<p>I'll be graduating in May with a BS in Civil Engineering with a structural interest. I'm graduating from Georgia Tech and just had a few questions about what to expect from potential employers.</p>
<p>First off, GT is ranked #3 in the country (via USNews) in civil engineering and I was curious about how that will affect the salary I might be offered. Do employers just see an engineering degree as an engineering degree or do I have a bargaining chip for a higher salary because of this ranking?</p>
<p>Also, my GPA isn't the best (3.0) and I'm just wondering if employers take into account the difficulty of the school. For instance, would my 3.0 from Georgia Tech look better than a 3.4 from a local city college?</p>
<p>Finally, I was curious if anybody had any salary information for entry level structural engineers. I'll mainly be looking for jobs in New York City but am also considering Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and San Fran. </p>
<p>If people have information on how much a masters degree would help out with salary as well. If I get my masters it will be at either Notre Dame or Georgia Tech, so again I'll have a reputable school on my resume.</p>
<p>I would like to preface this by saying I don’t know the civil engineering market, but I do know the general job market and career services at your average school.</p>
<p>To find out expected salaries, look at career surveys. Georgia Tech certainly has career surveys broken out by school, so you can get some information there. From a quick glance, it looks like last year’s median salary for civil engineers was $67,000, but that is JUST information about graduates with that major. They could have gone into finance, teaching or any other industry.</p>
<p>When you are looking for jobs, your school matters for the primary purpose of attracting different employers. A #3 ranked school will attract higher quality companies than a #300 ranked school, but as far as your likelihood of getting placed into a job, I’d argue that it is just as difficult at GT as it is anywhere else: instead of 300 average people applying for 20 slots at an average company, 300 exceptional people are applying for 20 slots at an exceptional company.</p>
<p>GPA matters most when you are doing OCR; if you don’t know what OCR is, you are nearly too late. Do research NOW because resume drops are occurring right now, and some interviews have already happened. Now, I don’t know your industry, so I don’t know when the real hiring season is, but I can tell you that if most finance jobs are already in the middle of on site second interviews. When it comes to OCR, you are talking about potentially hundreds of applicants going for a set number of interview slots; these applicants are your peers, so when there are 400 people applying and only 50 interview slots (and 50 is a HUGE number… it’s more likely to be 12 or 20 slots), the GPA is the quickest filter. </p>
<p>Regarding a master’s degree, based on what I saw in the GT salary surveys, it makes no difference, but there are very few results for Civil Engineering MS degrees in spring of 2012, so I don’t know about that.</p>
<p>1) If you go to a good school, then many good employers/companies will recruit from your school. If you’re not doing OCR, an engineering degree is just an engineering degree, although certain school names will stand out (i.e. Cal Tech and MIT). Georgia Tech isn’t one of them, but I think GT is a good regional school, so you shouldn’t have any problems with reputation if you’re planning in working in Atlanta. If you’re trying to move to SF, it might be more difficult because there is bias for Berkeley and Stanford grads. Nobody knows what GT is in the West Coast.</p>
<p>You will not have a bargaining chip for your salary based on your school. You only have a bargaining chip if you actually had prior work experience and were paid in your previous job or were offered multiple job offers with comparative salaries.</p>
<p>2) No. A 3.0 at GT is probably infinitely better than a 3.4 at the local community college, but a 3.4 at GT by someone else is even better.</p>
<p>3) I don’t know about structural engineering, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, most of my engineering friends had entry level salaries that ranged from 45k to 70k. The median was 50k.</p>