<p>You’re in the fire, having jumped from the frying pan. If anything, science & math skills are even more portable (and therefore outsource-able) than are engineering skills. At least with engineering careers, you sometimes need to interface with the marketing and strategy/bizdev departments and have some level of cultural awareness to design products that customers actually want. </p>
<p>On the other hand, you can literally be anywhere in the world, and never converse with anybody, to prove a new math theorem. The proof of Poincare’s Conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics history, was recently and famously discovered by a highly reclusive and eccentric Russian. Similarly, science research can be conducted anywhere that has the appropriate facilities. The costs of building new science labs and elite university science departments are a mere rounding error compared to the gargantuan costs of the mortgage/financial crash and the resulting bailouts, a fate that rapidly developing nations such as China and India have savvily avoided. How many new science labs, and resultant new jobs for scientists, could have been built from the funds devoted just towards rescuing AIG alone?</p>
<p>It was mentioned that most grad students at top US engineering schools are foreigners. True. Yet the fact is, most grad students at top US science/math programs are also foreigners. No shelter from the storm is available from science or math.</p>
<p>I agree that selection of a particular field of study should be based on one’s own strengths and interests and not on fear of competition.</p>
<p>I think it is important to have a strong math/science foundation and not all engineering programs include a strong core curriculum like the one in CalTech.</p>
<p>It’s debateable whether you even really need to have great grades. I can think of a number of people who didn’t even have 3.0’s who nevertheless got lucrative consulting or banking offers, albeit at 2nd tier firms. Although, to be fair, it should be said that they had cracker-jack schmoozing skills - obtained from their pervasive partying and socializing at the expense of their studies - and they were admittedly remarkably handsome men or beautiful women. Nevertheless, I remember that it was quite a smack in the face for those engineering students who studied hard and earned top grades who were nevertheless consigned to jobs lower-paying than some people who barely studied at all and had instead spent their college years partying and enjoying life. </p>
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<p>Or, frankly, any major at all. People with humanities degrees can be hired as strategy consultants or bankers, although I’m still not entirely sure why.</p>
<p>During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.</p>