Importance of undergraduate engineering

How important is it where you get your undergraduate engineering degree when it comes obtaining a job? For example, if I were to like the University of Alabama better than the University of Maryland, would it make a big difference to attend Alabama? I know Maryland’s engineering program is much higher ranked. I am also not sure yet what type of engineering I am interested in.

Many engineering job opportunities are primarily based off of your interview and not where you came from (sometimes not even your grades either!). They frequently ask you to solve some sort of problem or code on the spot. If you impress them then they may offer you the job. If you can’t solve the problems they give you then they don’t care that much about the name on your resume.

At least, that’s how many interviews in CA go. It may be different over in Alabama.

There will be some regional bias in on-campus recruiting, since local and regional employers will find it more convenient. Bigger employers tend to recruit more widely, because they have bigger needs and more recruiting resources. Small distant employers may make fewer non-local recruiting trips.

If you prefer Alabama, go there. It’s true that where you went to school isn’t a big deal for engineering. As long as your program is ABET-accredited, you should be in good shape.

It does matter somewhat, although if you are attending a particular school because of merit aid, most potential employers understand.

IMO employers generally do not care where you got your engineering degree from. A concern… you are likely to be employed in the geographic region where you attended college. Ask your prospective college department heads who the predominant employers are. You can also figure this out on LinkedIn.

Once you reach the interview stage, I’d agree that your school doesn’t matter (or your resume as a whole, really). The real trick with landing a job, in my opinion, is landing the interview in the first place. In terms of getting that interview, the biggest difference between the “top” schools and the rest is that they are going to have a larger variety of companies that use some of their recruiting budget to actively recruit there.

The top schools will tend to have a larger number of companies from around the country (or world) that come to their career fair, for example, and you may see less of this at the smaller and less-known schools, where the companies recruiting there will skew a little more toward regional firms that are already more familiar with that school. Of course even at the schools that are lower in the rankings, you will see some of those national and well-known companies, especially if they have a regional presence. It just won’t likely be as prevalent.

As long as the school is ABET-accredited, though, you will likely have no real issues finding a job so long as the economy doesn’t crash again (ask my class year how that worked out). You are just more likely to be working within a several-state radius as your go lower in the level of notoriety for your school.

At the end of the day, you are usually better off going to a school that you like, where you can afford the cost of attendance, where you will be happy and able to excel, and in a region where you would be happy to work afterward than you are going to an elite school and hating your time there.

I wont get into the pros and cons of Alabama, lest this turn into the inevitable debate about the school. There are plenty of such threads.

My son from NY is about to graduate from Alabama engineering. He has had interviews and offers from Lockheed in TX and FL, Harris in FL, Boeing in MO, Raytheon in AZ and MA, BAE Systems in NH, Textron in MD, Viasat in AZ, and other companies in AL and elsewhere. His best friends will be working at Honeywell in AZ and Northrop Grumman in CA.

Do well and build a good resume at Alabama, and every opportunity is there for you.

I want to build upon @boneh3ad and @Chardo 's posts by stating it differently.

  • If you go to the University of Alabama, will you have many opportunities? Yes
  • If you go to the top ranked school in your selected major, will you have more opportunities than Alabama? Also yes

After the first job, your background and experience matters most, and the better school matters only at the margins. For example I was recently involved in hiring a computer science person, and one of the people that applied was a Petroleum Engineer from MIT that had taken some computer science courses. Given the oil price collapse, people are leaving the oil industry in droves. I gave her resume more consideration than I would have otherwise, but ultimately moved ahead with people that had more of a solid computer science background.

A couple more data points for you:

  • The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, went to Auburn.
  • The center of the world in Google Earth (keep zooming in) is Lawrence, KS. This is because the head of Google Earth attended the University of Kansas, located in Lawrence.

^ True to an extent. If you go to the top ranked school you will have more opportunities. However, in the OP’s situation, Maryland is not one of those schools. It’s a good school for sure, but Maryland engineering doesn’t open more doors in any significant way.

The importance of the school name varies by major in engineering. It pays to investigate graduation rates, placement rates, average salaries, and salary ranges for your specific major at the specific two schools you are considering.

In my experience the better schools will usually share more information of this sort than schools with worse outcomes.

Also avoid anecdotes. If you are going by anecdotes you will skip college completely. There are many billionaires who don’t have a college degree.

I’d argue that the perception of Maryland as being better than Alabama (since they were the examples given) matters, but only a little bit.

Maryland probably has an advantage in some types of government entity or contractor work, while Alabama probably has an advantage in the automotive industry, due to local or regional recruiting convenience.

Boeing’s President of Network & Space Systems got his undergraduate engineering degree from Auburn and his Masters in Business from the University of Alabama.

Head of Marshall Space Flight Center rcvd his undergraduate engineering degree from Auburn and previously worked as the space center’s deputy director and had managed the Space Launch System Program since its inception in 2011.

There are a lot of Auburn and Alabama grads at NASA in various engineering and management positions - plus 6 astronauts, I think.

Alabama is one of the major centers of aviation in this country. Lots of space, missile, and aviation engineering jobs in Huntsville.

When I was hiring for one of the big aerospace companies we had a list of the top 5 engineering schools and were told that there was a preference to hire from those. In reality, we hired from all schools. What mattered more was your GPA and what kind of internship/project work experience you had.

I didn’t realize Maryland was a standard metric used for comparing engineering schools, but I’m flattered :-h

Personally in my experiences both at Carnegie Mellon and at UMD, the opportunities available are different on the whole, but to the ambitious individual it really doesn’t matter where you go as long as you get a solid education. I’ve seen people in coveted positions with name brand degrees working right along side (or reporting to) those who went to a state directional or CSU’s.

Go where you feel you personally will excel and the opportunities will present themselves when you do.

This often happens. But I just wanted to add a note to make sure that people don’t mistake this for parity.

At the top schools, many of the best performing students get pulled into non-engineering industries. For example at MIT, about a third of all graduates ended up in finance or consulting companies which offer high initial salaries and potentially very high mid-career salaries. Many of those that stay in traditional engineering fields are disproportionately pulled towards the top companies. For 2015, the top employers at MIT were Google, Oracle, Amazon, McKinsey, Accenture, Apple, Boeing, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Boston Consulting Group, Morgan Stanley, Booz Allen Hamilton, Goldman Sachs, and SpaceX.

Given that many of the top students are pulled towards a certain set of companies and industries, the MIT students working at other engineering companies represent a skewed sample set. This in no way diminishes what an individual person can achieve whether from Alabama, Maryland, or MIT, but reflects the different set of opportunities that exist between less selective and highly selective colleges.

Some of those “top companies” are merely big. Companies like Apple hire widely, so an MIT grad is likely to find San Jose State grads there. The consulting and finance companies (McKinsey, BCG, BAH, GS, etc.) tend to be more school-elitist.

Apple is large, but still highly selective. Just about everyone in computer science considers working for an Apple, Google, or Facebook, and they get a large number of resumes. And these large companies know that talented applicants come from all over including San Jose state, and Auburn (where Tim Cook came from, as I pointed out earlier).

The places where the skew manifests itself most are in respectable but lesser known engineering companies.