<p>I'm currently in my 4th year of 5 in Mechanical Engineering and I was wondering what I should do with myself when graduation comes along. The P.E. test or whatever they're calling it now is a must in case I do plan on working as an Engineer. I was also considering going into Law school to become a patent lawyer or going to get my MBA. obviously law school is going to be much harder than MBA, MBA will probably be easier than undergrad. However that is not what's going to make my decision. I'm just not sure what I would be doing as a patent lawyer or even an engineer with my MBA. </p>
<p>Does anyone have some experience like this they'd like to share? I know how to go about getting into law and business school, I just don't know what i'd do with each degree when I got out.</p>
<p>As a patent lawyer you will be quite well paid (more than as an engineer, in my experience) but will also be very very very busy. Very. You will spend most of your time trying to determine and/or convince others (in writing or in person) whether or not someone else’s inventions are patentable or patent-infringing.</p>
<p>As an MBA-engineer with no experience you will be in a poor situation. No one will want to hire you for engineering jobs (since you clearly don’t want to be an engineer if you have an MBA) and you will lack the experience that management/business jobs really want.</p>
<p>As an MBA-engineer with at least 2-4 years of engineering experience you be primed to go into the engineering/manufacturing world in various program management, marketing, and other business roles. This is a track that pays pretty well, comparable to engineering at the start but with a much higher ceiling.</p>
<p>As an MBA-former engineer you also have the ability (based on your MBA experience) of leaving engineering behind and going into other fields, like finance. If you want more info on this route I suggest you survey the MBA threads.</p>
<p>Please note that most MBA programs WILL accept people right out of undergrad, but a colleague of mine (in the organizational management and psych field, with an MBA himself) noted that part of this is to provide “workers” on which the experienced and more promising students can practice managing. Plus, they get your not insubstantial tuition.</p>
<p>@Andrewsky, are you saing everyone gets their MBA and no one does anything with it? or are you saying your MBA isn’t worth anything until you start moving up the company ladder?</p>
<p>MBA’s are worthless until you have the experience to manage. Why would a company want to hire a manager who doesn’t even have experience at the entry level? Also, with patent law some kind of scientific graduate education is preferred be it Ph.D or MS, I don’t think many patent law firms will hire a BS+law degree with no experience either.</p>
<p>Your success out of law school determines your salary. Someone who graduated top of their class from Yale will receive a big law firm 160,000+ salary straight out but someone who came from a state college with okay grades will not.</p>
I know two patent lawyers, and neither have an MS or PhD. It is a trade off - most patent law is 80% law, 20% science, and you don’t really need the higher degree until you are looking at the few cases that are 80% science, 20% law.</p>
<p>Grades play a big part but involvement (experience if you will) is just as important, if not more so (Clerking experience, Journal involvement, Moot Court involvement).</p>
<p>Well, the (surprising) truth of the matter is that, at least at the better MBA programs, you don’t really need experience and you certainly don’t need to be ready to manage, for the fact is, most of the graduates from those programs don’t actually take management jobs. Rather, they take positions in finance or consulting which, frankly, pay far better than do general management positions. For example, despite being the purportedly best general management business school in the world, Harvard Business School sends only a small minority of its graduates directly to general management. </p>
<p>{Which points to an enduring irony in the business world - companies may not want to hire managers who lack entry-level experience, but, bizarrely, they can and do engage consulting firms - and pay multi-million dollar fees for the privilege - who are largely populated with employees fresh out of undergrad or MBA programs who lack entry-level experience. }</p>
<p>Now, certainly I agree that lower-level MBA programs likely do send a large proportion of their graduates to general management positions. But that then begs the question of do you really want to attend a lower-level MBA program.</p>
I wasn’t dwelling on this option too much because the OP seemed to be interested in somehow actually applying their engineering knowledge. Any major can get an MBA and switch to finance or consulting, often with a big pay raise even without experience. You don’t need to go through an engineering undergrad if that is what you want to do.</p>