you planning on going into, and why do you want to go to grad school?</p>
<p>I have a question to contribute: what if I only want to do a co-op program for experience and to make money to pay back my loans? Will this plan look unfavorable to grad schools, or will it not make a difference? I even worked out that if I had both work experience and research experience, and I chose to apply to grad school (the research route) then they would consider me a stronger candidate…? Now that I’ve typed it out and read it, it doesn’t seem so concrete, but would this happen? And is it worth the extra time in college, to do co-op?</p>
<p>I want to go to grad school because I would like to specialize. I was under the impression that grad school allows you to do this. Is this not correct? I plan on going for water resources or applied fluids(Thats what clemson calls it pretty much same thing). I also am considering hydrogeology which is not a branch of civil.</p>
<p>LIke hadsed it would also help me financially</p>
<p>Grad school is expensive. It costs $30-$60k (you sometimes can get waivers for grading or being a TA) PLUS you have the lost opportunity cost of $60k a year while working. Financially, I don’t think grad school is a good option unless you are sitting around unemployed. It’s also a necessary option if you want to go into academia.</p>
<p>You can take a whole bunch of classes in grad school to specialize in an area, but there is no guarantee in industry that you will work in that specialization. In industry, you work in the area that demands your skills.</p>
<p>I’m saying that as a current grad student. But I’m doing mine as a part time program while working full time, so it’s free (company paid) and I’m earning a full paycheck while going to school.</p>
<p>Water resources, much like structural engineering, is one where further education would be of benefit to you. I’m unfamiliar with hydrogeology.</p>
<p>I’d say that you ought to look for jobs AND apply to grad schools. If one of the grad schools gives you a full ride plus a Teaching Assistantship, Research Assistantship, or Fellowship, then go for it. It’s a little tougher to get the motivation to go back to grad school once you’ve had a salary for a while. At the same time, it’s probably wise to apply for jobs and see what happens, too.</p>
<p>Bigtrees, aerospace works differently from civil engineering. Civs don’t make $60K a year right out of the gate with just a bachelors degree, first off, and secondly, it’s not easy to get even an entry-level position at a company that does any interesting work unless you have a masters degree. For highly-calculational and life-critical fields like structural engineering and water resources/hydrology/hydraulics engineering, your resume almost goes in the trash if you don’t have at least an MS. You just don’t have the calculational tools that the job requires without at least two years of grad school behind you. Our H&H guys here at our firm all have masters degrees or PhDs, same as our structural folks.</p>
<p>I thought that having a professional engineering license was the ticket in civil engineering?</p>
<p>You’ve gotta have that, too. In order to get a PE license, you have to get industry experience (typically four years’ worth), and in order to get industry experience, you’ve gotta get a masters degree so that you can actually land a job in the first place and start building your qualifying experience…</p>
<p>Another advantage: an MS usually takes between 1-2 years. One of those years typically(depends upon the state) counts towards your qualifying experience for the PE exam, so you only have to wait three years after school to get licensure.</p>
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<p>In general, academic research is better than R&D research work experience, R&D research work experience is better than non-research work experience, and non-research work experience is better than nothing.</p>
<p>Co-op work experience helps more for professional MS programs (non-thesis) than for research MS programs (thesis), but either way won’t hurt you.</p>
<p>Civil’s really a field where R&D and academia and industry are pretty intertwined. Just so long as you find an internship or co-op at a good company where you’re going to do some actual work, like something other than running docs to the City or County authorities, then it’ll be seen as a positive.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, most of the jobs I hear classmates getting are for general engineering or general civil engineering type jobs. A lot of the specialists are having a harder time because firms seem to want their entry level engineers flexible enough to go into whatever area they have work in. Also, a master’s in civil does not equate to a hire starting salary, so really the only benefit I see to it is if you’re dead set on one particular area of civil engineering or if you can’t find a job you like coming off your B.S.</p>
<p>In a typical economy, there are jobs for specialists. Also, most of the specialization jobs are probably being snagged by the folks with masters degrees.</p>
<p>A masters in civil engineering DOES mean you’ll get a slightly higher starting salary (it’s probably the difference between a 45K salary and a 55K salary, maybe more) and it means that you’ve got the benefit of getting the specialized job that you’re interested in.</p>
<p>But hey, it’s cool if you want to trust an Aggie student majoring in who-knows-what over a Rice and Illinois grad who’s gotten her degrees and has actually been employed in the field for several years…! ;)</p>
<p>John Roebling never got a master’s degree, and he did just fine.</p>
<p>As far as salaries go, I base my info from the A&M salary survey, which in fact does show that master’s start out making more, though in the survey I’m looking at, it’s 57k for an MS as opposed to 54k for a BS.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to the survey, but beware, if you click it and look at the Petroleum Engineers’ starting salaries, you will be filled with all sorts of regrets. Also interesting is how in just about every other discipline the jump from BS to MS warrants a much higher salary increase.</p>
<p>[Salary</a> Survey Results for Texas A&M University Post Graduation Plans<br>Spring 2009 (Generated 09/08/2009)](<a href=“http://careercenter.tamu.edu/guides/reports/SalarySurvey/2009/Spring/SalarySurveyResults_Spring_2009_generated_08-03-2009.html?]Salary”>http://careercenter.tamu.edu/guides/reports/SalarySurvey/2009/Spring/SalarySurveyResults_Spring_2009_generated_08-03-2009.html?)</p>
<p>Remember, once in industry you usually get a 2-5% raise per year or so. If a Masters degree takes 2 more years to get, that is 2 years (5-10%) of raises that you forgoe.</p>
<p>For example, the list shows mechanical engineering starting salary at $67,000 for a bachelor. You can figure about $6700 in raises over 2 years, or about $73,000 at the point the person with the masters graduates. Your $70,000 - $73,000 current salary will be roughly equal to their $70,000 starting salary. So I don’t see much financial benefit to getting a Masters degree.</p>
<p>Do remember that the salary survey results aren’t from a random sample. They are derived from people who volunteer to tell the school how much they make. People that are really happy about their salary are far more likely to tell the school what they make than are people who accepted an embarrasingly low offer because they didn’t have another option. (Or who may not be working in engineering at all right away.)</p>
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<p>No. The benefit lies in your ability to pursue the career that you want to pursue. Not everything’s about money.</p>
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<p>Yeah, neither did the masterminds of the pyramids.</p>
<p>“The benefit lies in your ability to pursue the career that you want to pursue.”</p>
<p>How about…the benefit is you get the fun college experience for 2 more years instead of doing some entry level crappy engineering job that doesn’t make good use of your skills anyway!</p>
<p>I’m all in favor of graduate school. I could have gone 2 more years to grad school and it would have been a much better option than the crappy engineering jobs that I had right out of school. </p>
<p>I am in a grad program right now. Sadly, I can’t say that it will benefit me in my career. I hope so but not counting on it.</p>
<p>My grad school experience was not fun like my college experience. 
It was so ridiculously uncool of an experience that one colleague said, “I have never seen a thirty-mile radius gang up on a person like Champaign-Urbana has ganged up on you…”</p>
<p>But other than that, I wouldn’t have gotten any of the cool employment offers that I’ve had since grad school, so ultimately, it was worth it.</p>