<p>Whatt… I know a guy whos graduating this spring in Mechanical engineering with a 2.7 and his starting salary is 69,000$! </p>
<p>Your gpa barely matters! If you can maintain near a 3.0 and have excellent speaking skills you are a hot commodity in engineering. Every engineer I know who can speak well is doing very well in engineering without good grades. </p>
<p>When it comes down to getting a first job, words speak louder than actions in my eyes.</p>
<p>What Sapere says has some truth to it. Communication skills are very important. In my Engineering Technical Writing course, many engineers struggled to write a simple research report over a topic of their own choosing. Even more surprising: some didn’t know the difference between a results and conclusion section of a lab report. If you can’t communicate your ideas to an audience, you are in some serious trouble no matter how well you do in everything else.</p>
<p>Everything I have heard over the last 4 years in engineering from recruiters is really just to stay above a 3.0 (or whatever their cutoff is). It is great if you have above a 3.5 too. Other than that, it isn’t a big deal. </p>
<p>Saying you need a 3.5 is ridiculous. Saying you for sure can do well with a 2.7 is also ridiculous. </p>
<p>Obviously, it is better to have the high GPA and have it help you, instead of it closing doors for you. </p>
<p>Also, why the emphasis on med school, law school, business school, etc. Most engineers aren’t looking to do that. An MBA is something you would get after gaining experience in the field. </p>
<p>@vladenschlutte, oh yeah, that’s right, you graduated. My bad I forgot about that when I posted that. </p>
<p>Commencement was awful, so you didn’t miss anything haha</p>
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<p>1) I am like half joking
2) Through my personal experience, as well as the experience of others I know, IOE, relative to some other engineering majors, is easier. Maybe that is just my opinion, no biggie. That’s just what I gathered over 4 years.
3) You’re right, do what you love and what you have a passion for. Not everyone lasts in engineering though. I know people that couldn’t handle some part of it and changed to business. That’s all I was sayig.</p>
<p>@chemengdude You are part of the problem of misinformation on these forums. You think they dont consider a anthropology major with a 3.9 versus a engineer with a 3.2? </p>
<p>“But here’s the rub: that may well be well and good for engineering, but will not cut it for med school, dentistry or higher ranked law and mba programs. in these programs you need 3.4 minimum to be competetive. and data10, the issue with law and MBA is that the ranking is critical, basically 1st tier only for law and even then.”</p>
<p>You have no idea what you are talking about. There are several attorneys that go to 3rd tier and 4th tier schools and do just fine. When I lived in the Minneapolis/St Paul area, the University of Minnesota was the obvious top choice for law but state schools usually only offer a law Full Time.</p>
<p>I know several people who had to work FT while they getting their law degrees, so they ended up going to places like William Mitchell College of Law, Hamline University or University of St Thomas.</p>
<p>Here in Iowa, we have the same type of deal: the University of Iowa is the top choice but several people go to Drake: they offer it PT and it is the only choice if you are working FT.</p>
<p>Regarding MBA’s, there are hundreds of different types of MBA’s. Some are extremely competitive, some can be done 100% online, some do not even require a GMAT. </p>
<p>When I was considering doing a MBA, I found a very cheap option through the University of Nebraska, their MBA could be done 100% online and it was convenient- unless you are going to Harvard or some top ranked school, I don’t think most employers give a damn if your MBA is from Nebraska or the University of Central Florida- it is mostly a worthless degree anyways, a good resume booster perhaps.</p>
<p>@Terps93 - I happen to be very familiar with Maryland and all the resources they offer engineering students. If your gpa is not where you would like it to be, have you been or have you considered utilizing all the support services offered? </p>
<p>The thing that troubles me is your statement, “However, I grew up in the middle class and honestly, I would consider not moving up in terms of financial standing to be a failure on my part, that is why I dislike engineering.” </p>
<p>You need to redefine failure. Getting a job where you are able to be fully self-sufficient (mom and dad are not helping in any way) is in NO way a failure- especially in this tough economy… As a parent, I see that as very successful! </p>
<p>Remember, you cannot ascribe success or failure to any one profession. It depends more on an individual’s own capacity and what he/she does with that profession that makes all the difference. It’s a commitment to excellence and hard work that defines success or failure. </p>
<p>How is it that your classmates in high school (that had the same classes/education as you) all were accepted/rejected by different schools? Is it your high school’s failure that not everyone was accepted to MIT? </p>
<p>It’s not the school that makes you successful, nor is it the profession; it is the individual that makes for his/her own success. Sometimes school is tough and unfair, and you won’t see the immediate rewards for working harder than your peers…just remember the story of the tortoise and the hare…</p>
<p>Hang in there and rock those finals!!!</p>
<p>You shouldn’t compare direct salary, you need to see the unlimited upside potential for an engineer. As Cramer from Mad Money show said “nerds are not only embarrassing, but embarrassing rich”. Nerds rule!</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a great idea to go into engineering if you don’t want to be an engineer, unless you simply think it’s a fun major.</p>
<p>However, engineers are by no means trapped in a middle class lifestyle (is that a bad thing, anyway?).</p>
<p>I just read a survey from Evaluation Engineering Magazine that indicated that the average engineer earns about $100,000. That’s by no means an average income. Some would call that middle class, but they don’t know what the true middle class wage earner earns in this country.</p>
<p>By the same token, I wouldn’t recommend going into engineering for the money, because no amount of money is worth doing something you don’t enjoy.</p>
<p>Some engineering jobs may be boring and mundane (especially entry-level ones), and any engineering job could be boring to most people (just as being a lawyer would be disinteresting to most people, yet is fascinating and challenging to a good lawyer). There is a huge variance in what engineers do. Some design and oversee the building of one-of-a-kind machines. Some lay out factory floors so they are efficient. Some help customers with equipment problems. Some design airplane wings. Some design subcomponents that are invisible to the user but that solve enormous technical problems, and these invisible subcomponents are critical to the operation of a boat, a car or a power tool. Some press specialized materials beyond their known limits to develop a boring-looking box that allows 10,000 chips to whiz station-to-station through a semiconductor fab clean room, untouched and uncontaminated by human hands.</p>
<p>In addition, most engineers don’t remain engineers for their entire careers. They move into management positions in engineering, sales (an engineer who can sell can make a lot of money), production/operations, business development and general management. I’ve recruited four presidents for small- to medium-sized industrial companies recently, and all four organizations have given me the same mandate: find someone who started as an engineer, then moved into an engineering or project/program management position, then added some customer experience through sales or business development before moving into a general management position. They also said that operations management experience would be good, too (required in one case). The key here is that all four companies wanted someone who started as an engineer.</p>
<p>By the way, the richest guy I know with an engineering degree paid $56 to buy ½% of a small company in Seattle in 1981, with the stipulation that he also would come to work full-time for that company. Never did find out how much that $56 investment became worth (never dared ask him), but his art collection is valued at over $100-million, and I think his share of a major league baseball team is worth over $400-million.</p>
<p>PS: Company after company tells me that they can’t get enough engineers right now. Despite that, there doesn’t seem to be enough students going into engineering now. Projections are that the engineering shortage will continue.</p>
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<p>I don’t agree with this statement. Google stem shortage/crisis myth and you’ll see more than a few articles like this.
<a href=“The STEM Crisis Is a Myth - IEEE Spectrum”>http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth</a></p>
<p>Of course, Google “[literally anything] myth” and you’ll get hits. Googling something with the word “myth” after it is hardly proof that there is some big myth actually occurring. Google “Earth 6000 years” and you’ll get a bunch of sources claiming the Earth is 6,000 years old.</p>
<p>That said, there are some legitimate questions as to how real that shortage actually is given the relative stagnation of salaries over the last decade. Part of the problem is that the skills a lot of engineers have and what the companies need don’t always align so they end up with a giant line of slightly underqualified applicants who vie for that average salary rather than one or two great candidates that they must pay a premium.</p>
<p>@boneh3ad … What are some examples of skills that colleges are not teaching their engineering grads?</p>
<p>@RedEyeJedi There really isn’t a universal set of examples since every job and every hiring manager is different with different expectations. The only one that seems to apply across the board is that many people seem to be pretty deficient when it comes to written and oral communication.</p>
<p>The other issue is that it seems many companies don’t want to be bothered with on-the-job training anymore. I suspect there are simply a lot of instances where industry and academia disagree on who should be teaching some of the more job-specific skills.</p>
<p>I suck at memorizing. I hated analyzing books that were just meant to be enjoyed. And I hate dealing with dumb people. I like building and working with technology. I don’t have very many options to do something I would enjoy and get paid well. Hence, Engineering. </p>
So you went to engineering school and gasp, there were other people there who also wanted to be engineers and they were smarter (studiers). So you graduate with an okay or low gpa and you now get the awesome prize of being an engineer. Not a doctor. Not a lawyer. An engineer. You did not get ripped off. I also want to go into med after engineering school, but I understand that engineering could make that impossible for me, but I would rather struggle through an engineering degree than breeze through biochem and still not get into med because the program’s IFG ( a difficulty factor of sorts used by universities for transfers) isn’t high enough for me to be considered even with a 4.3 gpa. because your pre-med may become your new career choice, you have to love it. That might be where you went wrong. Also, I understand wanting to improve your financial status, but at some point you should ask yourself why dollar amounts matter so much to you. You’d be surprised what you can get and buy on 60000$ a year. That satisfies needs, and then some. you could singlehandledy raise children (mind you, not many) on that income. So ask yourself, what concrete, non-frivolous things do you want to do with 100000$ + a year other than brag about being rich? I do respect that engineering is not for you. And i wish you the best in the finance world. But don’t put down a whole profession/domain because you don’t enjoy it.