<p>What does IP stand for?</p>
<p>Intellectual Property.</p>
<p>So how is it possible to make $ with an engineering degree? The only options I see involve extra schooling.</p>
<p>u can definitely make $ with an engineering degree. $$$$$$ is difficult.</p>
<p>How much can you expect with just a engineering degree?</p>
<p>i will be graduating soon and i used payscale.com
for B.S. in CivE in a private firm with EIT cert. and 3-yrs experience in San Diego,CA salary ranges from 41,200 (which is what i make as an intern) to 53000. my friends who graduated december 2005 were offered between 45k to 55k starting salaries. but, please consider the Cost-of-Living in San Diego! 300k will only get you a 1-bedroom apt in the ghetto...</p>
<p>^ yikes........</p>
<p>You can buy a 1-bedroom apt in San Diego for less than $500,000???? It's cheaper than I thought!</p>
<p>(Read this post seriously. A million dollar home in SD gives you a 3-bedroom place on an eighth of an acre.)</p>
<p>come to Phoenix everyone!!! :)</p>
<p>youll find a 5 bedroom house for as much</p>
<p>I just found this post while seaching online. I don't know if anyone is even still reading this thing, but felt a need to respond to it. I am an engineer with a double degree in mechanical and aerospace so trust me when I say I researched average pay scales for ALL over the U.S. To put it simply, in NYC, one of the most overexpensive cities(just about the same as San Diego if not slightly higher), the average starting salary is $45K, with many friends started at closer to 40K in private, smaller firms. The thing you need to understand is that most engineers that make a lot or money are making it due to royalties from patents. The only true way to make money is to design/invent something, then patent it, well that or real estate, but I am no Donald Trump.</p>
<p>Well, first off, I would say is, why do you have to work in NYC? If you feel that you're getting underpaid somewhere, why stay there? </p>
<p>Look at tha average starting salaries nationwide. If what you are saying is correct, then engineers in NYC are getting screwed, so why do they stay? Nobody's forcing them to work in NYC. Or San Diego.</p>
<p>The average starting salary for chemical engineers in 2005 is 54k. While that's not living large, believe me, there are a LOT of people in the country who would like to be making 54k, especially to start. </p>
<p>If you want to make a lot of money as an engineer, get your MBA and become a manager. Or an engineering consultant. Or, maybe better, go work for a startup. The engineers who have been working at Google or Yahoo or Ebay since the beginning of the company are doing extremely well for themselves. So are the guys who got in early at Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, and technogiants like that. </p>
<p>Nor do you even have to work for a company that becomes a technogiant. It's usually enough to work for a small startup that gets acquired. I was just talking to a guy who worked as an engineer at a startup company that got acquired by Cisco. Suffice it to say that he probably doesn't have to work a day in his life ever again.</p>
<p>Actually some Engineers do make 200+k a year.</p>
<p>What about those with Phds, that are deans at out schools. Many Board members and higher ups make well over 200k a year teaching.</p>
<p>As my steel design professor once said, "Doctors kill their clients one at a time, but structural engineers can kill hundreds at one swoop." Sort of callous, but he makes a very good point.</p>
<p>Many of the structural engineering professors I know chose academia over practice because they didn't want the responsibility of design. When you put your seal on a design, you sign your work. You are liable for your mistakes in that design until you die.</p>
<p>Even now, though I don't yet have my PE licensure, since I'm EIT certified, if I notice something wrong in <em>another</em> engineer's design, or if I'm out at a construction site and I see something fishy, I am obligated to report it. If I don't report it, and in thirty years, that unreported flaw causes the structure to fail, and it's traced back and is discovered that I (intentionally or inadvertantly) failed to report it, I could lose my PE license that I had received in the meantime and be sued for everything that I'm worth.</p>
<p>And that's why engineers are highly paid.</p>
<p>Aibarr,</p>
<p>I heard that civ e's are really in demand. Do you have to put up with a lot of crap from people in civ e? Do you use a lot of computer programs when your doing your job? Does a p.h.d. really help in civ e as far as industry and academia are concerned?</p>
<p>Fwee! Okay, starting at the top:</p>
<p>1) Yes, civ e's are really in demand. I'm sitting here amid swaths of envelopes, flooding the market with my resume in anticipation of my December graduation from grad school. I'm applying to probably over 100 different companies, and they're all hiring right now. This past week, I sent my resume to one major company and four days later, I found myself in the middle of an impromptu phone interview with the head of the large-span bridge design department and was subsequently invited to fly down to Tampa, Florida, for an interview. Maybe it's that I'm <em>that</em> highly qualified, but a lot of that eagerness is because business is good and more engineers are needed.</p>
<p>2) Do I have to put up with a lot of crap...? As in, Office Space sorts of crap? Well, sure. As a grad student! In my experiences in the practical world, though, there's much less of that in the good engineering firms. Generally, you're working in small enough groups that you've got a lot less crap that you have to deal with.</p>
<p>3) Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I use a TON of computer programs. On a steel design exam, working quickly but accurately, I can design a steel beam or girder for a given loading condition in about fifteen/twenty minutes. Consider that a building can have hundreds of thousands of beams and columns and girders and such. I'm not sure who would die first: me, from sitting forever and doing all those calculations, or my client when he saw how much I billed him for my hours. You've got to know how to use the computational tools of the industry in order to help you with those highly iterative design processes, and if you're designing something especially complex that can't be designed by conventional methods, you have to know how to use numerical and computational methods to your advantage in order to design those more complex things. Lots of computerwork involved, pretty much in any design engineering or engineering research/analysis capacity.</p>
<p>4) A PhD is crucial for academic tenure. If you want to be a professor, you need a PhD. So far as industry goes, it can be quite helpful. It varies within the various branches of civil engineering, though... If you're in a very in-demand and highly specialized field, like structural mechanics and fracture mechanics research, a well-trained PhD student can walk out of his/her university with their civ e PhD and walk into a research position at a national laboratory with a starting salary of ~100K. (Not kidding! It's very possible with a PhD from Berkeley or UIUC or one of the other top programs.) So, in that regard, it <em>can</em> really help. Perhaps it's less beneficial for those who wish to go into design, but a PhD can give you some valuable tools and insight that can be very useful and sought-after in the practical world.</p>
<p>Those are the long answers to your questions... LOL. Sorry. I was a little more long-winded than I'd intended.</p>
<p>Do you have to use a lot of multi-variable calculus in civil / struc. engineering? All the triple integrals, line integrals, Stokes theorem, divergence theorem in calculus III...</p>
<p>Sure do. In structural mechanics, which is more on the theoretical end of civil/structural engineering, we use a lot of multi-variable calculus, and even take it a step further and learn tensor calculus, which is the calculus of MATRICES... (Nearly died when I realized I was going to have to learn a whole other dimension of calculus, but it's not awful at all.)</p>
<p>Structural mechanics is the basic building block that structurals use to derive finite element analysis... And working backwards from finite element analysis, you can see that mechs and aeros use vector calc and tensor calc, too, since they're way into the applicability of the FEM. It's a really useful and incredibly versatile tool, and it works in so many settings. It's on the order of usefulness as, like, the INTEGRAL, but the theory and math and crunchy proofs and such that you need in order to understand how to get there are definitely a mental workout. Struct mech is known around UIUC's structural grad program as the "really hard course". I'm reeeeeally glad that I'm done with that class!</p>
<p>Calculus III is hard for me to do without having to use either a Ti-89 graphing calc. or a computer program like Mathamatica or Matlab. I just can't visualize the complex three dimensional structures without using a program. However, once I can draw the 3-d shape, setting up the constraints and doing a triple integral to find the volume is cake - the hardest part is just drawing the 3-d structure on the graph. Drawing 2-d structures is easy but to incorporate that extra z-axis is a pain in the ***. </p>
<p>Furthermore, turning cartesian coordinates into spherical coordinates (roe, theta, phi) is even uglier because I'm not used to working with spherical coordinates. </p>
<p>For most of the multi-variable calculus that you do, I hope that you use the advanced graphing computer programs -OR- the advanced calculators. Then, life would be x100 easier and cooler.</p>
<p>These days, if I can't do it in my head, I generally end up having to use Matlab. Things like spherical coordinates, I generally have to look up again in my old calc texts in order to remember all the little rules and conversions and such.</p>
<p>Don't throw away your old textbooks or class notes!!!</p>
<p>so you use multivariable calc. on a regular, every day basis?</p>