<p>Does anyone know anything about this company Exponent? They seem to recruit from the best engineering schools in the nation including Stanford. How much do you think they offer as well? </p>
<p>Great working environment? Great benefits? Can't seem to find them on the best to work for list in Fortune Magazine.</p>
<p>I worked as a forensic engineer on a litigation case opposite a couple of guys from Exponent. Those guys had PhDs, their hardhats were pristine, and they clearly had no idea what they were doing when it came to being on a jobsite… They nearly got themselves killed a few times, and I wasn’t that impressed with them. Their slant seemed to be on technical knowledge, with no regard for practical knowledge, and I’m of the school of thought that you pretty much need both in order to really truly know what you’re doing as a diagnostician.</p>
<p>Don’t look on the Fortune 500 list, you’ll just find multinational engineering conglomerates there… You won’t find many smaller specialty firms on it, just because they don’t really pursue that award. ENR (Engineering News Record) has some “top lists” that you might find them on, and I know that every year Structural Engineer and CE News have their “best firms to work for” lists, too.</p>
<p>What aspect of failure analysis are you interested in looking at? Structural? Mechanical? Electrical?</p>
<p>Most likely Environmental. Thanks for the heads up, I used to work for AECOM but the work environment was terrible, lack of morale and bad management. Ppl told me look into Parsons, Ch2mhill and others. Yea, Exponent seems too much of a theoretical work place as opposed to practical knowledge.</p>
<p>One of the guys from my research group got a job at Exponent after getting his PhD. Apparently he’s making around $100k off the bat plus he gets to travel all over for work. I know they like to take people and put them into fields they’re not familiar with, so that’s probably where aibarr’s gripe comes from.</p>
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<p>That’d explain it. (Jeez, though, they should teach them OSHA regs before they send them into unfamiliar territory and leave it to me to scream at them to quit taking pictures and get out of that unshored 6-ft trench…)</p>
<p>Exponent guys usually have Ph.D.s from Stanford or MIT (don’t really hire Master’s students). Their job offers have really high salaries in the six figures with great benefits. But, you need to be arrogant as hell to work there. Some of my ph.d. friends recently turned down job offers from them. One of my course Professors is actually in charge of the menlo park office. You need to be an expert on structural mechanics, probabilistic modeling, and finite element modeling/analysis to have of a shot of working there.</p>