<p>Engineering is worthless underpaid career. I have been an engineer for 9 years and have regretted every minute of it. I now plan to pursue a career in real estate development so that I can finally earn the $400,000 a year I deserve.</p>
<p>
Is this true? Is a PhD in engineering the way to go then?</p>
<p>Doing a PhD is NEVER something one should do for the money. You have to be very passionate, intelligent, and a little lucky to land a faculty job and work your way into the $200k range.</p>
<p>Let’s list out what you can do with an engineering degree after college.</p>
<p>-Job in engineering
-PhD
-Finance/consulting</p>
<p>others?</p>
<p>Can you get a finance job on wall street with an engineering degree from Cornell or does the degree have to be from HYPSM.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Pretty much agree, but money can be part of the equation. I was laid off from my previous engineering job, and decided I wasn’t going to work again for the corporations. My perceptions(I hope they’re right 
that PhDs in engineering have a better future kept me in the field.</p>
<p>Back to the first post in this thread. The posters parents had a point…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>lol I hope you are being sarcastic, especially in this economy.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not necessarily. If you can get a full time professor position at a big university, which is extremely competitive these days, you might make around 160K after several years of hard work and assuming you are doing good research. 200K is relatively rare in academia, unless you are the dean of engineering, or your research is able to draw a lot of grant money. lol no PhD makes “millions” just because they have a PhD.</p>
<p>The reality is that a PhD in engineering does not really give you a salary boost compared to an M.S. I know many M.S. engineers, who know their stuff very well, and command 150-160K. PhD should only be pursued if you have a desire to do research and/or teach.</p>
<p>Finally, I think many people are ignoring the fact that no career path, whether it be doctor, engineer, lawyer, or business will make you automatically rich. There is a range of salaries and incomes in all of those fields and it just really comes down to the individual’s determination, effort, and luck.</p>
<p>
But M.S. programs cost money, don’t they?</p>
<p>
But its ridiculous that business people can do better with less work than engineers.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not always. It is not uncommon to get it paid for by your company. It is also common, though not quite to the same degree, to get funded much like Ph.D. students do.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The operative word here is “can”. They can make more with less effort. Those instances are very rare, however.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It depends. If you go to state schools, they usually give you grants depending on financial aid eligibility. If you go to private schools, you are charged a premium and have to take a bunch of loans.</p>
<p>I should point out that going to medical schools ends up costing a lot of money as well. Many recent grads have debts around $200,000 or more.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I disagree. There is a lot of work associated with doing well in business.</p>
<p>For the record, I am pretty sure an engineer can do business work, but a business-type major cannot do engineering.</p>
<p>Engineering and then into finance is my exact plan. If I try and fail to succeed in finance, I will still have a great engineering job market. If a finance major ends up not doing too well, they are stuck with it. I am already self-teaching myself finance.</p>
<p>For all of these folks who keep mentioning finance, finance, finance…</p>
<p>You DO know that just about all of those high-finance/I.B. jobs require selected “target” schools (usually Ivy’s and psuedo-Ivy’s), extremely high GPA’s, about 1,001 extra-curricular activities and with an applicant-to-job ratio of 10,000 to 1.</p>
<p>That doesn’t include the long hours and competition involved once you are actually working.</p>
<p>At the same time, there are nice defense contracting jobs that support parts of agencies that NEVER GET BUDGET CUTS and you rarely work over 40 hours and can make anywhere from $100,000-$200,000…and I have to admit, very little stress.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then perhaps it would be productive to hold a discussion regarding what specific steps one would have to take to obtain one of those jobs. Let’s face it, the truth is, the overwhelming majority of engineers do not have a secure 6-figure job with little stress and low work hours, and likely never will, given their current career trajectories. According to the BLS, the median experienced engineer in 2008 made only $80-90k. Plenty of engineering-predominant industries - most notoriously the auto manufacturing industry - have been rife with layoffs and pervasive job insecurity over the last few years. Many of those engineers would surely prefer to swap their immiserated state for secure, stress-free 6-figure jobs. </p>
<p>{Note, to be clear, the discussion wouldn’t be to benefit me, as I suspect I actually know many of the required steps. But it would be of benefit to many of the readers here.} </p>
<p>Otherwise, I think we may have to conclude that it may be as comparably difficult for an engineer to obtain one of those secure defense jobs as it is to obtain a finance job. The reasons why those jobs are difficult to obtain may be different - finance jobs do indeed require brand-name degrees that most people lack, whereas secure defense jobs require knowledge of certain career pathways that are not entirely obvious - but the level of difficulty may be nonetheless comparable. Let’s face it: there are clearly not enough of those secure high-paying defense jobs for all of the engineers who would want one.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Cornell is a decent target, but it’s somewhat weaker than HYPMS (Wharton should be added to this list).</p>
<p>What and where exactly is a stress-free, secure, 6-figure job? Does it even exist for a normal person?</p>
<p>Sure, SuperGrad. Bill Gate’s son, if Bill Gates decides to keep 100% of his fortune</p>
<p>I said for a “normal person”. :D</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is an interesting question. Realistically the engineers that make over 100k are being paid more for their management skills than their engineering skills, so a fair amount of stress can be involved. Actuaries can make well over 100k, which is a stressful job while one is taking the certification exams, but not so much after these are completed.</p>
<p>I will answer the stress-free question later…although I do have a little stress today because my linux server is hardlocking and affecting the Oracle database and I have a bunch of Java developers looking at me mean…lol</p>
<p>al6200, your statement is not accurate that engineers making over 100k are being paid more for their management skills. This is a huge generalization. There are many engineers that are technical specialists with essentially no management responsibilities that make well over 100k. It is possible in consulting or even at large companies for technical specialists to make as much or more than some managers.</p>