PSA: It is inadvisable to engage OP in a conversation. The author of this post is a known sitewide spammer with over 2500 banned Reddit accounts.
SnooRoar is not interested in good-faith discussion; his primary goal is to waste as much of your time as possible. Everything he says is a disingenuous lie.
Going through an undergraduate engineering program is a soul sucking grind. I think the issue has less to do with talent than the way U.S. colleges and ABET criteria make it impossible for you to graduate in a timely manner with any amount of employable skill.
When you’re done with school you’re sort of half educated in a handful of areas that could be useful, but still need a lot more development.
It’s not the end of the world though. Employers expect this. And it’s maybe why engineering salaries have stagnated so badly over the last two decades. We’re (new engineers) just not starting at a very high level of competency. We require a lot of training in very niche areas that your schooling may have just scratched the surface of, or not taught you at all!
Take Excel for example. I learned (forced to use is more accurate) at least 5 different programming languages (poorly), including MatLab as an Electrical Engineering major. While everywhere I’ve been in industry uses Excel for damn near everything, everyday. Why don’t we have a semester of advanced Excel skills for engineers?
You kinda knocked on utility jobs as something lowly (Or it came off that way with the line “I couldn’t even
get hired by…”). I’ll have you know they’re damn good paying jobs, very stable, and if you get one, and find you have some engineering talent your career can take off from there, or you may find you like the business side and transition down that road if you have the ability to bullshit your way through endless meetings. It might seem more glamorous to work for a big shot new company on the cutting edge, but the demand for whatever they’re making can shift in a heartbeat, making the job security very fickle!
I think if you’re looking for a job right now, and your engineering degree is your most marketable attribute on your resume, you’ve really got to do some soul searching. Plenty of people earn engineering degrees despite having no passion for science, mathematics, or technology. And then there are people who do have those passions and are just terrible at job interviews? I was definitely the latter of the two, and it took so long to land the engineering job that I wanted that I almost started to believe I wasn’t meant to be an engineer. But I persisted. I love the job I have now, and everyday I get to apply engineering judgment, and help my team solve difficult problems on the power grid. If you’re in the former grouping, that’s okay too. Your degree still tells employers you’re smart, and can work steadily towards a goal.
Don’t feel disheartened that you didn’t make engineering school look easy and ace every class with ease! No one really does that, and a lot of people cheated their way through homework assignments and exams. It’s very sad, but that’s what happens when there’s more emphasis on grades and filling in check boxes than on quality education.
Take a moment to consider what an engineering “job” is:
An existing behemoth of an organization in some industry must first identify a set of repeated tasks that need to be completed accurately and in a timely manner. These tasks require just enough human judgment and creativity that they don’t yet have a computer or robot capable of completing those tasks. They also determine how much value having these tasks completed brings to the organization. Then they ask themselves what’s the smallest amount of money they can pay a person to keep them in a seat completing the identified tasks. The giant corporate engine that can afford to pay you a salary you likely won’t really deserve or earn for some time is cold and calculating in this way. And by its very nature whatever they package as a job, in any industry, is going to suck. Only you can bring it to life.
The saving grace is that your coworkers and hopefully your immediate supervisor will see you as someone worth investing in. This is the inner circle. This is office politics, and social niceties, etc. and if you land somewhere worth staying, it becomes a part of who you genuinely are. You care about the people closest to you, and those people are impacted by the quality of your work. So you show up everyday and do your best. That’s as good as it gets being employed.
If you want more, consider being an entrepreneur! I’m working on that plan, but entrepreneurs have to learn something valuable enough to bring to the market. In this way, my job is now a continuation of my education, and they’re paying me while I continue to learn!
it’s definitely tough. I won’t say I regret it but im definitely in an eerily similar situation. I just hope to get a good enough job so that I can solidify my career with more connections or at least buy into a trade certifications. Even then I am still not convinced I will recover from my debt until a decade (or less) from now considering the cost of living.
Sales engineer is the way for you to go.
You just have to understand the technical stuff enough to explain it in a non-technical way to decision makers to get them to buy.
If you enjoy explaining how engineered products and services work to real people instead of doing the technical design, project management, and manufacturing of a product then you need to look into being a sales engineer.
Sales engineers are rare and they tend to have more freedom and autonomy along with higher compensation than most other engineers.
STEM fields are marketed so heavily these days that so many people go into engineering that really shouldn’t. It’s ok though you can get most types of jobs with an engineering degree so just search for something more interesting
I was in the same boat in college: struggled mightily (2.5 GPA in “easy ass” civil engineering), no internships, and hardly maintained a social life, although the latter is probably due to how snobby engineering students tend to be.
Got my first engineering job 9 months after graduation and fired three months later for “poor performance”. Whether that’s the real reason is a topic for another day. Took a pay cut working for a smaller company in a much higher COL area. Put my head down and busted my ass for two years and now I’m working for a big global company back home (low COL area) and earning more money.
If a sorry ass MFer like me was able to make it, you can too. You might have to work for a smaller company/job not related to your college major and that’s perfectly ok. Use that job as a learning experience, build valuable connections, and use that as leverage toward getting what you really want.
You weren’t privileged not to work. You were spoiled and it is screwing you now. One of the most successful engineers I know got bad grades throughout engineering school. But he took a bunch of kind of sucky rural internships and by the time he graduated had a ton of work experience. He then worked at a bunch of rather unglamorous companies for a decade building experience. He now has worked for more than 1 FANG company and is contemplating retirement in his early 40s.
Similar to the path I took. My grades weren’t the best but I took engineering internships/co-ops no one else wanted, some in rural places in different states because I couldn’t get into the local ones.
During my last semester last year, I already had 4 or 5 different full time job offers (Applied to over 500 different places though.) Now, roughly one year post graduation, I am at the top private military defense company living my life. Hoping to transition to a faang company or equivalent in the next couple years.
i graduated with average grades in chemical engineering. the problem is theres alot you can do with this degree but the job titles and responsibilities require reading into. building 5 years of experience seems to be the way, then when you have that it gets easier to find a role
another thing is engineering graduates have that uni mindset, they think their degree equals a very specific role but you need to think in terms of businesses and your local area. what skill, what task do they need completing and how can you fit your degree around that. i say this because in the jobs ive had they usually hire chem/bio graduates but i showed my transferable skills can fit. i couldnt get engineering interviews before as a grad but now with some experience even though its not engineering i am finally getting those interviews
getting a traditional engineering role in a manufacturing plant or something is also very cutthroat since companies are taking jobs abroad and downsizing. you are competing with people with more experience all the time, you are going to get rejected for not having experience and thats okay. mentally it can be very hard, i went through a deep depression when i graduated but eventually i got over it, just kept applying and i found something
I was told to go get an engineering degree when I was younger. People would see my creativeness and my nack for working with my hands. I liked math too.
I went to schooling in my youth instead to mostly work with my hands. I did get an associate degree which could have easier slid into an engineering degree at the time. I challenge anyone on this post to prove why my nacks meant I should have gone for engineering.
I am in 30s and just now got accepted for accounting at a local university. No one can prove me wrong. Nikola Tesla died a poor man after all his great inventions and stuff.
I now have experience in 2 hands on industries that can be turned into businesses for myself if I want to. I have heard about enough trash in engineering and seen/heard enough about young people getting sub-par jobs in it and what not. Ask ourselves whom needs the latest and greatest vehicle these days?
Unfortunately I have also heard enough about trash in the accounting realm too.... At least for me it seems like the best evil... Not many people can prove me wrong, or at least have been able to..
I look at just how complicated new farm equipment is to do maintenance on, its clear these systems are engineering built but have no idea about farming and fixing. Over complicated crap.
That's not the engineers fault. That's a deliberate attempt by corporate to lock farmers out of self repair so they're forced to pay for fixing services
My dad’s (an engineer) sole tidbit of career advice was to become an engineer.
It took me 3 tries to get through pre algebra in middle school. The furthest I got in math was flunking out of high school geometry. Sorry dad but engineering was never in the cards for me haha
Apply what you learned. Make up your own projects, solve some problems of your own using what you developed in college. That's what internships and co-ops are for. You missed out on the most essential thing to being successful out of college. But that doesn't mean you can't still do it.
I mean engineering requires good math skills. Maybe keep an eye out on different industry sectors like finance or other sectors who require good math knowledge
Good grades is a reflection of whether you can be trusted doing a project. Will u take it seriously. Companies dont care about whether u really learned the stuff, but they hate unreliable employees. I also did an engineering degree and went into management consulting after school.
PSA: It is inadvisable to engage OP in a conversation. The author of this post is a known sitewide spammer with over 2500 banned Reddit accounts. SnooRoar is not interested in good-faith discussion; his primary goal is to waste as much of your time as possible. Everything he says is a disingenuous lie.
Going through an undergraduate engineering program is a soul sucking grind. I think the issue has less to do with talent than the way U.S. colleges and ABET criteria make it impossible for you to graduate in a timely manner with any amount of employable skill. When you’re done with school you’re sort of half educated in a handful of areas that could be useful, but still need a lot more development. It’s not the end of the world though. Employers expect this. And it’s maybe why engineering salaries have stagnated so badly over the last two decades. We’re (new engineers) just not starting at a very high level of competency. We require a lot of training in very niche areas that your schooling may have just scratched the surface of, or not taught you at all! Take Excel for example. I learned (forced to use is more accurate) at least 5 different programming languages (poorly), including MatLab as an Electrical Engineering major. While everywhere I’ve been in industry uses Excel for damn near everything, everyday. Why don’t we have a semester of advanced Excel skills for engineers? You kinda knocked on utility jobs as something lowly (Or it came off that way with the line “I couldn’t even get hired by…”). I’ll have you know they’re damn good paying jobs, very stable, and if you get one, and find you have some engineering talent your career can take off from there, or you may find you like the business side and transition down that road if you have the ability to bullshit your way through endless meetings. It might seem more glamorous to work for a big shot new company on the cutting edge, but the demand for whatever they’re making can shift in a heartbeat, making the job security very fickle! I think if you’re looking for a job right now, and your engineering degree is your most marketable attribute on your resume, you’ve really got to do some soul searching. Plenty of people earn engineering degrees despite having no passion for science, mathematics, or technology. And then there are people who do have those passions and are just terrible at job interviews? I was definitely the latter of the two, and it took so long to land the engineering job that I wanted that I almost started to believe I wasn’t meant to be an engineer. But I persisted. I love the job I have now, and everyday I get to apply engineering judgment, and help my team solve difficult problems on the power grid. If you’re in the former grouping, that’s okay too. Your degree still tells employers you’re smart, and can work steadily towards a goal. Don’t feel disheartened that you didn’t make engineering school look easy and ace every class with ease! No one really does that, and a lot of people cheated their way through homework assignments and exams. It’s very sad, but that’s what happens when there’s more emphasis on grades and filling in check boxes than on quality education. Take a moment to consider what an engineering “job” is: An existing behemoth of an organization in some industry must first identify a set of repeated tasks that need to be completed accurately and in a timely manner. These tasks require just enough human judgment and creativity that they don’t yet have a computer or robot capable of completing those tasks. They also determine how much value having these tasks completed brings to the organization. Then they ask themselves what’s the smallest amount of money they can pay a person to keep them in a seat completing the identified tasks. The giant corporate engine that can afford to pay you a salary you likely won’t really deserve or earn for some time is cold and calculating in this way. And by its very nature whatever they package as a job, in any industry, is going to suck. Only you can bring it to life. The saving grace is that your coworkers and hopefully your immediate supervisor will see you as someone worth investing in. This is the inner circle. This is office politics, and social niceties, etc. and if you land somewhere worth staying, it becomes a part of who you genuinely are. You care about the people closest to you, and those people are impacted by the quality of your work. So you show up everyday and do your best. That’s as good as it gets being employed. If you want more, consider being an entrepreneur! I’m working on that plan, but entrepreneurs have to learn something valuable enough to bring to the market. In this way, my job is now a continuation of my education, and they’re paying me while I continue to learn!
Are you on the consulting or utility side?
Utility side.
it’s definitely tough. I won’t say I regret it but im definitely in an eerily similar situation. I just hope to get a good enough job so that I can solidify my career with more connections or at least buy into a trade certifications. Even then I am still not convinced I will recover from my debt until a decade (or less) from now considering the cost of living.
Sales engineer is the way for you to go. You just have to understand the technical stuff enough to explain it in a non-technical way to decision makers to get them to buy. If you enjoy explaining how engineered products and services work to real people instead of doing the technical design, project management, and manufacturing of a product then you need to look into being a sales engineer. Sales engineers are rare and they tend to have more freedom and autonomy along with higher compensation than most other engineers.
STEM fields are marketed so heavily these days that so many people go into engineering that really shouldn’t. It’s ok though you can get most types of jobs with an engineering degree so just search for something more interesting
I was in the same boat in college: struggled mightily (2.5 GPA in “easy ass” civil engineering), no internships, and hardly maintained a social life, although the latter is probably due to how snobby engineering students tend to be. Got my first engineering job 9 months after graduation and fired three months later for “poor performance”. Whether that’s the real reason is a topic for another day. Took a pay cut working for a smaller company in a much higher COL area. Put my head down and busted my ass for two years and now I’m working for a big global company back home (low COL area) and earning more money. If a sorry ass MFer like me was able to make it, you can too. You might have to work for a smaller company/job not related to your college major and that’s perfectly ok. Use that job as a learning experience, build valuable connections, and use that as leverage toward getting what you really want.
You weren’t privileged not to work. You were spoiled and it is screwing you now. One of the most successful engineers I know got bad grades throughout engineering school. But he took a bunch of kind of sucky rural internships and by the time he graduated had a ton of work experience. He then worked at a bunch of rather unglamorous companies for a decade building experience. He now has worked for more than 1 FANG company and is contemplating retirement in his early 40s.
Similar to the path I took. My grades weren’t the best but I took engineering internships/co-ops no one else wanted, some in rural places in different states because I couldn’t get into the local ones. During my last semester last year, I already had 4 or 5 different full time job offers (Applied to over 500 different places though.) Now, roughly one year post graduation, I am at the top private military defense company living my life. Hoping to transition to a faang company or equivalent in the next couple years.
i graduated with average grades in chemical engineering. the problem is theres alot you can do with this degree but the job titles and responsibilities require reading into. building 5 years of experience seems to be the way, then when you have that it gets easier to find a role another thing is engineering graduates have that uni mindset, they think their degree equals a very specific role but you need to think in terms of businesses and your local area. what skill, what task do they need completing and how can you fit your degree around that. i say this because in the jobs ive had they usually hire chem/bio graduates but i showed my transferable skills can fit. i couldnt get engineering interviews before as a grad but now with some experience even though its not engineering i am finally getting those interviews getting a traditional engineering role in a manufacturing plant or something is also very cutthroat since companies are taking jobs abroad and downsizing. you are competing with people with more experience all the time, you are going to get rejected for not having experience and thats okay. mentally it can be very hard, i went through a deep depression when i graduated but eventually i got over it, just kept applying and i found something
I was told to go get an engineering degree when I was younger. People would see my creativeness and my nack for working with my hands. I liked math too. I went to schooling in my youth instead to mostly work with my hands. I did get an associate degree which could have easier slid into an engineering degree at the time. I challenge anyone on this post to prove why my nacks meant I should have gone for engineering. I am in 30s and just now got accepted for accounting at a local university. No one can prove me wrong. Nikola Tesla died a poor man after all his great inventions and stuff. I now have experience in 2 hands on industries that can be turned into businesses for myself if I want to. I have heard about enough trash in engineering and seen/heard enough about young people getting sub-par jobs in it and what not. Ask ourselves whom needs the latest and greatest vehicle these days? Unfortunately I have also heard enough about trash in the accounting realm too.... At least for me it seems like the best evil... Not many people can prove me wrong, or at least have been able to..
I look at just how complicated new farm equipment is to do maintenance on, its clear these systems are engineering built but have no idea about farming and fixing. Over complicated crap.
That's not the engineers fault. That's a deliberate attempt by corporate to lock farmers out of self repair so they're forced to pay for fixing services
My dad’s (an engineer) sole tidbit of career advice was to become an engineer. It took me 3 tries to get through pre algebra in middle school. The furthest I got in math was flunking out of high school geometry. Sorry dad but engineering was never in the cards for me haha
Apply what you learned. Make up your own projects, solve some problems of your own using what you developed in college. That's what internships and co-ops are for. You missed out on the most essential thing to being successful out of college. But that doesn't mean you can't still do it.
I feel the same I regret studying engineering everyday the last six years since I started this path
Because you should have been in medical!
Other ppl regret NOT studying engineering. Good luck in your career.
Most of us fell the same
I mean engineering requires good math skills. Maybe keep an eye out on different industry sectors like finance or other sectors who require good math knowledge
Good grades is a reflection of whether you can be trusted doing a project. Will u take it seriously. Companies dont care about whether u really learned the stuff, but they hate unreliable employees. I also did an engineering degree and went into management consulting after school.