<p>I decided to do materials engineering for graduate school at Georgia Tech. Currently, my goal is to get a PhD and enter into the workforce as an engineer or a research and design scientist for a company. When choosing my advisor and research topic should I choose based on the applicability of their research to the company that I'm interested in working for? Does it matter? For example, there are some professors who do biological materials. If I choose them as my advisor, will I have thrown away my chances of getting a job in the aerospace, oil, manufacturing, and semiconductor industries? Or do the companies recruit you just because you hold a degree in a field that they're looking for?</p>
<p>Your thesis area will certainly be of interest to potential employers - if you are already knowledgable about their target subject, you will be much more attractive to them. However, you will also be attractive to employers looking for related fields, and even to those who are just looking for a PhD in materials engineering.</p>
<p>So if you go bio materials, you will get more and probably better offers from those industries, but aero or oil may still take a shot at you if you show an interest and basic knowledge in their needed subjects. A lot of companies need PhD’s that they cannot easily get - they will take “near misses”.</p>
<p>I have been thinking this for a while, and I was told something somewhat different. I was told you should never study the exact topic you want to focus on in industry, and that companies actually prefer “near misses”. </p>
<p>This is because they already know what they are doing. They don’t need someone to come in and tell them what they already know. They want someone who might have a slightly different background that can bring new ideas to the table.</p>
<p>I may be wrong when it comes to materials engineering. So I guess it depends what you do in biological materials. If you have a way of involving biological materials in another field, then I think you could be appealing to companies who want to head in that direction.</p>
<p>It varies a bit, and depends on the industry - some people want “the guy who wrote the book” while others are looking for the kind of person who will think of creating random search algorithms based on gene transmission. In my company we hire both.</p>
<p>The downside to being hired for your thesis is that you are probably stuck doing that one thing as long as it is profitable…</p>