<p>I'm talking about fresh graduates from top notch, ranked programs who have maintained a high level of GPA (say 3.5+).</p>
<p>Also, how do their job offers compare to the average/median offers that are more readily found on the internet?</p>
<p>I have heard many people claim that the best talent flocks to finance or business because of lucrative salary offers, but how exactly does that work? Do they work as engineers, go to business school, THEN work in finance? Or go to finance straight out of college (which I assume would be quite difficult)?</p>
<p>The reason I ask is because after interning at one of the largest aerospace and defense contractors in the world as an engineer, I realized that things such as seniority REALLY are preferred over talent, and things are way too bureaucratic and slow moving for my taste (i.e. work X years to get Y raise, no exceptions).</p>
<p>Excuse me for being blunt, but I would rather take my talents (to South Beach, lol jk) and motivation somewhere else where they will be appreciated and compensated. I don't want to be an engineering drone in a cubicle with mediocre pay, when I know my capacity is beyond that.</p>
<p>P.S. Sakky, if you're out there. This one's for you</p>
<p>They work pretty much everywhere. Mechanical is versatile enough to give you a choice. You could find yourself solving problems in all of the major industries related to your major.
Finance affects the best at the best of schools. Basically large firms poach the engineers out of top schools (Ivy, MIT, Stanford, etc) and they accept because of the relatively weak opportunities for engineers in engineering jobs as far as pay. If you’re not an elite from a top school, you don’t need to worry about it yourself. However, they pretty much get trained on the job and their quantitative skills come in handy for making new mathematically sound scams.
Location matters, pretty much. If you’re willing to move to find a good job, you should be fine. There’s nice jobs in Texas that pay 110k+ in an area with a significantly lower than average cost of living index. Not too many people want to go to Texas though.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, things will be “bureaucratic” at any large company… it’s just the nature of the beast. But unlike you proclaim, there are exceptions to the “work X years get Y raise” trend that you’ve noticed. And there are jobs that you’re not working as a “drone in a cubicle with mediocre pay”… you’ve just got to find and compete for them. </p>
<p>Whether you are exceedingly intelligent or have great capability, most large companies aren’t going to place you in a lead/expert position initially… why should they? Sure maybe you had a 4.0 at MIT, but you are unaware of their operating procedures, unaware of the tools they use, and inexperienced in your field. Large companies aren’t going to trust or believe enough in a fresh out of college graduate that they are willing to risk thousands or millions of dollars on. Business is business, and losing one talented junior engineer out of thousands of engineers due to boredom is not their priority.</p>
<p>Smaller companies may give you more important opportunities starting out that you don’t experience elsewhere, so try looking there.</p>
<p>Well, that’s simply not financially feasible at the moment. I’m more interested in paying off my debt before I can even begin to think of ventures of that nature. Hopefully some day though.</p>
<p>I couldn’t agree with you more on this point. Which is precisely what brought me to this forum with my original question in the first place. I wanted to explore my other options while I still have time to decide my future with relative flexibility.</p>
<p>I would say just don’t stay in one place too long. The best way to move up is to NOT have anybody remember what a dork you were at 22. I think there is great training at big companies, but try a small one after 3-5 years and see how much more breadth you can get out of them.</p>
<p>Be more specific in what you want, or do you know exactly? From your original post all I could really gather is that you see yourself being unhappy at a position in a certain large aerospace firm because you: 1.) Don’t think there is room for promotion 2.) Don’t think you’ll be challenged and/or appreciated 3.) Don’t think you’ll be compensated well.</p>
<p>What do you believe is the ideal job? What types of things would you like to work on, how well do you want to be compensated? These are the types of questions you need to answer for yourself.</p>
<p>From a ME perspective, oil and gas will compensate the best (at least initially)… typically smaller companies and/or start-ups will likely give you the most responsibility right out of college. Have you considered grad school and getting a doctorate? Research is usually at the cutting edge of technology, which might give you the most challenging/rewarding work.</p>
<p>You’d probably find a lot more flexibility in smaller companies than larger ones. Think about working for SpaceX vs Lockheed. I think a lot of top talent goes to companies that are very specialized or maybe are spinoffs from their university.</p>
<p>As boneh3ad already said, I would argue that the truly most elite mechanical engineering talent in the US work as tenured faculty at the top engineering schools. It’s not a bad life: while you won’t be rich, nevertheless you can research whatever you want (assuming that you can secure the funding), you’re surrounded by intellectually passionate peers like yourself who appreciate technical excellence, and most importantly, tenure means that you can never be fired.</p>
<p>But it is also true that an increasingly large share of the top engineering talent in recent history has (sadly) abandoned engineering entirely for the finance and business (especially strategy consulting) sectors.</p>
<p>The former is commonplace. The latter is also commonplace and not difficult in the least given that you attend an elite-branded school such as MIT, Stanford, the like. The difficulty is being admitted to those schools in the first place, but once you’re in, it’s not particularly difficult to obtain a finance or consulting job, at least during healthy economic times (read: not right now). The result is the enduring irony that MIT and Stanford - the two consensus best engineering schools in the country - train numerous engineering graduates who will never work as engineers, instead becoming bankers and consultants. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That seems perfectly logical until you consider that that’s precisely the type of risk that banks and consultancies take with their new brand-new 4.0 GPA hires right out of school with not only no experience, but not even any relevant academic study in the job at hand. Nevertheless many of them are quickly tasked with responsibilities where one mistake can easily cost millions, if not more.</p>
That has not been my experience (in a similar company - possibly even the same!), and I do not think that EE and ME are so far apart that the ideologies would vary. I think perhaps it is just the culture of your current employer and that it may be time for a change. As other have noted, smaller companies can have more rounded opportunities where you are less likely to spend all day in one place or doing one thing, but the advancement opportunities, while less bureaucratic, are much more chaotic - they might not care at all about your age, but that promotion just may not happen until either the company grows or someone more senior quits!</p>
<p>
Please do not take this personally, as it is not meant as such: your capacity might not be beyond that. Most people feel underappreciated and undercompensated, and most are wrong about it - there are only so many “cool” jobs out there, and a heck of a lot more jobs that pay decently well but serve in less interesting and more supporting types of roles.</p>
<p>One solution is to try and find that magic job where your inner talents will be fully utilized, recognized, and compensated. Most people will fail to do so, but it does happen and is probably worth at least investigating. Just remember that there is an inherent risk associated with this - if you jump ship to a “better” job that is beyond your capabilities, it will hurt you more in the long run than simply staying where you are.</p>
<p>Another solution is to sit down with your boss (and if possible a few other trusted senior engineers), explain that you are interested in being a better engineer, and have a frank discussion on where you need to improve and what positions you should angle towards. This is less likely to yield the kind of results as the first option, but is still the best choice for the 90% of whose ambitions outstrip our abilities.</p>
<p>The truth is, with the exception of software engineering, the top engineering graduates from the top programs do not really receive engineering job offers that pay substantially more than does the average graduate from an average school. Now, granted, the top graduates are more likely to work for more prestigious engineering firms, but those firms don’t really pay that much more than does the average engineering firm. </p>
<p>Given that, I think you can now understand why many of those top grads would rather not take regular engineering jobs at all, preferring to head for academia, finance/consulting, or start their own firm.</p>
All industries are not the same, and just because (elite degree + no experience) = instant profitability in finance does NOT mean it has to be that way everywhere. It certainly isn’t true for medicine, where no elite degree will allow a novice doctor to actuall practice medicine until they have completed at least an additional year of supervised practical study, more if they want to be certified as competent in any actual area of practice (including family medicine!). Or do you think that the model of finance and consulting should be used for medicine, and new doctors should be handed a license, a half-million dollar salary, and an operating theater and told to go to it?</p>
<p>Sorry, I was not specific… I was speaking about engineering companies/positions. IB, as you know, is a completely different industry where both the financial risk and reward are much greater. Sure, you can lose a million in one day, but you can also make that (and more) in one day. However, most engineering companies do not operate like that – engineering company X will primarily operate by receiving several multi-million dollar contracts that extend over several years.</p>
<p>I never said that. There’s plenty of room for promotion, but my problem with that is those opportunities are primarily available only after you’ve logged a predetermined amount of years. Many of these companies have a simple little chart that has # of years worked on one axis, and job level on another. And especially because handling the logistics of human resources is a monumental task for a large company, it only makes sense that they don’t really make exceptions. I’m okay with that 100% because it just means that the company is not a good fit for me. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Once again, this has to do with getting lost in the crowd. Being a drop in an ocean, so to speak. It’s not the companies fault that the managers have to handle groups of large engineers and as an intern I’ve found myself sitting around doing nothing even when I ACTIVELY go looking for work. Most of the time it seems like people are assigned tasks and given a deadline, and from what I’ve heard a lot of it is just template based excel crunching in my group.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, why in the world should I settle for the same salary as an average engineer who got average grades throughout his college career and who will more than likely continue to produce average work, if I’m not average.</p>
<p>Ultimately, more than anything else, I am just looking to find the best fit.</p>
<p>You don’t need too much practice in IB because all you have to do is get people to buy into your BS long enough to make money.
Perhaps a smaller company will reward your talent more if you’re actually above average. It’ll be less stable, a slower start, and a smaller scale of work though.</p>
<p>Only because there are laws prohibiting that. In essence, the MD could be viewed as not a true ‘degree’ as such, but rather the first step of a long sequence of training. The true medical “degree” could be said to be the completion of residency after which you are indeed legally certified to practice anywhere in the country, or even start your own practice. See below. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, something like that does happen now, particularly with the more consumer-oriented fields of medicine. Somebody who completes a plastic surgery residency is perfectly legally permitted to immediately move to Hollywood or Miami and launch a plastic surgery practice and charge whatever he thinks his clientele will pay. And of course if that plastic surgeon happens to hold an MD from, say, [Harvard</a> Medical School](<a href=“http://www.drsanders.com/]Harvard”>http://www.drsanders.com/), you better believe that he’ll exploit the marketing value of that elite brand to the hilt. </p>
<p>But more to the topic at hand, what you said also happens within engineering, albeit apparently predominantly within the entrepreneurship space. I can think of several teams of MIT and Stanford engineering students who each have secured 6-7 figures of angel funding to launch their startup ideas…and they haven’t even graduated yet. </p>
<p>Isn’t it interesting that engineering startups backed by small investors with limited capital bases can nevertheless take financial risks on ‘unproven’ engineering talent who haven’t even completed their engineering studies, whereas large engineering firms with immense financial resources dare not?</p>
<p>Gstein, I was well aware that you were originally speaking specifically about engineering firms. But I replied in order to illustrate a point: a key structural/organization difference apparently exists between (large) engineering firms vs. business service firms such as banks/consultancies such that the latter willingly pays top salaries to newly minted graduated students from top schools, even if their majors had nothing to do with their job tasks, whereas the former can’t or won’t. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I don’t believe that the difference stems from multi-year contract payments. Let’s face it: the largest engineering firms do not sell contracted services, but rather sell products. ExxonMobil, Boeing, General Motors, Dow Chemical, Dell, Ford - these firms derive nearly all of their revenue from the sale of products, not contracted services.</p>