How likely do you think it is for someone who graduated fresh out college to earn a salary as a Aerospace or Mechanical Engineer of $80k? I think it is somewhat likely; looking at job openings on indeed.com, I see entry level jobs that offer that sort of salary and require a Bachelors with three years of experience. Payscale.com says that the average starting salary is about $50k. I am going to attend a university soon, and I plan to do internships all the way ( during summer and school if I can), obtain a us patent for a product of my own design, and enter ( and hopefully win) design contests. Many graduates I read obtain offers before graduating.
I am not into engineering for the money. I just want to live in a good home in a good area and not worry about being financially stable. I do not care about owing a summer home, or own acres of cars, or owning a yacht. We are born without possessions and we die without them. Engineering fascinates me because I want to build products to help others. When I was a kid I had a design notebook filled with ideas for inventions. I also enjoyed tinkering with things to see how they work.
One day, I would like to work at Nasa or SpaceX or Boeing or Lockheed.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback.
Also, is this the right category asking this question?
Bachelor’s plus three years of experience is not the same as new graduate with a bachelor’s degree. It is true that many students seek post-graduation jobs while still in school.
Some career surveys indicate that $60,000 to $70,000 is a more realistic typical pay level for a new graduate in mechanical engineering these days. However, industry and economic cycles can have a large effect on the job prospects and pay levels – if you graduate into a downturn, you may have more difficulty finding a job.
My two kids recently graduated with BS’s in mechanical engineering. Looking at their respective school’s grad salary ranges, it was from 50K to 70K with a few outliers. Most offers were in the low 60K range. However, the job market is somewhat tough. A lot of companies are looking for young engineers all right, but want 5 years experience and won’t budge much from there. You can find a job, but it can take some effort. Once you get the 3-5 years experience, the market opens up for you and the salaries go up correspondingly.
Internships “all the way” is possible but, again, it will take some effort. Most companies that hire interns want rising seniors. Many companies look at interns as 2-3 month job interviews, so want the students that are about to graduate. My company (which was one of the large aerospace companies) had a hard cutoff for interns; rising seniors with GPA’s 3.5 and above. We’d get so many applications for so few available internships that we could be very picky. Smaller companies weren’t so hard to get into.
Don’t mean to burst your bubble so much as you have to be realistic. You may be able to achieve your goals but engineering school can be tough. It would be good to have a plan B just in case.
P.S. You list 4 places you would like to work. Be careful what you wish for. I’d consider 3 out of those 4 good places to work!!
It depends on which NASA job you get. Some of them are very political. Most people I know hat work there love it though. SpaceX is the kind of iffy one in my book. They pay well and do cool stuff but they expect a lot of work… as in long hours, probably without overtime (since they pay well to begin with).
And keep in mind, in college, stacking piles of extracurricular activities on yourself isn’t just an automatically good thing. Maybe pick one or two that you enjoy, work to get good grades, take electives that support a specialty you want to pursue as a career (if you have one in mind yet), and do internships or co-ops for experience. That’s how you set yourself up for success. The least important of those are the extracurriculars.
Aerospace engineering is just a little peculiar. A large chunk of the job pool is defense-related and so it ebbs and flows with the funding picture of the government. It is more regularly-cyclical than most careers in terms of hiring and layoffs. There’s a whole commercial and small aviation section that is nearly immune to that, though. The only real catch is you maybe need to be willing to relocate to one of the regions with a large aerospace presence. Otherwise finding a job isn’t all that difficult with a little diligence.
FWIW, my dad is an aerospace engineer and has been employed by the same company in the same city for 30+ years. Stability is possible.
Sure, and aerospace engineers apply for jobs that lean a little bit more toward the traditional realm of other engineers wth success as well (though perhaps with slightly less success). At the end of the day, there is a subset of jobs in the aerospace sector that prefer aerospace engineers and a subset that prefer other types of engineers. The sizes of those subsets are generally roughly consistent with the sizes of their respective applicant pools.
Of course there is overlap in those subsets, but for those jobs, an aerospace company as familiar with both aerospace and mechanical engineers (for example) is likely to understand that they are largely interchangeable and give no preferential treatment to either variety for those overlap jobs. The real issue is if you try to leave the aerospace industry, that parity in perception isn’t likely to exist, thus the reason I generally recommend doing mechanical instead unless a student is sure he/she wants to end up in the aerospace industry.
I think I will major in mechanical, and take as many aerospace courses as possible. Is that a good idea?
My first preference is to work with spacecrafts, then air planes, and fina
ly withautomobiles.
P.S. my has counselor does not have connections with engineering companies. I was thinking of knocking on doors of aerospace companies and asking if I can volunteer there. The only “experience” I have is reading a few books on mechanical and aerospace engineering. I mean, as a volunteer, they would have nothing to lose. Is that a good idea? At least it’s a stepping stone.
Since you are “not into engineering for the money”, not sure why you care about the specifics of salaries at this point. They all make a decent wage. Down the road when you are looking at job offers, keep in mind that cost of living varies a great deal from place to place.
“You don’t need engineering experience. You are in high school. Almost no one has engineering experience at that point.”
Really? I hear many students in college complaining that they do not receive internships because they do not have experience. I think its better to start early as possible.
Really. Very few high school students get engineering experience. Perhaps because every few engineerin firms have tasks they feel are complete me by a high school student, I’m not really sure. Either way, the vast majority of entering freshman engineers don’t have experience, and that’s okay.
Of course you have no engineering experience in high school. Even in college, your freshman year is more basic math and science classes. Sophomore year is just starting to get involved with engineering. It isn’t until your junior year that you truly start to delve into “real” engineering. Some colleges do tout classes that get you involved in engineering early, but their content (from what I’ve seen my kid’s take) is more of what I would call a “seminar” type class. Kind of “soft toss” engineering.
As one who hired interns for the summer (before I retired), I was looking to find students who could make some meaningful contributions to the group and that I could evaluate what they were capable of. So, it was rising seniors and above that I was looking for. Any experience that one had holding a job was a plus. It was more of does this person know what it is like to have to be on time and can they focus on what they are doing was what I was looking for.
Volunteers need not apply. The money we would pay interns wasn’t really that much and was not a big driver in whether I would hire an intern. The time out of someone’s day to teach the intern was the more critical part (TIME and money). Also, I’m not sure what the liability issues would be having a “non-employee” around would be. If they got hurt out in the shop, what was the consequences?