<p>What is a good college where you can easily major in both Electrical Engineering and Business? I don't know whether I should focus more on Business or Engineering. So, please help. Thank you. :)</p>
<p>Edit:</p>
<p>I did post something very similar to this before asking the same thing. I got CMU and MIT. I can only dream of MIT, but is business good at CMU? Are there any other colleges?</p>
<p>I suppose one could do at, and it has been done before, at Berkeley. Also at Penn via Jerome Fisher.</p>
<p>However, I will say that same thing that I have said about all double-major questions, which is that it's highly overrated. And I say that having gotting doubles twice now (once as an undergrad, once as a grad-student, so I guess that would make me a 'double double'). The truth is, employers don't care, and grad schools don't care. Countless times have I seen people who doubled lose out on jobs or on grad-school admissions to people who got just a single major, even for jobs in which you would expect the double to come in handy (like tech management). In fact, I know several people who doubled in engineering and business but didn't get the job they really wanted, and who have concluded bitterly that if they had to do it all over again, they wouldn't double. Rather they would just get a single major and then spend their saved time to work on their interview skills and spend more time recruiting and networking. There's little point in spending a huge amount of effort in doubling, and then not getting the job you want. </p>
<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you shouldn't double. What I am saying is that you shouldn't expect outside parties to reward you for the double, because the truth is, they probably won't. The only person who is really going to be impressed by your double is yourself. So if you're going to do a double, do it for your own self-satisfaction, not because you actually expect to gain much of an advantage via the double.</p>
<p>thanks sakky, that's really insightful :D</p>
<p>Sakky, if you can't double major in business and engineering, how else can you be in Engineering Management? My parents are the ones who care about money a lot. They want to make sure I choose a career that will pay me near 100,000 dollars. </p>
<p>I love Math, Chemistry, and Physics. I'm also excited about technology and computers. That's why I decided to be an engineer, but engineering doesn't pay much, does it? Isn't it like 50,000 instead?</p>
<p>Most people at management-level positions at engineering firms worked their way up the chain, starting out as a regular old engineer</p>
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Sakky, if you can't double major in business and engineering, how else can you be in Engineering Management?
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<p>Right there, you have just alluded to one of the enduring myths of higher education. The fact is, you almost never need a degree(s) in a field in order to actually work in that field. The only important exceptions are the professional fields like law or medicine where a specific degree is actually part of the licensing process (although certain states offer ways to become a lawyer without getting a law degree). Just take a look at the resumes of the engineering/tech management positions like CTO or VP of Engineering of the largest companies, and you will notice that almost none of them have a double-major in engineering/business. They might have a technical BS and an MBA, but they don't have a eng/biz double-major. Plenty of them have just a single bachelor's, and often times that bachelor's isn't even a technical bachelor's.</p>
<p>Let me give you a few examples:</p>
<p>David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft - BS's in math, CS, and philosophy, MS in CS from UToronto, but no degree in business.</p>
<p>Robert Baker, SVP and GM of Technology and Manufacturing (the rough equivalent of the CTO) at Intel - BSEE from Washington State (but no business degree)</p>
<p>Alan Eustace - Senior VP of Engineering and Research at Google - PhD in CS from UCF, but no business degree (at least, nothing listed).</p>
<p>William Zeitler, SVP and group exec of Systems and Technology at IBM - BS in mathematics (no business degree)</p>
<p>Nicholas Donofrio, EVP of Innovation and Technology at IBM - BSEE from RPI, MSEE from Syracuse (no business degree)</p>
<p>Paul Horn, SVP and Director of Research at IBM - BS Clarkson, PhD in physics from URochester (no business degree).</p>
<p>Shane Robison, EVP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard - BS and MS in CS from Utah (no business degree)</p>
<p>Ann Livermore, EVP of Technology Solutions at Hewlett Packard - BA Economics from North Carolina, MBA from Stanford (but no engineering degree)</p>
<p>Richard Lampman, SVP of Research at Hewlett Packard, BS and MS EE from CMU (no business degree)</p>
<p>James Jamieson, SVP of Engineering, Operations, and Technology at Boeing, bachelor's in science/humanities from MIT, master's in ChemE from MIT, no business degree.</p>
<p>I could go on and on, but you get my point - you clearly don't need a biz/eng double major to become an engineering manager or a technology manager. Some people are, as Drew00 said, engineers with engineering degrees who worked their way up into management. Some other people, like Ann Livermore, are business managers with non-engineering degrees who were picked to head technology departments. And then there are some people who never even graduated from college at all. For example, the former VP of Engineering at Google, Wayne Rosing, doesn't have a degree. And then there are all of the tech entrepreneurs - Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), etc. Or, if they did graduate, they often times graduated with neither a biz or engineering degree. Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace, didn't major in engineering or business. Instead, his degrees are in English at Berkeley and Film Studies at UCLA. Chad Hurley, CEO and cofounder of YouTube, has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of Paypal (before selling it to Ebay) has degrees in philosophy and law from Stanford. The point is, you don't actually need a CS degree or a business degree to become a wildly successful tech entrepeneur. It probably helps, but you don't actually need it. </p>
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My parents are the ones who care about money a lot. They want to make sure I choose a career that will pay me near 100,000 dollars.
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<p>If money is what you want, then go to investment banking. Wall Street bulge bracker analyst positions pay about 120-140k right out of college, and the pay accelerates quickly from there. Managing Directors easily make in the millions. </p>
<p>It doesn't really matter what you major in. You can major in anything and get into Ibanking. Plenty of engineering students head off to Ibanking. It's become something of a running joke at MIT that the best MIT engineering students don't really want to work as engineers, but would rather work at Goldman Sachs. </p>
<p>Now, it should be said that Ibanking is a grueling career. Many (probably most) people who enter it find that they hate it, especially the hours. It is literally an 80-100 hour per week job, with high stress. You're making a lot of money, but you're definitely working like a dog. The job is also intensely competitive. It's and up-or-out system, meaning that if you're not doing exceptional work that is enough to get you promoted to the next level, then you're going to be fired. You can't just sit at the same level, doing average work. It's definitely a tough game. But you really can make boatloads of money. </p>
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I love Math, Chemistry, and Physics. I'm also excited about technology and computers. That's why I decided to be an engineer, but engineering doesn't pay much, does it? Isn't it like 50,000 instead?
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<p>I guess that depends on what you mean by "much". 50k a year is far more than most other bachelor's degree recipients can ever hope to make. 50k a year is significantly higher than the average wage in the country, and that 50k is a starting salary, whereas the average national wage includes all wages - starting and experienced. An engineering job pays you better than almost any other job you can get with just a bachelor's. So if you don't think engineers get paid well, what about the vast majority of Americans who don't even make what an engineer makes?</p>
<p>Business at CMU was recently quoted by Newsweek as overlapping with "Wharton". It is definitely a tier 1 B school that compares with the likes of Stern and Ross on east coast postgrad success.</p>
<p>The average median salary for 2005 and 2006 has been 55k (the highest base salary tied with Wharton) and its "mode" companies for 2005 have been:</p>
<p>IBM, JP Morgan, Merill Lynch, Lehman Brothers</p>
<p>For 2006 it has been:</p>
<p>JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, IBM Consulting, Deutsche Bank, Deloitte Consulting. </p>
<p>The school is pretty small so there is variation in the "mode" companies but over the years it has been consistent. Wall Street company recruitment is high and so are salaries and bonuses. The Tepper school's acceptance rate dropped to 19.23% and CMU is consistently listed/ranked for its job networking and recruitment skills. The most notable and reputable would be Newsweek's "Hottest College for a Job" listing in '05.</p>
<p>For ECE/engineeering I feel like I don't have to defend/explain. CMU has enough of a reputation for that.</p>
<p>Drew00: How long does it usually take to work up the chain?</p>
<p>Sakky: You are very intelligent! You give very detailed answers, and I love it! Thanks for showing me that you don't have to double major to be a management tech. :) Could you tell me more about investment banking? What do they actually do? Where do they work? Who do they work with? I never heard of investment banking before. </p>
<p>AcceptedAlready: Thanks a lot for the details on CMU. :) I hope I'll get accepted.</p>
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Thanks for showing me that you don't have to double major to be a management tech.
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<p>There's actually a more general point, which is that you don't need to have majored in something in order to actually work in that field. Most history majors will not actually work as professional historians, most political science majors will not actually work as professional political scientists, most sociology majors will not actually work as professional sociologists, most math majors will not actually work as professioanal mathematicians. </p>
<p>The link between the engineering major and the engineering job is obviously tighter, but is still not irrevocable. Plenty of engineering students will never work a day in the life as engineers, preferring instead to work as investment bankers, or management consultants, or go on to law school or medical school. Furthermore, you can sometimes get hired as an engineer without having an engineering degree. This seems to happen most of all with sotware engineering jobs, where many people majored in other things but picked up programming skills on the side, or in some cases, never even graduated from college at all (i.e. Bill Gates). But even other 'engineering' jobs are open to non-engineers. For example, I know 2 girls who work at Intel as research engineers who did not major in engineering. Instead, one majored in chemistry, the other majored in physics (she has a PhD in physics). </p>
<p>This in fact gets to a related point which is that most US tech companies are not actually led by engineers. Look up the biographies of the CEO's of the leading tech companies - Microsoft (Steve Ballmer), Intel (Paul Otellini), HP (Mark Hurd), Dell (Kevin Rollins), eBay (Meg Whitman), Cisco (John Chambers), IBM (Sam Palmisano), Sony (Howard Stringer), Boeing (Jim McNerney), Pfizer (Jeff Kindler), Yahoo (Terry Semel), etc., and you will see that these people do not have engineering degrees. Ballmer is closest, with a degree in applied math, which is related to engineering, but it still is not a "real" engineering degree. </p>
<p>Now of course, there are some tech companies like Google (Eric Schmidt) and ExxonMobil (Rex Tillerson) which are led by engineers. But the point is, most tech companies are not. The biggest factor explaining this is that there just aren't that many engineers - of the approximately 1.4 million bachelor's degrees conferred by US schools every year, only about 60,000 (or less than 5%) are engineering degrees, and even if you include all the people getting 'engineering technology' and computer/information science degrees, that only comes to a total of about 138,000 people, or still less than 10% of the total. </p>
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Could you tell me more about investment banking? What do they actually do? Where do they work? Who do they work with? I never heard of investment banking before.
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<p>Read all about it:</p>
<p>this is all very disconcerting to me, as i have just recently decided to double major in electrical engineering and business, my potential schoools being UCLA and/or berkeley. i must say, this delivers a very serious shock to my system. In which case, sakky, i gotta say...i'm in complete disbelief. that isnt a jab at you or anything, i'm just in complete disbelief. at this point, though, i'm still going off of anecdotal evidence in this matter. this may mean that i radically shift all of my classes entirely, which in reality, really throws me for an absolute loop. I was pushed by my father and actually other people that i talked to to get some kind of technical background-electrical engineering or computer sciences especially, because working in the 20th century means working around computers. is it something i want to do? sure. it is sometihng, however, that i have been doubting the relevance of. seeing this has greatly confused me. my potential career track is, in fact, investment banking. </p>
<p>i really have absolutely no idea what to say. but i will take devil's advocate to further the exploration of this subject. right now, i'm operating off of anecdotal evidence from you, sakky. not to say that it should be completely discredited, but i do wish to find more resources in which to validate the claims. is this at all possible, do you know?</p>
<p>seriously, this changes everything about my future college career. and i'm not even kidding at all when i say that.</p>
<p>Well, first off, as far as value of the double major is concerned, I don't ask you to believe me. I just ask you to believe the evidence. You are free to gather your own evidence. Go to the website of any major public tech company and read the biographies of the management. You will notice that almost none of the management will have a double major. They may have a technical undergrad degree and then an MBA. But rarely if ever will they have a true double. Pick any 10 large tech companies randomly and do this, and I think you will convince yourself that you don't really need a double in order to become a tech manager. </p>
<p>In fact, you will find that often times, tech companies and tech divisions are led by people who don't even have a technical degree. Sam Palmisano of IBM and Howard Stringer of Sony have degrees in history. </p>
<p>This in fact gets to another related topic. Essayist and former tech entrepreneur Paul Graham said it best when he said that the American economy relies on "dynamic typing", a term from computer science which basically means that people are free to reinvent themselves in their career. ** You are not defined by your college major **. Plenty of people end up in careers that have nothing to do with what they majored in. A lot of people on CC seem to think that what you major in dictates what you will do for the rest of your life, and this is simply not true. People reinvent themselves all the time. Just because you majored in engineering does not mean that you have to work as an engineer. </p>
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i must say, this delivers a very serious shock to my system. In which case, sakky, i gotta say...i'm in complete disbelief. that isnt a jab at you or anything, i'm just in complete disbelief. at this point, though, i'm still going off of anecdotal evidence in this matter. this may mean that i radically shift all of my classes entirely, which in reality, really throws me for an absolute loop. I was pushed by my father and actually other people that i talked to to get some kind of technical background-electrical engineering or computer sciences especially, because working in the 20th century means working around computers. is it something i want to do? sure. it is sometihng, however, that i have been doubting the relevance of. seeing this has greatly confused me. my potential career track is, in fact, investment banking.
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<p>I don't see why this would throw you for a loop. Plenty of engineering students do not ever work a day in their lives as engineers, instead heading off to other careers such as investment banking. Like I said above, it's become something of a running joke at MIT that the best engineering students will actually end up not working as engineers at all, instead going to Wall Street. Ibanking draws from a wide variety of majors. People with art degrees can go to Ibanking. What you need is to go to a school at which the banks recruit (both Berkeley and UCLA fit the bill), and to do well on the interview. It would also help if you could get summer internship experience in Ibanking (which itself depends on both going to a school at which the banks recruit and on doing well on the interview). Networking is also key. </p>
<p>Now let me be clear. Most people at any school and in any major aren't able to get an Ibanking job. And even of those that do get in, many of those find out that they hate it. It is an extremely stressful job. What a degree like EECS can do for you is deliver for you a good backup career, in case you can't get an Ibanking job, or you do get it but have to quit because you loathe it. </p>
<p>As far as verifying evidence about Ibanking, I would say that there are plenty of other threads on CC that have gone into great depth about Ibanking. Go to the Internships/Careers thread, the MBA thread, or just search. You will find many other people who will tell you the same thing I have told you. Or go to some other reputable discussion board. Or just search around on Internet websites, and you can verify everything that I say. I'd like to think that I have portrayed Ibanking fairly accurately, and you are free to search around for verification.</p>