<p>Excuse what may be a elementary question, but does anyone have statistics or opinions on what factors affect engineering job placement? To be more specific, lets play with these factors:</p>
<ul>
<li>Mechanical and Civil Engineering</li>
<li>Not going to a dedicated Engineering undergraduate college, but a undergraduate school within a national university</li>
<li>Perhaps a dual degree in business </li>
<li>Geography of home and of school; Northeast, Mid-West, the South, Pacific coast</li>
</ul>
<p>EDIT: How could I forget</p>
<ul>
<li>The school's overall and engineering specific ranking</li>
<li>Popular prestige</li>
</ul>
The company’s experience with alumni from your school is also pretty important. If they had previously hired people from your school and there was a trend of it not working out, they’ll be less likely to come to recruit.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’d rather say those get you the interviews and the interviews are the most influential factor in whether or not you get hired.</p>
<p>Remember that job placement and recruiting is a series of hoop jumps or catalyzed reactions with various activation energies (just for you ChemE/BME folks).</p>
<p>The first step is to GET the recruiters to your school.
This will depend on:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Prestige/strength of program: If it’s a top program (lets just say top 30) your school has a strong program and their graduates have known skills.</p></li>
<li><p>Alumni: Huge factor as well–job placement is NETWORKING. There is a reason why Silicon Valley heavily recruits from Stanford–there is a strong alumni network there.</p></li>
<li><p>Geographical Location: Big Oil recruits heavily from California, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Why? You area near the GOM or heavy oil fields of California. Also, these schools have strong petroleum engineering programs.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So you now have the companies at your school. Now you need to find your way into an interview slot. Remember, the first interview round is based mainly off a cursory resume look. This can vary on</p>
<ol>
<li>Academics: GPA/courses/etc</li>
<li>Past experience: be it research or internships this shows that you aren’t all academics</li>
<li>Extracurricular: Shows you have leadership or personal skills</li>
<li>Networking: once again if you go to an expo and give them a good story chances are your resume will go on the top of the stack</li>
</ol>
<p>Now you got your interview. At this stage you already made it through most of the hoops and therefore your GPA or other stats don’t matter as much. What matters now is</p>
<ol>
<li>The interview!!!: Your passion, professionalism, questions/answer, etc.</li>
</ol>
While this is something that needs to be factored in, it is significantly less important in the civil and mechanical engineering fields than some other ones out there. At the civil engineering firms that I am familiar with, there are alumni from top schools as well as third tier schools.</p>