Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
(OP)
I'm a sophomore physics major at a state liberal arts college in Colorado. I went here to save money -- it's walking distance from my parent's house. And though I'm learning a lot, I'm worried about job placement, from being qualified and having a competitive degree, to vital networking availability: we're a few hundred miles from Denver, the closest bigger city. There's no high-tech industry here either. On another level, Colorado doesn't offer great scholarships, even for in-state students. It scares me to take on a hundred thousand dollars of debt to go to CSU or CU Boulder. Furthermore, I'm having trouble deciding which branch of engineering I want to specialize -- it's a tie between electrical engineering, computer engineering (not computer science), aerospace engineering, and optical engineering. Right now I'm leaning towards electrical engineering after taking an intro to electronics course.
Would it be professionally and, in the long-term, financially advantageous to transfer to one of the bigger schools to study electrical engineering? Am I too late in the process? Also, for those of you who majored in electrical engineering, how competitive are jobs? Can I find a job designing processors for Intel with a physics degree from a relatively unknown school?
Also, how would job placement be if I finished my physics degree here and got a masters in a specialized engineering field?
Thanks so much for taking your time to read this post.
Would it be professionally and, in the long-term, financially advantageous to transfer to one of the bigger schools to study electrical engineering? Am I too late in the process? Also, for those of you who majored in electrical engineering, how competitive are jobs? Can I find a job designing processors for Intel with a physics degree from a relatively unknown school?
Also, how would job placement be if I finished my physics degree here and got a masters in a specialized engineering field?
Thanks so much for taking your time to read this post.





RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Where you start matters little; your degree only comes from where you finished. There are lots of students in California that spend a couple years at a community college to clear out all the humanities and other low-level pre-requisites and then transfer to a 4-yr college. Your best source of information should be your school's placement office, which should have better statistics than any anecdotal information you might get here. However, it's likely to be difficult to get a job with Intel designing processors, even if you came from Caltech MIT, simply because there's a limited number of jobs. No one would be able to design a processor by themselves, given that the i7 Haswell processor supposedly contains 2.6 billion transistors; there would be a team of dozens working on such a chip. Nevertheless, there are lots of job openings at Intel: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/jobs/jobs-a... There even appears to be a few dozen job openings in Colorado
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
First off, IR is right. Neither CU-Boulder or CSU should cost you 6 figures (even starting from scratch). Mid 5, potentially. But you're in luck -- Colorado happens to have some of the easiest requirements for transferring your base credits between public schools (by law). So most if not all of your two years should be applicable -- you may have to lean on the admissions offices of both schools to have them talk to each other, but it can be done. I happened to transfer about a year and a half from CSU-P to Mines with little difficulty (and this was before the law changed). Keep your coursework, especially old tests, just in case there's a question of what material was covered in a given class.
You're right in that there aren't a bunch of in-state scholarships. But I found that there were pretty good work-study packages (at both schools, in my case) that allowed me to cover a lot of the living expenses I incurred during school. I lived frugally, but didn't have to pinch too many pennies.
So in the end, you're talking about 2-2.5 years of tuition, fees and some of your living expenses. Work hard and take a full load for a few short years and you won't have to mortgage your future.
Now, talking about the main crux of your post, I happened to live with a bunch of EEs and one Physics major turned Mechanical Engineer (with an MS). The latter had some difficulty getting admission to the Mech Eng MS program, and some challenges with the job hunt related to his Physics BS (he's doing great now). I'd say that if/when you decide that engineering is where you want to be, there is value to getting a BS that says engineering instead of physics. As a sophomore, you probably don't have to rush the decision -- just keep an eye on the course flowcharts to see when that hard turn into specialized courses really starts.
(I'd risk having to take a few extra classes if if means you have more time and more exposure to figure out what you want to do. This part of life is about exploring what the next 20-40 years of your life might be like. Don't go off half-cocked.)
The EEs I lived and worked with were mostly in Power (which is the focus at Mines), so I can't speak too well to the IC/electronics side. Though you might also enjoy the Mechatronics program at CSU-P.
School "prestige" is overrated. Work hard, ask good questions, and find something you love to do. Any employer worth their salt will recognize that.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Internships count more than anything. This seems to be the single greatest factor into getting a good position to enter the job market.
Grades, projects, and extracurriculars are important because those enable you to get the best internships.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Another thing, major in what you love, not what pays the most. You can (through electives) tailor your degree to some extent to match your interests and increase your chances of being hired by the company(s) that you are interested in. I took two graduate level courses in polymers my "senior" year and landed a job out of school in the resins (paint) industry at a plant that made both free radical and condensation polymers.
Also, as Lomarandil noted, shifting to engineering for a MS after a BS in another field is difficult. AFAIK, schools are required in the US to have you complete at least the core BS coursework for the major you want a MS in if you do not have a BS in that field, if the MS is in engineering.
I will also second TheTick's advice on internships. I went to night school to finish my ChemE and had difficulties with the recruiters since I did not have Co-op experience (I went to Drexel, which has a highly ranked Co-op). The rest of the class I graduated with (the night school walked with the engineering discipline they majored in, not as a separate group) had a 97% placement rate at graduation, with most going into industry, not graduate school, and they all had two 6 month Co-ops. Of those who took jobs in industry, most went to a company they had worked for as a Co-op. Also, at the time (2006), the average pay for the Co-op was in the ballpark of 30K total.
Good luck!
Matt
Quality, quantity, cost. Pick two.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
When I reread my post, I realized I didn't make myself clear. The OP should be looking now to transfer with the intent of starting at the new school in the fall term of his junior year, as you pointed out.
Matt
Quality, quantity, cost. Pick two.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
You have to know what you want before you know what to chase. If you don't have a vision that you are laser-focused on, I recommend taking time away from school. Go work in the field in any capacity that you can, get exposure to real-world scenarios, formulate a plot, and spend money on tuition when you are all-in.
Vision, some clarity, passion, and experience are integral to learning and planning ahead.
With the price of tuition, you want to either go all in or fold.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
A retired colleague went to a state university and was just as highly regarded as those that went to "prestigious" colleges, but paid about 1/4 of what those others paid.
But, this is all old news, right? You give one person an HP65 and they use it to calculate sums and differences; give a different person the same calculator, and they're doing calculus and trig and figured out the Easter egg that made the calculator work as a timer. You are only as good as what you've put into yourself. And, if you can't do integrals to save your life, going to Harvard ain't going to help that.
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Do apply for an internship for this summer. My internship (47 years ago) led to an excellent starting position which directly impacted my future career into my current retirement. The company from which I retired has hired interns still in college and working part time during the year. The majority of those interns were awarded full time employment upon graduation.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
Some of the NM universities are cheap to attend and cost of living while in school is low. I believe some NV and UT schools are too.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
From what it seems, it doesn't matter necessarily what your degree is but your experience and drive that gets you a job. Obviously a specialized degree will give you experience for a specialized job but also closes doors in other fields. My concern is closing those doors too early -- that's why I'm majoring in physics. But by not specializing am I limited professionally?
Again, I really appreciate all the responses. It gives me a lot to think about. Thanks so much.
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
No you are not limited by any factors that are external to the results that you bring.
Even my arduino is having a successful career lately.
if (results);
then (money);
else (failure);
"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin
RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
I now teach engineering, and the physics majors that are accepted into our MS program are unprepared for graduate engineering courses or even engineering practice in industry. Their mindset is oriented differently due to science vs. engineering undergraduate coursework. They also need postbaccalaureate undergraduate engineering courses to be successful. I have a former physics student in two of my classes right now who is struggling to pass. While he can analyze problems that are well-defined, the ill-defined problems in engineering design are too difficult for him. If I give him a blank sheet of paper and ask him to design something, he can't do it. He was not required by the admissions committee to take undergrad classes, yet he should have been.
xnuke
"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life." Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
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RE: Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college
My two sons are on opposite sides of that same paradigm; one excels at dealing with unknowns, while the other is most comfortable with problems that are only slightly different than problems he's already done.
That said, not having the engineering background is a hindrance, at times, even for systems engineering. Most engineering jobs requires a combination of analysis and synthesis, so while the analysis part fits well within the physics purview, synthesis does require at least the basic background courses.
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