<p>so i am currently in my 4th year as a civil engineering major and i am starting to freak out about job opportunities. I read from various places that it is hard to find a job these days and i don't particularly have the experience or the grades to compete for the top jobs in bigger companies (hovering around 2.9-3.0 GPA). </p>
<p>so my question is what should i do at this stage of my life, i will be graduating in april (1 quarter early since UCLA is on quarterly system). I don't plan on gradschool for now. So what approaches can i take towards securing a job after graduation, is this too early for job hunt? besides career fairs should i try to apply for jobs online (from job search sites)? </p>
<p>thanks in advance for everyone that helps :)</p>
<p>Start looking now. Be prepared to apply to a good number of places and to lower your standards (if you were expecting some easy, high paying job).</p>
<p>Work on your resume. Make it look professional and ensure there are no spelling errors. Don’t use the same basic MS Word template that everyone uses.</p>
<p>Work on your interviewing skills. Employers love to ask the same questions over and over. But beyond those, be able to answer the questions well and turn your interview into a conversation.</p>
<p>Doesn’t UCLA have a career center or placement office? Don’t they have on-campus interviews for engineers? Do as many of those as you can. I did 30 on-campus interviews when I got my degree.</p>
<p>My nephew starts with the DOT in a week. He interned the summer before this past one, graduated in Dec. 09 and waited until now for the offer. His grades were similar to yours, but he loved the internship, loves road construction, and (I assume) made that evident in his interview last spring.</p>
<p>Did you take the pre-PE test (EIT in the old days)?</p>
<p>Don’t limit yourself to a specific concentration within civil engineering. Apply to structural engineering firms, geotech engineering firms, inspection agencies, contractors, etc. </p>
<p>While you shouldn’t limit yourself, it would be a good idea to concentrate more of your efforts on firms that do work for heavy construction projects (engineers and contractors). The two headhunters that have contacted me recently were both looking for people to work in this sector. Employment in this industry is still rough, but heavy construction is looking better than general buildings construction right now.</p>
<p>Did you have any internships before? Try them first. Depending on how good your relationship is with them, you might ask them if they know anybody else is hiring and if they can put in a good word for you.</p>
<p>There are lots of good entry level opportunities with the feds. Homeland Security has a great one called the APCP program and has positions for engineers:</p>
<p>thanks for all the responses, i am slightly less nervous after reading the comments</p>
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<p>i am not very picky about job and wages, i am willing to work for any pay they may offer, i am willing to put in the work to gain experience towards better jobs. Would you care to suggest some common interview questions i should particularly be prepared for?</p>
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<p>yes we do, but i browsed the career selections on the career center site, most of the results i got after searching civil engineer is CS and EE jobs (top result was microsoft). i’ll look into it more and check out the actually career center to see how the interviewing process works oncampus. DOT would be one of my top choices too, living in LA made me realize how bad the traffic can be and it might sounds like cookiecutter answer but it really made me interested in ways to help solving the traffic (4 hour drive to go home on traffic days, i live 50 miles away). Did your nephew had other offers but held out for the DOT job or was it difficult for him to find others as well? And I am planning on taking EIT in april.</p>
<p>As for internships i didn’t have any due to amount of classes during the year, taking summer school every summer as well inorder to graduate early to solve the financial strain on my family, will this turn out to be a bad idea and making getting a job hard process because of it? (as in i know the positives to good internships and how bad are the negatives for not having them)</p>
<p>again thanks for the answers, i’ll continue for follow them and the new ones that come</p>
<p>Nephew took the first job offer he got, which was the DOT job. He visited the guys he worked with that summer often, learning what he could about his prospects. He is relocating to another part of the state for this job, but it’s only a couple of hours from his home. He focused his search on nearby states as he wanted to do road work and felt the experience (soils) in a remote part of the country would not be relevant here. He recently attended a public hearing on road plans to see how the engineers handled themselves, and got a business card from someone new there. Network any way you can.</p>
<p>One thing he learned is that the DOT only hired interns this summer. Permanent hires had to wait for the fall. So you might look into summer internship possibilities if they will take you with your degree, or look into spring internships and graduate a bit later if that is a possibility. For example, nephew could have interned in his college town last fall, but it would have delayed his graduation till this spring. Now that we know he didn’t get hired until Oct, the fall internship would have been better financially for him than the December graduation.</p>
<p>As for preparing for interviews, go to your local library and check out books on interviewing - both from the standpoint of the interviewee and the interviewer. Learn from those ‘how to conduct a good interview’ books and you’ll be more prepared than most.</p>
<p>I know my GPA is on the lower side, i browsed some of the career opportunities of the companies that sends out emails via our engineering school and they tends to require a GPA of 3.5… so if anyone is familiar with the field can you help me name some smaller less rigorous companies that tends to hire the less qualified applicants?</p>
<p>By my previous post, I meant people in an online forum probably wouldn’t be able to answer your question unless they lived in or are familiar with your area.</p>
<p>thanks for the comment ken, im hoping someone from LA area can comment on this then, also seeing that your location is in NYC which is one of the places i would like to start my career, is it possible to find smaller firms in NYC area that would be willing to hire someone that comes from UCLA (or like from other parts of the country)? what can i do to make starting in a big city like NYC a possibility?</p>
<p>Some of the architecture firms also employ engineers, so don’t immediately dismiss them. Contractors hire civil engineering majors; some do actual engineering and some are more involved in the management aspect of the industry. Construction managers also like to hire civil engineering majors, but you won’t be doing any engineering.</p>
<p>Do you know any recent grads from UCLA that were civil engineering majors? Find out where they ended up. See if there’s a company out there that likes your school especially and loves to hire you guys.</p>
<p>I’m also civil at ucla. In the past I’ve been only marginally involved in our asce chapter, but it seems that all the officers/PMs there have solid connections with industry. Yesterday our new asce president quipped that because of asce, he now has a stack of business cards of people in industry and although the economy is not good enough for him to get a job, he can still call them up anytime and “have a nice chat.”</p>
<p>“i browsed the career selections on the career center site”</p>
<p>Yes, go there, speak with whomever runs the center for engineers, peruse the material they have, get some tips from people there. Scanning online stuff won’t hack it in this economy, I’m afraid.</p>
<p>They should help you with your resume too - have you gotten advice on that?</p>