<p>lol do you go to UCLA? i graduated there last year. obviously i’m biased, so i’ll say that it is a top25 school =)</p>
<p>I would say you’re gonna have difficulty landing a position with Mckinsey or BCG or Bain…BUT I know of fellow bruins that have recieved positions in Bain. I think alot of bruins get offers from Delloite, accenture, etc. You should look into being a part of Bruin Consulting if you’re actually interested in this stuff.</p>
<h1>25, #37</h1>
<p>Can you not see the assumptions that make your argument less than credible?</p>
<p>lol LongPrime, do I need to state for the 3rd time how I readily admit that my hatred for SLO students is based off completely irrational reasoning and should be taken with not even a grain of salt? You seem easily bothered by my views, which I will be the first to admit has no credibility (and have done so for the 3rd time now). This is actually something that has always bothered me about the SLO students that i’ve come across…They seem quick to jump at the chance to defend their school and try to compare their schools higher ranked schools. Are they insecure or something? (AGAIN, THIS IS ONLY based off my experience with the 1-5 cal poly students that I’ve dealt with. Please save your "small sample size does not represent the SLO population. I already acknowledge it.)</p>
<p>and just curious, what does the #37 refer to? is that SLO? i didnt know they have rankings with phd schools and non phd schools in the same set</p>
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<p>Just what is your end-game? I would imagine that the ‘standard $50,000-$60,000 job,’ could be just the beginning of the game?</p>
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<p>You have got to be kidding (and I’m a consultant). As with any other job, it has pluses and minuses. There’s plenty of grunt-work in entry-level consulting, and “travel to a multitude of cities” means sitting with your laptop and room service in the front room of the Embassy Suites near some suburban office park. The glamour wears off quickly. And even more quickly when you realize that entry-level management consultants don’t have a single thing to offer any business who is hiring them, since they don’t know enough to add value. Frankly, I find working for the actual client – you know, the person who actually <em>makes the goods and services</em> – a far better entry-level job from a training standpoint than entry-level management consulting, because the person working for the actual client gets to learn all aspects of the business, not just the set of business problems that are farmed out to the consultant.</p>
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<p>You have got to be kidding me. The question is not whether it has its plus’s and minus’s, but how it compares to the other jobs that are actually available to new graduates. </p>
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<p>And there’s even more grunt work in regular entry-level jobs. </p>
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<p>But at least you’re traveling. Contrast that to other entry-level workers who rarely if ever get to travel anywhere. They’re chained to their offices. How glamorous is that? </p>
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<p>And other entry-level workers do add value? </p>
<p>In fact, the fact that consultants probably don’t add value - of this, we agree - is actually part of the genius of management consulting. As Bruce Henderson, founder of BCG, once remarked to his astonishment: “Can you think of anything less *improbable [sic] than taking the world’s most *successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and *hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their *businesses?” But, for whatever moronic reason, they do, and are paid handsomely to do it. </p>
<p>Hence, as long as the world’s top businesses continue to hand undeserved power and pay to fresh new hires, you should want to be one of them. Again, it’s better than taking a regular entry-level job. Who doesn’t want power and money that they don’t deserve. </p>
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<p>And that’s where your argument falls down completely. After all, exactly how many entry-level new college graduates are provided with jobs where they are actually trained to “learn all aspects of the business”? I’m going to go with 0%, and I doubt that I’ll be way off. Let’s be perfectly honest: most new college graduates are hired into an basic level job where they will be performing only a tightly circumscribed set of tasks, with no opportunity to learn more until after years of experience. With the possible (and anomalous) exception of startups, a newly minted engineer will be hired to work on one small aspect of a large engineering project - and probably won’t even be allowed to learn the scope of the entire project - much less be allowed to learn the other functions of the firm writ large. For example, I know a number of engineers who’ve worked in oil refineries or petrochemical plants for several years, and have garnered experience on only a few unit operations in the production process, and not only have never been provided opportunities to learn what happens in the rest of the plant/refinery, many of them have don’t even have physical access to the rest of the production operation, and forget about learning about the functions of the headquarters staff departments such as sales, marketing, or business development. {Heck, I know engineers with decades of tenure who not once had been invited to the headquarters office.} </p>
<p>But that does open an (infinitesimal) area of agreement. If you can truly find an entry-level job with a client that truly is willing to teach you “all aspects of the business”, and also will pay you as well as a consultant, then, sure, take that. But good luck trying to find that. Let’s face it: the overwhelming majority of firms do not provide those sorts of opportunities to entry-level. Heck, they won’t even provide it to employees who have worked there for decades.</p>
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<p>I was recruited into an MIS position after one-year of college and got to work on ten different IS systems in a medium-sized manufacturing company in the first year. It was a total blast. My next job was in consulting and I got to work in three different companies doing completely different things. The consultant paid me 50% more than the first company and I thought that they were very generous until I found out how much they billed me out at. Consulting is a blast but it can become a headache when you have to spend more time with your family. One other nice thing that you can do with some time working in consulting is starting your own business. You just need a network, a good reputation and a little skill at marketing.</p>
<p>There are some engineering jobs where you travel moderately. It may be to go to trade shows, visit customers (for support, gathering requirements, diagnosing problems, field testing). My experience is that traveling is inversely proportional to the level of company structure.</p>
<p>Well, I hate to break the news to you guys, but engineering salaries have already peaked. This world needs so many engineers. There are more than enough engineering graduates to replace satisfy the job market and companies prefer to hire newly minted engineers than middle aged engineers. Furthermore, past demand for engineers have been projected based on past information from the US, not taking into account the HUGE influx of engineers from China, India, and Russia. These jobs will ultimately flow to these countries. The only job that is guaranteed success in this countries would be MD’s.</p>
<p>Johhny, you are full of it. Stop spreading baseless rhetoric that you have no data to back up. I’m guessing you know nothing about engineering and from the sounds of it you have something against engineering. The NSF came out with a survey fairly recently that said that 40 percent of U.S.engineers are age 50 or older. Engineering salaries have not peaked. There will be plenty of demand and opportunities in the future.</p>
<p>You clealry don’t know what you are talking about so please stop wasting everyone’s time on this forum. Take it from someone in the engineering industry.</p>
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Define average. Because MC is 99th percentile, and after that there just really isn’t <em>anything</em>. So, unless you think average is 98th percentile, you are dreaming.</p>
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I am a Cal Poly grad that got into UCLA Engineering. I chose Cal Poly because I thought it had a better program (and it would be easier from a curve perspective).</p>
<p>And I make substantially more than 60k/year (and most of my friends hired on at significantly more than 60k/year).</p>
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MD’s income will always be inextricably linked to the average income of the country where they practice. If US GDP declines, MD income will decline. Trust us, you want engineers to be successful, as they are a good bellweather to overall US economy strength.</p>
<p>ok, I have plenty of friends that make $75,000 a year. What does that have to do with anything? </p>
<p>Just curious, what program are we talking about? And how do you compare undergraduate programs anyways? I could understand comparing graduate programs by looking at research facilities, strength of faculty, focus of curriculum, etc…but how do you compare undergraduate engineering programs? I’m not arguing, I’m just curious what your take is.</p>
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Mainly because I didn’t know why you were even mentioning 50-60k/year.</p>
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Lab work, primarily. Cal Poly, when I went there, required these labs to graduate for Mechanical Engineering:
<p>There, of course, was technical electives on top of this.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.catalog.calpoly.edu/2007depts/cengr/me_dept/mecrs2007.pdf[/url]”>http://www.catalog.calpoly.edu/2007depts/cengr/me_dept/mecrs2007.pdf</a></p>
<p>Not to mention that I was taught by PhD professors that were selected for teaching ability, not research ability (which I couldn’t care less about in an undergrad institution).</p>
<p>Taking 17 labs, minimum, is a good way to teach. Understanding how mechanical systems work is a major portion of my current job, and I think Cal Poly prepared me better for that than UCLA would have.</p>
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<p>IMO
Recruiters to target student body(s) ratio.
Placement.</p>
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Too hard to measure, a better measure would probably just be % employed on graduation, and average salary.</p>
<p>Mr Payne, </p>
<p>I was mentioning 50-60K/yr as an “average engineering salary.” If you think I should change that number then so be it. My point in that thread of discussion was to point out that a student, whether from Cal Poly or MIT, - if they choose to become a standard engineer - are likely to have similar salaries (which was then why I began to ask Saaky about management consulting pathways). By the way, kudos to you for having a 70K salary while graduating from SLO. In terms of finances, you’ve made quite a nice return on investment.</p>
<p>Also, I personally disagree with your hypothesis of Cal Poly better preparing you for your current job versus UCLA. I’m sure you already know that most firms train their new-hires for several weeks and months on their new job duties. What the new-hires learned in school is not necessarily relevant because the employers view the new-hires as clean slates that they will mold anyways. </p>
<p>This brings me to my next point…to address your whole stance on Cal Poly’s laboratory and teaching-professors emphasis. Instead of typing out another spiel on why I think Cal Poly’s approach is faulty and misguided, I will just recall what fellow CC’ers G.P. Burdell and nshah9617 have already stated within the past couple weeks:</p>
<p>G.P.Burdell
<quote>
One misnomer about engineering - it’s not a trade. Engineering is not a field where you “get your hands dirty and figure it out” like auto mechanics, or culinary arts. Many schools, especially the teaching schools like Cal Poly, believe it is, but that is not the case. A student that learns using that method is not an engineer, but rather an engineering technician, despite what that person’s degree might state.</quote></p>
<p>A real engineer is someone who is taught first principals and can deduce practice from the basis of theory. A real engineering student should be able to explain a distillation column, for instance, before ever seeing one or being told what one is. They should be able to use the basics of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and mass transport to identify how such a theoretical piece of equipment should work. Such an education allows students to have a fundamental and theoretical understanding of the unit, so that when faced with issues in practice, the student can resolve the issue using fundamental analysis and not text books or case studies. </p>
<p>The current philosophy of most schools to lecture, show, then explain creates substandard engineers. That is why the school you attend matters.
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<p>nshah9617
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Anyway, G.P Burdell brings up an important point. Engineering IS NOT a trade skill or vocational program. The goal of any engineering program is to educate the students first and then provide career placement second. Besides, most engineering programs are standardized throughout the nation and therefore all students learn the same fundamentals through coursework and hands on lab experience. </quote></p>
<p>Of course, if you are a Cal Poly graduate making 70K a year out of graduation, then that’s great. But if you’re trying to convince me that Cal Poly has a better undergraduate program than UCLA (which I gathered from the tone of your previous response) - it wont happen since we fundamentally disagree at the core of the issue.</p>
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It really doesn’t matter what I think, because the job market essentially reflects what I think. There is no premium for a UCLA grad over a Cal Poly grad. That is also accounting for the fact that the average UCLA grad is smarter than the average Cal Poly engineering grad.</p>
<p>When money, time, and credibility counts, how one gets to the solution is not relevant.
A person can be a good engineer and a good tradesman. Some can only be one or the other.</p>