Attending SLO will not hold you back if you want to attend Graduate school. Just make the most of any opportunities you are given at any Undergrad school.
so is it better to go to SLO or an UC for Materials
SLO has hands on stuff i like, the only cons for me is the food sounds bad and maybe hard to get classes
Is Cal POly better for practical approach
I wanna get a job right out of school and go to grad school later
does a MS or PhD help with jobs or lot or can u make a lot with just Bachelors?
You can go to a good graduate school even if you get your bachelor’s at East Nowhere University. Just make the most of your opportunities that you have and get good grades. Get research experience.
It isn’t necessarily better to go to one over the other. You need to visit the schools you are considering if possible and decide which you think fits you best based on a number of factors, including academics, facilities, cost, culture, location, and any number of other factors you might consider important to “fit” for you. Academically, you will be fine at any of the schools you’ve mentioned.
It is way too early for you to be focusing on graduate school, and even when you do, these schools may not even be on your radar screen anymore. Picking a graduate school is about picking the school that is a good research fit, not the school with the best name brand. At any rate, you need to focus on your undergraduate studies for now and worry about graduate school after you already know you actually like materials engineering and have a sense of what sort of research you might want to do.
You can get a good job just fine with only a BS in engineering (with the possible exception of biomedical engineering). That’s one of the great strengths of the field since the pay is quite high compared to most other fields when you only have a BS. Graduate school is a whole different animal, and what it does for you depends on MS vs. PhD.
An MS will open a few more doors for you in terms of advancement and in terms of the sorts of jobs you will be qualified to hold. It also won’t really close any doors. It’s also fairly easy to get a company to pay for your MS after you’ve worked for them for a few years. The vast majority of engineers only need a BS or an MS, depending on their company and their career goals at said company.
A PhD is basically all about research. It will open some new doors for you, specifically pertaining to jobs where you direct your own research program (or are otherwise high up in the program and conduct research independently). Some jobs in industrial R&D require a PhD, a large portion of national lab jobs require a PhD, and pretty much academic research careers require a PhD. However, at the same time, a PhD will close doors for you. You are basically making yourself dramatically overqualified for standard entry-level positions at most companies, so your job market is going to be much smaller than the ones for BS and MS holders. Of course, there are a lot fewer PhDs entering that market, so it’s pretty close to even at the end of the day.
There’s also a huge opportunity cost associated with a PhD. After my BS, I spent nearly 6 years getting a PhD. While you won’t generally pay for your PhD, it is sort of like working a full time research job while also taking classes, and I got paid just over $20,000 a year during those 6 years while working probably 60 hours a week on research. At the same time, I could have just taken a job offer for $65,000 after my BS and worked for 6 years and been much higher by the time it was over working 40 hours a week. I wanted that research career, though, so I did the PhD.
The key thing to remember is that a PhD is really only for people who have specific, research-related career goals in mind, and there is a huge opportunity cost associated with it. That’s a decision that you absolutely should not be thinking about this early because you are not yet equipped to make it.
33 by @eyemgh
so the https://careers.calpoly.edu/search.php shows 36 MatE grads and 78 BioE grads jus saying- not that it means anyting- also mechE is the engr major with most grads from SLO
but y aren’t much people interetsed in materials?
isn’t it an important and useful field?
also according https://careers.calpoly.edu/search.php for 2014-15 Materials Engineering undergrads, 12/30 grads are still seeking unemployment. Is it hard to get a job as MatE major from SLO based off this data?
Those surveys are self reported and under report for nearly every major. What’s important to know is that 97% of engineering grads got engineering jobs.
It’s not that Materials isn’t important. There just isn’t as great a need for Materials specialists as there is for the broader, older disciplines like ME, Civil and EE. You will find Materials to be much smaller than ME no matter what school you look at (with I’m sure, a frw , rare exceptions).
As for what school is “better”? Based on what? Only you can answer that. As others have said, you haven’t named a bad one yet. We get so obsessed with finding the “best” school when in reality, there are LOTS of great candidates. Here’s the other end of the truth we never wasn’t to acknowledge, no matter where you land YOU WILL find things you don’t like.
Why don’t you start by trying to figure out why UCSB is your dream school?
Some UCs pretty much only have professors teach. Others are TA heavy. At UCLA it’s almost exclusively Professors Teach lectures and TAs lead discussion sections. UC Davis on the other hand lets senior grad students teach some lower division courses.
how bout SLO
Cal Poly is 100% professor taught, lectures, labs and discussions. Does that mean they’ll all be great teachers? It does not.
BTW, it would behoove you to read the replies to the threads you start. That question had already been answered…by me.
how hard is materials compared to chemical?
You’ve asked that question multiple times in this thread alone and received an answer every time. Asking again isn’t going to change that answer.
@SREE33 Bro you’ve asked this on another thread and I answered you already. There is no difference Engineering is hard no matter what major. The only thing will be what do you prefer.
At D2’s school the students say that engineers who are struggling switch to systems engineering, and if they are still struggling, they switch to business.
D2 likes chemistry and shifted her major from Chem e to Materials e because she like the profs better. I am not sure it is really easier though. The salaries seem similar, if you don’t want to be a petroleum engineer.
One more detail. At D2s school, the Chem e requirements are a little more extensive than materials e. However, materials dept recommends that you add a minor. D2 is adding a polymer science eng minor. With the minor, the materials eng requirements are more extensive.
Materials is definitely real engineering if that is your concern. My daughter says that she likes studying materials engineering, “Because most things are made out of stuff.” I like that answer.
ye i just feel like its not as popular as chemE and MechE so its harder to get jobs with MSE degree
@sree33 Once you are in an engineering program, see which one you prefer. Materials does graduate fewer majors but at our school the placement is similar, if you don’t include petroleum jobs.
Ask the career services people at your college how the placement and salaries are.
Popularity and difficulty in finding a job are two entirely different concepts. Really, the first inclination would be that there are fewer people studying it so there is less competition for jobs. In reality, that’s not true either.
Materials science and engineering may have fewer graduates overall, but it also has a less broad range of jobs to cover than mechanical engineering or chemical engineering. In other words, there are fewer graduates and fewer total jobs to go around. In the end, it’s typically kind of a wash. Schools don’t typically try to graduate more students than can reasonably find jobs, because it looks bad for them if there is a high unemployment rate among their graduates. On the other hand, they also don’t like to graduate too few students because that means less tuition money. These things have a way of evening themselves out. It’s like it’s own, miniature economy subject to the same laws as any other economy.