Some Questions About A Masters

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

I’ve been considering grad school. I’d never really thought twice about it before, I’m getting pretty tired of the academic grind and am not interested in doing research, but I talked with a professor about it last semester and he gave me a pretty hard sell. I’ve just come back to thinking about it the last few days.

There were two main points he made, and I’d like some input on them.

For one, engineers with a bachelor’s tend to cap out early salary-wise and are limited to more rote manufacturing and testing types of jobs. A graduate degree is required to do design type of work.

For another, there is a chance that I could get grad school fully funded. I’m not sure about how exactly that would work, or if it’s a reasonable thing to expect.

Are these pretty accurate, or he stretching things for recruiting? I personally know nothing either way.

2

Jobs, on average, will be less likely to be rote as you attain more and more degrees. That doesn’t mean all BS jobs are rote; just more of them are.

Getting graduate school fully funded as an engineer is common. Essentially 100% of engineering PhD students are fully funded. The figure is less for MS students and I don’t know what it is. Different departments have different percentages of funded MS students so it’s hard to make a general statement. The graduate program I attended funded most MS students.

That said, funding for an MS will come in return for teaching and/or researching, which you seem to be against. If you want a free MS that doesn’t involve doing research then you are probably better off working for a few years and getting your employer to pay.