30 years in a career you hate, or 2 semesters getting onto a path in life you'll actually enjoy.

hmmmmmmm.....


there was a show on the other evening about the Echo generation, how the ability to see long term just isn't there. How instant gratification is what motivates the decision in most of the people of this generation (The Echo generation.).

FWIW, nobody at your age knows what the hell to do. your internship isn't a full reflection of what your job will be like when you get out. instead of making committments to school in fields that you have no experience in (like MBA, or law school), do yourself a favor...switch majors to something you enjoy studying. or, continue on in your field and get a JOB. When you get a JOB you will have plenty of opportunity to learn about other things, before jumping into grad school.

i'm an executive recruiter, and wish i had a dime for every "candidate" that has completed undergrad and jumps right into grad school with no experience. trust me, there are thousands out there, and employeers are preaching to me: experience, experience experience! NOT, education, education, education.

research for yourself what's going on in the market. i'm sure you'll find that experience is what you need--not graduate level education with zero experience (minus an internship). if you want to have an impact, you've got to get out there and earn your stripes, and not expect to be at the top right away. there are people out there who will kick your ass in the workplace. experience and earning your stripes is what will make you get ahead. then you consider grad school. but work 2 years and get some real life experience first. this will make you more attractive and you'll make more than those who just stay in school.
also, depending where you work, your education reimbursement could be a part of the company benefits. that's a great situation.

If you enjoy engineering, and you are interested in law, have you considered intellectual property law? The shift to it is pretty easy and the wages can be very nice. It is absolutely office work - a lot of time in front of a PC, but can be very interesting/intellectually challenging and is generally independent work. You can find a job as a patent agent (after taking a pretty easy test) which should start you in a salary range well above your peers and those positions will generally help you go to law school at night (which only takes an extra year and is low pressure).

If you want more info, PM me.

I am in senior management in the Defense industry. Most of my peers are EE geers with MBAs. This MEM thing sounds great, I would look into it. Have you thought about some other E degree, like ChemEng, EE or even geological/materials? The mining industry is super hot in NA right now, and there are tons of jobs, all more interesting than ME (IMHO).

Edit: Most get MBAs after 5-10 years of working (as per kittycat's point above - you need some experience first, before you make that decision).

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"How bad could it be?" - SimpleS

This sounds a bit familiar...
I got my bachelors in ME five years ago, but long before I graduated, I decided that an engineer's role was not for me. The decision was the result of disappointment with an internship I had before my junior year. Like you, I hated the cube life, and the insignificant role I played.
I decided on the MBA track, using the quantitative skills I learned to enther the financial services and management consulting fields. Ultimately, I came to my senses, and realized that I had been rash. I was a hopeless geek who would be happier as an engineer. I left my consluting job and got a masters in Engineering, not an MBA.
What's my point? My point is that you should be careful before leaving your major. There was an interest there, and more money or a sexy title isn't going to replace that in your career.
It sounds like you are frustrated with your current role in your co-op, and want a deicsion-making position with power. Is it possible that you aren't frustrated with engineering, but frustrated with being the office peon? If you are a talented engineer and leader, you will quickly rise to the kind of job you want. A business degree is not a free pass. you will be still start at the bottom.
Change majors if you like, just make sure you are following your passion. If you are driven, you will always find a role where you make an impact. (and most triathletes are plenty driven) The question is, will you miss building things and working in the tangible world if you leave?
Kevin

Hi.

I have an ME degree and am currently in MBA school. Every engineer I know hates their job. I am not an engineer anymore and will never be one again. Engineers are underpaid and underappreciated relative to their skillset. I am doing a finance internship right now. I am sitting in my cubicle . . . I could stand up and look at 100 people who couldn't handle engineering school if their life depended on it. Every single one of them makes more than you will ever make as an engineer. And they don't work as hard either.

Masters in engineering management is the same crap as engineering. You are just telling engineers what to do instead of doing it yourself. If it is only one extra year of your life and you are already smart enough to have figured out how much engineering sucks, I would just change majors. If not, be glad for the technical skills that your engineering degree gets you and go the law or MBA route. Technical skills are good in these careers because no one has them.

Eric Lambi

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

I second what Andypants says...

I worked as an Engineer for 8 years and got my MBA and Masters in Engineering at nite school. I wanted to keep the technical path and business path open as options. I did my first 8 years as an engineer in the Air Force, so not your typical cube job (although I was in a cube for ~9 months a year), the rest of the time, on the flight line working with air crew or in the simulator facilities updating, coding, and documenting (and trust me, that Mil Spec stuff has crazy amounts of documentation).

For the last 9 years, I've been doing Product Management in the networking, semiconductor and now biometrics markets. Its been good overall.

If I were to do it again, I'd skip out on the MBA and Masters in Engineering and I would go to Med school which is what i am most interested in (human body). In fact, I had everything lined up to go back to med school 2 years ago and go back into the Air Force (have everything paid and then do something useful with my life helping the troops...), but my family did not really want to see me being a medical officer in Afghanistan after not seeing me for effectively 5-6 years during the med school slog.

So my take, is go to med school if you don't want a cube job :-)

something that does really make a difference when looking for a (interesting) job is to have multiple skills. Certainly having an eng. degree + an MBA is a plus. But even as a mechanical engineer, you may look at complementing with something that can be technical as well.
Also, keep in mind that doing one internship sure doesn't give you an overall view of what you could be doing. And 'being the bitch of the workplace' well...you're an intern...what do you expect? Coming up with new wing designs? ;-)
Thing is, if you like the business aspect of the job, you more or less answer your question...go a MBA.

I'll second what kittycat says (although I'd moderate it a bit...experience only, with education is a bad idea...specially when 10 years down the road, your job has become obsolete, and you need to switch and don't have the education to do so...however, it's definitely possible to have both education and experience) re. getting some experience.

Btw, many schools now emphasize hands on experience...the industry may want to stop thinking that students right out of school have no skills.. ;-)

everything 'kittycat' wrote.. {{clap clap}}

My undergrad degree? English Literature and Biology. My graduate background? Management.

My background: 20 yrs military space logistics management, working with the remaining defense firms launching GPS, comsats and other cool stuff. I get yelled at, made fun of. I can still prank with the best of 'em. You are not alone, even at your age. You are going to think about this more than once during your lifetime. I still do.

Capitalizing on the 'internship' experience, I made a plan during my undergrad years to be OUT of my university within 4 years (is graduating on-time still possible?). Anyway, I graduated early due to an unfortunate circumstance: I applied to medical school and got the 'thin' envelope.

I went to Plan B: Have something in the back pocket. That 'back pocket' was the four-year, paid internship with the Air Force. Those four years on various space and missile acquisitions gave me some of the best experience - nonstop. Even today, my interns - go through the exact same training cycle I went through 20 years ago. I was given a 'mentor' to lead, guide me through the episodes of b.s. I learned from some of the greatest aerospace minds who showed me 'rolling up sleeves' and working for a living, wasn't really that tough.

But you must - pay your dues. Your dues? the '[7-6p] job inside my cube' making a difference.' Your dues? Being able to take criticism and understanding why Senior VP Smith said what she thought about your project. Your dues? Being able to understand 'immediate gratification' is not part of the Engineering model, or life in general.. unless you're part of the 'privileged class' per se. Delete those feelings of being "closed in." Find an internship that will let you soar! (Sorry for the pun).

I earned my graduate degree only after it became mandatory within Mother Air Force (Space) to have a masters in order to be promoted and remain competitive. I learned that was bush; still, there were ideals within the study of management I needed to learn. For example, I can design a support system around a satellite system blindfolded. Can I program a budget against the rest of the FYDP?

Not on your life. I'm still learning even today. I know the basics (we deal in billions & billions of dollars); I have a financial management team who does that for me.

Can I get rid of people? No. I cannot. I hold onto them too long. My bad decision(s). Even B-School texts and classroom experience can't help me out of this one; experience does.

Bottomline - Get the experience, a mentor. There is no such thing as 'immediate gratification' in Engineering. Some things are best learned 'in the field' vice the classroom.

One more thing: (shameless recruiting plug insert here) We're hiring engineers, too!

Good luck and enjoy your undergrad years.. make an 'impact' that way.

- kd

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kestrel driver


DonorsChoose.org (!!!)
bogolight.com (!!!)

A business degree with your engineering degree will definitely be helpful. In my organization the engineering management degree will get you to senior engineer or supervisotry engineer and the MBA helps get you to the upper reaches.

I'd suggest not switching now. Just about any post graduate path you decide will look favorably upon your engineering degree. Whether you decide on law, medicine, business school the engineering will have you in good stead.

Also don't get too worked up about your co-op. My co-op was at a paper plant in a dry parish in Louisiana. The work was boring to boot. My current job is very different from the co-op I did.

Also realize that you are very young and no matter what job you go to for the first year or two you will be the new guy and get all the new guy jobs. That's no matter what you decide to do. So yes, I made copies did powerpoint charts, brought things to the fedex place etc etc. But now I run my own project and very soon will have "Worked my way up to middle management." Just like the monster.com commercial from a few years back. :-)

Also realize that where you are isn't typical of what mechanical engineers do. Because ME's do lots of things in lots of places. Just about any city has mechanical engineering jobs. Any industry uses them. So you could be doing hvac for buldings, mining industry, petrochem, making machines etc etc.

Lastly, the engineering degree will allow you to do lots of things not only because your education is well respected but also because the pay is good. While your friends in business school are having a very tough time right out of school, you'll be starting in the 40 - 50k range (maybe more) and banking money while you decide what do. You might decide eventually to get out of engineering, but while you were making up your mind, you were making decent bank and have a little more freedom.

Just about any business will pay for your grad school if it is engineering or business related, that's also a bonus.

An engineering degree is always a great base...If you don't want to do engineering later, so be it. You can always move into the business world. Whereas, it's virtually impossible to move from business into the technical world without th degree. There are far worse things to be doing for a career than engineering. I make a good living...It's 10:45 a.m. on the East Coast and I'm heading to the park for a run.

With an engineering degree you can pretty much get into any post graduate program you want, and if you didn't have a hard time in engineering school, will find most programs fairly easy, including med school.

Forget about what your co-op is like, unless you get hired by that company, it will be completely different. I graduated in 2000 with an engineering degress (CSE), and change jobs just about every 2 years. So, I am on my 3rd "professional" job....they are all completely different!

Everyone else hit the nail on the head. Get your degree, got work for a few years, then go back to school. You will have a much better grasp on what you like, and don't like.

If your thinking about changing degrees, I would suggest staying in the engineering department. Its worth getting the degree with engineering emphasis. If your are thinking about changing to the business department, just finish out the engineering, and then got for the business.

One last thing, don't discount being a peon. So far in my limited work exp (5+ years) I have discovered there are two sets of people, the people that do the work (peons) and the people that organize the work (managers). A peon is told what to do, given tasks, given direction, and is lost in the mix. As a manger, you have to organize schedules and budgets, keep people busy, go to meetings, get shit from multiple levels of high management, and you don't get to do the actually work. For me, I like doing the work....and I also like leaving work at work! I love 9-5, I hate 9-5, plus being on call, plus staying late, plus coming in for meetings, plus stress, plus worrying, plus.....you get the picture.

Good luck....and don't worry, no one knew what they wanted to do when they were in school. Even the ones that think they do....they really don't know! It all changes with perspective. I felt I learned more in my first year of work then in 5 years of college!!!!

-bcreager

I'm a double-geek (EE) student and not an ME, but anyways. What does your internship entail and where do your interests lie? Mechanical Engineering is such a broad field that you might simply be frustrated with the specific area. Plus, you're an intern, which means technical secretary. (or in my case mindless data collector on occasion)

I'll admit you sound exactly like one of my roomies, whom I'm still confused why he chose ME as his degree -- he doesn't like any of his classes nor is entirely competent in the material (I wonder at times whether I get his classwork better than him). I'm not suggesting you don't, but he makes the same complaints regularly.

Everyone that I have talked to with engineering experience (just about my whole family/family friends) has told me it takes 3-4 years to earn your keep. Then the job begins. In fact a hiring manager from Tektronix told me it takes 2 years before a new hire is fully functional. But I'm rambling...

Honestly I love the degree I'm pursuing so I'm biased. If you were going to jump ship, it seems that a business degree gets you nothing right now over what you already have going. If you can cut out your own niche, intellectual property law does sound interesting. But listen to the hiring people. (see above)

I'm going on to do my masters in EE in a program that builds on my senior project, but I'm honestly interested in the medical world also. I certainly have not looked at that option seriously. Dev - do you have any info on taking an engineering degree and going towards something like neurology?

Good luck!

Daniel

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The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.

-Albert J. Nock

medical world and EE??

how about you email me and do a phd in bioinformatics? I am working on machine learning techniques for data analysis in cancer therapy.

either way, pursue your idea...there are awesome stuff done in this area...truly fascinating field...

IMHO - Everyone has been giving you great advice - the key is to sit down and figure out what it is that you dont like about engineering.

For example if you love problem solving and all the "tech/geek" stuff but you hate what you're doing at work because they have you doing menial tasks like plot graphs etc. The key here is that a) you're not graduated yet and that makes you bottom of the totem pole b) the company you're working for isnt giving you a lot of good tasks to help you develop necessary skills and/or c) you have yet to show them what you can really do.

I had many friends who had bad co-op/internships and were very unhappy with engineering until they found a job after graduating that they like. I had the good fortune of landing a co-op job with a small company that takes on wide variety of projects within the defense, industrial, aviation, naval and power plant industries. Typical projects take around 6 months to over a year but they're always something slightly different if not completely different - software, hardware, R&D, etc.

Its not logical to lump what you're disliking about your job to engineering in general. If you dont like cube life - there are many engineering jobs that dont involve a lot of cube work, - i.e. production/plant engineers, field sales engineers, research and development etc. But most if not all of these require some level of experience.

As for jumping straight into grad school - I would not recommend it for several reasons -

1) You have no experience so you typically become a professors donkey for whatever research they want done and which will most likely have no real application once you are out of school.

2) the idea of being a manager just because you have a graduate degree is ludicrous no matter what that masters is called if you have zero experience. Most people/companies will start you at the bottom anyways meaning you are still at the bottom of the ladder and you might not even get a sniff for an interview because you may be perceived as being too expensive to hire to do bottom of the pole work. Most companies calculate pay based on experience and at best a masters is equivalent to a half year experience

3) Once you start working, most of the time you can get your company to help pay for your graduate school tuition. I think this is the best approach because 1) you are getting valuable experience in the workplace and 2) you have a much better idea of what you want to do for your graduate degree (i.e. some R&D that is work related and/or courses to help you at work). Plus this is how one of the managers explained it to me - lets assume you take two people who are graduating from their undergrad. One starts work right away and gets paid say 50K a year and at 60 is making say 150k a year because of 35 years experience and seniority until retirement at 65. The second one starts work after 2 years of grad school and starts at say 52K a year. But he has to pay off the extra year or two of grad school (assuming he doesnt get a huge grant or anything) plus heres the kicker he wont reach 35 years experience until 62 and make 150k a year for only 3 years instead of 5 to retire at 65. The second guy just missed out on 300K (give or take) of salary. I know its a simplistic view of things but it sort of put things into perspective for me. Now take the third guy who starts working after undergrad, gets his grad school paid for and is gaining valuable experience. I picked the third route and I feel Im getting the best of both worlds.

Nothing is ever easy - Good luck...

i'm a EE with 5years of engineering and management work. I'm getting an MBA next year.

Management skills with a technical background is the best you can be. Work as an engineer for a while before going into your MBA. There is nothing worst than a manager that has no technical ablities or any idea of what the work requires.
Some people can't be made into good managers. It's one of those things that people want to work with you or they dont. If they dont, then youll be stuck doing technical stuff the rest of your life.

sorry for all the engineers who don't like being engineers. I can't conceive of doing anything else. I'm a PE with an EE degree who works in a large manufacturing plant, and I've been doing it for over 20 years. I do some work in my office and some out in the production areas. I get to desigh, install, check out and start up new stuff, and I get to fix broken stuff. what more can any little boy with adhd and an imagination ask for?

Management skills with technical background the best you can be?

Nooooooo.

Try technical skills with finance skills . . . hedge funds=$$$. managing engineers for big companies=boooooring.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

My advice is that you complete your degree, and then do whatever it is you want. Having an ENGG degree is just fine for alot of business endevours, and there's no limit to what you can do once you're finished.

Myself, I anticipated a similar problem so my degree is as follows:

Major in Electrical Engineering

Specialized in Biomedical Engineering

with a Minor in Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development

5 Year degree + internship. I figure I'll be able to do whatever I want when I'm done.

I'm going to 2nd ericlambi's two posts. If I had to do it over again, I would have gunned for a career in financial services. Either trading or research. Stay away from the investment banking side of things though, that level of abuse is not worth it. Anyways, I'll try to avoid rambling, but I am an outsider looking in on this one. I have about a dozen friends on Wall St. or similar. You can break in with the ME degree, finance hires all sorts of engineering and hard science majors, they love the math and analytical skills. Me, I wandered into database application management, after BS degrees in physics and political science. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. I still think about getting an MBA and getting into finance, but I'm 30 and the window for that opportunity is slipping away
.

Some minor advice, don't go straight to any graduate school, get a job and get some experience first. Minimum 2 years. I think most if not all here have already said that. And don't worry about not knowing what you want to do. The people who do know at your stage are in the vast minority. And even those who think they know, often end up being wrong.

hey dude,... depends on what you want to do...

BS and MS mechanical engineering, and after 3 years working for GM i started my MBA program this morning... send me a PM with your email if youd like to chat, I would love to help, and who knows, maybe you can shave some time off my tri's too :)



Scott