<p>
[quote]
I trust Google with all my searches, though I've never paid them anything for it.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Shenanigans!! Other people have paid for you to search, through ads! You trust Google because Google is good, and because you trust Google, they get paid. Shenanigans.</p>
<p>From Sakky:
[quote]
{Ever notice that in the US, engineers rarely win the Rhodes Scholarship? I would suspect that, in the US, there are far more Harvard graduates who have won the Rhodes Scholarship than there are total engineering graduates from all of the engineering programs in the country who have won the Rhodes).
[/quote]
This is really funny. Last fall, three US Rhodes winners had undergraduate engineering degrees. Harvard had two winners total. </p>
<p>The data does not lie. Only BS from uninformed posters does.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I know its not fair to compare a discussion centered around the "average" with the outstanding, but do you think Isaac Newton formulated the laws of motion and gravitation because he was paid to do it? Was Einstein a highly paid individual? Von Neumann? Euclid? Shakespeare? Was even Bill Gates paid to create Microsoft? I think the work that each of these people did was probably the most rewarding thing possible, financially or otherwise.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You're right because the average person is not going to make contributions like these people did. Not only this but most people don't feel as passionately towards one subject as these people did. Most people enjoy spending their free time with family, friends, or personal interests. The average person wouldn't spend their free time doing what they do for a job. I'm sure some would but not all of us can do a "fun" job.</p>
<p>lol aibarr... I know Google gets paid. I was just trying to say that the quality of a service isn't always judged by how much you pay for it.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Not only this but most people don't feel as passionately towards one subject as these people did. Most people enjoy spending their free time with family, friends, or personal interests.
[/quote]
And thats the crux of the argument. People are all very different and its hard to come to any one-size-fits-all type of conclusion. As long as you have something that motivates you to look forward, you're set.
My parents, for instance, don't have any real careers. But I would argue to say that their career is their children... because thats what motivates them to do everything they do, thats where they derive their satisfaction from, and to what they contribute everything to. Its like a project... the choices you make for your children are like design choices you make for a project, just in a far more abstract way.</p>
<p>This gives rise to another question, however. If free time with family, friends, and personal interest is the most important thing to you (nothing wrong with that), then are most people expecting too much from a career? Is it okay to think of a career as something you can reasonably enjoy to make money so that you can explore your true interests? I ask this because most people I know want something very ideal from their career. They want their career to be the most important thing in their life (ie: career > family, etc.).</p>
<p>Yes, prestige of undegraduate school matters in engineering because potential recruiters who pay $70,000+ a year up throw out applications when they never heard of the college the person graduated from. </p>
<p>Ivy League and internships under your belt? Look forward to a six figure salary in 5-7 years after graduating.</p>
<p>The first thing I ever learned was that we're not in the business of putting up buildings. We're in the business of making money. Pretty much everything is centered around money here... but did I choose this job because I make significantly more money here than somewhere else? No. Ironic, isn't it?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yes, prestige of undegraduate school matters in engineering because potential recruiters who pay $70,000+ a year up throw out applications when they never heard of the college the person graduated from.
[/quote]
Well the question isn't whether or not it matters, but rather which schools are considered prestigious in the engineering world.</p>
<p>hopefully, i will have the decision between michigan, illinois, purdue, and upenn for aerospace engineering (mechE for upenn). i know that purdue will be the least expensive and would probably be the default choice if i dont get into upenn, but upenn in the mix would make things interesting. since upenn is not as "good" in engineering as purdue, would i still be competitive for good aero grad schools (i.e. MIT, Stanford, UMich)?
i dont plan on being an engineer all of my life. i want to go back and get my mba after i get some experience.</p>
<p>Explorer: If you are interested in aero and mechanical you should explore GaTech, which is near the top for both undergrad and grad.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i dont plan on being an engineer all of my life. i want to go back and get my mba after i get some experience.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Then why do you want to bother considering aero grad school?</p>
<p>wobudong: looked at it, visited it, loved it, just too many dudes...</p>
<p>racinreaver: because i want to keep my options open. i dont think i will know exactly wait i want to do for another 3-4 years... and even then i will still have some questions to ask myself. so, would going to upenn or purdue for undergrad be better for engineering grad school admissions? would the prestige of one equalize the engineering power of the other?</p>
<p>Isn't going to grad school mostly about GPA? Most engineering schools won't be very kind to your GPA.</p>
<p>
[quote]
wobudong: looked at it, visited it, loved it, just too many dudes..
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You do know that Emory and Georgia State are within about 5 miles right? Both have more women than men. There's a lot of intermingling between the students off campus.</p>
<p>
[quote]
would going to upenn or purdue for undergrad be better for engineering grad school admissions? would the prestige of one equalize the engineering power of the other?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't think the U Penn name will carry any extra weight over Purdue in admissions for engineering graduate school since Penn isn't nearly as well known for its engineering as Purdue is. I think both schools would have excellent resources for you to take advantage of, so it's really up to you where you'd fit in best. One thing you should do is go to both schools' websites and find their course catalogs. See what requirements there are for the degree you're interested in (or if there even is an aero degree at U Penn), and count how many upper-level electives are listed in the catalog. For example, if one school only has a handful of junior/senior level classes it's probably not as strong of a program as one that offers more than you'd be able to take.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Isn't going to grad school mostly about GPA? Most engineering schools won't be very kind to your GPA.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Going to a professional school like doctors or lawyers do is more about your GPA than anything else (possibly MBA too, though I think work experience is a big factor there). For grad school (which generally implies seeking a MS or PhD it tends to be more about research experience in addition to keeping a solid GPA).</p>
<p>"Maybe somebody from Mudd could chime in about this. They only offer a general engineering degree. I think I remember aibarr saying she had a hard time trying to get her company to recruit there because of that."</p>
<p>I go to Mudd. I'm a senior engineering major. I have an excel spreadsheet with companies that have shown deep interest in hiring me. These include:</p>
<p>NASA JPL
Southwest Research Institute
Stanford Research Institute
Aerovironment
Wavefront Tech
Honeywell Aerospace
eSolar (IdeaLab)
Veritas Int'l</p>
<p>I've removed Lockheed Martin and Boeing as I'm not interested.</p>
<p>Even though the economy is going south, it appears most of us from Mudd are having no trouble finding top-notch jobs. I know that this is purely anecdotal but hey, I'm 0.143% of my school...</p>
<p>
[quote]
This is really funny. Last fall, three US Rhodes winners had undergraduate engineering degrees. Harvard had two winners total
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is really funny. Nobody is denying where there are some years where more engineers win than Harvard graduates. Heck, there are a few (rare) years where nobody from Harvard wins.</p>
<p>The question is, who has more overall winners? Harvard has well over 300 in the history of the US Rhodes. Does anybody really think there is anywhere close to 300 Rhodes engineers?</p>
<p>Sakky, </p>
<p>Do your homework. Answer your question. For once, please use data instead of BS or rhetoric! You may be surprised. </p>
<p>While you do the research, you might also want to look at trends over time. What Harvard did 30 or more years ago is hardly relevant to modern times. </p>
<p>Again: Do your homework...for once.</p>
<p>Edit: While you are at it, zakky, you should really weight your results by the percentage of colleges of the Rhodes winners that offer engineering. For example, your esteemed Harvard does not even offer an engineering degree, unless they changed in the past few years with the new emphasis on that division.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I know two things in life: i am my mother's son, and that i should never get into an internet debate with sakky, but here it is:
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Ha! And then you proceed to do just that. </p>
<p>
[quote]
My two sentences do not contradict, and I don't really know where you got that idea from. My only explanation for why you would think they contradict is that you think a job's salary is the only factor in making career decisions. People's priorities change all the time. What they think is important in their 20s may be less important in their 30s. Is 40 hours a week MORE in IB worth the extra salary potential? to me it is.</p>
<p>But, it's not hard to see why someone in their 30s with an established home life and young children, would want the less hours and less stress of most engineering jobs.--> Which pays for, with all things considered, a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. I'm sure you would agree with me that MONEY IS NOT THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have never said that money was the single most important thing in life. </p>
<p>But I would simply state 2 points. #1, many (probably most) jobs, including engineering jobs, aren't really that fulfilling. I know a bunch of software developers who work for online advertising firms, and hence are basically trying to figure out new, annoying ways to spam you. How fulfilling is that? But they do get paid well. </p>
<p>I agree with electrifice here - most people just view a job as a way to get paid so they can feed their family. The guy who just came to wash the bathrooms in my office - do you think he really gains "fulfillment" doing that? It's just a job that pays the bills. </p>
<p>Nor is it really so easy for him, or most people, to simply change jobs to something that they do find fulfilling, as I would argue that most people don't really have the luxury of finding a job that they actually truly find fulfilling. Let's be honest - most jobs are mundane. Walmart is by far the largest employer in the country, but do we really believe that most of its employees find that job fulfilling? Or take engineering jobs. There's a reason that comic strips like Dilbert are popular - because people understand that it largely speaks the truth about how it is to work at many (probably most) engineering jobs. {Heck, I've had several jobs that were exactly described by certain Dilbert episodes.} </p>
<p>Secondly, speaking about people in their 30's and 40's, I agree that most of them don't want the low quality of life of an Ibanking job, and certainly not an entry-level one. That's why Ibanking jobs get more enjoyable as you move up. As you move up to the VP and then director ranks, you tend to work less and you certainly have more control of your working hours, because you will have the power to farm out the grunt work to your underlings. Ibankers who don't get promoted to VP and above will look forward to a nice cushy job in corporate finance where they will get paid less (but still far more than engineers), and enjoy a far higher quality of life. </p>
<p>In other words, yes, the Ibankers have a high stress job that requires very long hours, but only in the beginning. Few of them will still be feeling that pain in their 30's or 40's. After a few years of doing that, most of them will move on to a far more comfortable job. Those admittedly harsh Ibanking entry-level jobs are gateways to better things. </p>
<p>Besides, I can think of engineering jobs that are also extremely harsh. I've known engineers at General Electric who were tagged on the 'fast track', which offered them fast opportunities for promotion, but also required working 80+ hours a week. I've heard Microsoft engineers joking that the company offered "flextime", meaning that you could work any 14 hours of the day that you wanted. Electronic Arts actually was infamously sued for having its developers work 70-90 hours a week without overtime. These guys were simply getting screwed over, for not only were they working Ibanking hours, they weren't even getting Ibanking pay, and that's just sad. If you're going to be working those kinds of hours, you better be getting paid very well.</p>
<p>Sakky, cut the BS. You love to argue from anecdote, but a grad student like you should know the weakness of such argument. For every engineer who hates his job, there are dozens who love them. Guess you never worked with engineers. </p>
<p>Ibanking more enjoyable as you move up? You been smoking something again? What keeps people going when they move up in IB is golden handcuffs and a love of money (along with a tolerance for divorce and multiple marriages...)</p>
<p>Let's get back to Rhodes scholars for a moment, since you seem to duck loosing arguments. Here's a bit of data for you to chew on:</p>
<p>In the period from 1996 to 1999, 18 Harvard folks won a Rhodes. In the same time frame, 8 engineering majors did. Before you declare victory, note that half the Scholars went to colleges that did not even offer engineering. When you then factor in the fact that only a small percentage of kids that attend a college offering engineering actually complete a degree in engineering, you can see that the odds of engineers winning are actually quite good. Note that a direct comparison of Harvard odds to engineering odds is impossible because they are such different pools to draw from. </p>
<p>Anyway, please do a bit of homework before you shoot from the hip next time.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Many I bankers, venture capitalists, and other finance people now are in the position of hoping they can get SOME job, ANY job, to pay their bills. With their firms out of business, merged, laying off, they are unemployable as finance people
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, let me put it to you this way. Some of you may remember the 2001 crash that hit the tech sector very very hard. I certainly remember. Thousands of startups and small firms died, and many larger tech companies shed thousands of jobs. Cisco laid off 8500 people, I believe Intel laid off well over 10,000, etc. Now, obviously, not all of those jobs lots were engineering jobs, but there were still a lot of engineers who lost their jobs. Lots of CS guys who were working at dead Web companies, lots of EE guys who were working at dead datacom/telco, networking hardware, and semiconductor firms, lots of chemical engineers and bioengineers working at dead biotechs, lots of other chemical engineers and matsci's working at dead firms that were trying to create advanced materials (i.e. advanced polymers and composites) - just lots and lots of unemployed engineers. Lots of those people became unemployable as engineers, especially those people who graduated in the late 90's or early 2000's hoping to catch the wave.</p>
<p>But there's one major difference between then and now, which venture capitalist (and founder of Paypal) Peter Thiel noted in Fortune Magazine when he asked, half-seriously, "What happened to the dot-com bailout?" Tech companies were failing left and right, yet nobody ever thought about using taxpayer money to help them. Nobody seemed to care that so many engineers couldn't find jobs and that much of Silicon Valley and Boston's Technology Highway were like ghost towns. But when the banks start failing, oh well, now the government has to step in. "It is an odd reflection on the priorities of our society," Thiel says, "that we value finance over technological innovation."</p>
<p>The</a> view from the Valley - Sep. 30, 2008</p>
<p>So, I would say that the Ibankers were brilliantly cunning. They devised a system that made them plenty of money when times were good, but that also took the rest of the economy hostage, hence necessitating a taxpayer bailout whenever things went bad. The engineers, sadly, were unable to devise such a scheme, and so when their industry crashed, nobody came to help them. Nobody cared. Sadly, I guess that's what makes the bankers smarter than us. </p>
<p>But in any case, the point is that crashes can happen in any sector. The truth is, there's probably going to be a tech crash soon, if there isn't one already. Relatively few tech IPO's have happened this year, even before the summer when the markets were still relatively decent, and tech IPO's are a general bellwether of the health of the entrepreneurship/tech community. Obviously there are going to be very few IPO's anytime soon, maybe zero for the rest of the year. Large tech companies are again talking about eliminating jobs. Ebay announced they are eliminating 1000 jobs, Micron will lose 1500, Yahoo may soon cut up to 3500 jobs, Dell is eliminating 10% of its jobs, and of course there is the drawn-out agony in the auto industry - a morbid race to see which of the Big 3 is going to declare bankruptcy first. </p>
<p>Hence, while finance jobs aren't safe, engineering jobs aren't safe either. Anybody can get caught in a bust. The only people who have true job security are tenured professors.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Now if you are fairly sure you want to be an engineer, and you are in the upper reaches academically (say you would have breezed into HYPSMC), then you are much more likely to actually graduate with your engineering degree, so the flunk out risk is low. For example, in spite of its rigor, MIT has a very high graduation rate, with almost everyone getting degrees in engineering, math, science or a highly technical version of economics. If you are one of these, then consider whether the relatively restricted engineering options at the Ivies with smaller programs fits you.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The question really is about reducing risk, especially if you really are one of those high achievers who can get into schools like that.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example. MIT and Caltech are basically of the same selectivity and tend to draw from the same pool of applicants, i.e. highly technically savvy high school seniors. Yet MIT has a decidedly lower (and hence better) "non-graduation" rate than does Caltech. Why? It's not because MIT simply has better students than Caltech does, for if anything, Caltech may actually be *more*selective than MIT is. Heck, from a purely statistical standpoint, Caltech is the most selective school in the nation. </p>
<p>I am convinced that the reason is that MIT offers a far broader set of offerings. If you go to MIT and decide that you don't really want to be highly technical, you still have good options, i.e. majoring in management at the Sloan School (now the #3 most popular major at MIT, after EECS and biology). This is far less true at Caltech. </p>
<p>This is precisely what my brother - who went to Caltech - told me, as it's a great school for those who are sure they want to be supremely technical. The problem is that there are a significant percentage of students who go there and only later find out they don't really want to do that, and Caltech doesn't really have a place for them, and hence they suffer a very painful life in barely making it to graduation, if they even manage to avoid flunking out at all. Those students would clearly have been better off by going to an Ivy or Stanford, or heck, even to MIT.</p>
<p>Again, what makes the story sad is that these were clearly some of the best high school students in the country, as they were good enough to get into Caltech. Hence, they're supposed to do well, or at least to not flunk out, from college. If some guy who barely made it out of high school goes to some unselective college and doesn't graduate, it's not much of a shock, as nobody ever really expected him to do so anyway. But if a high school superstar goes to college (like Caltech) and flunks out, that's an entirely different proposition.</p>