Differences in starting salary among different engineering majors

Mr_Payne
Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:22:07 +0000

Also, in terms of PetroE salaries I can confirm that they do make a good 10-15k more a year than the other engineering majors. At my old employer, they lumped all the EE/CHemE/Mech and non PetroE majors together and paid them the same.

I don’t think my company is like that. The upstream oil industry is broken up into four engineering disciplines generally (drilling/completion/production/reservoir). If you are an ME/ChemE you can get hired into those jobs (in fact many companies do this regularly). However, these engineers will usually start lower in salary. The difference gradually goes away though as experience trumps the degree every time. The salary track is generally setup so all production engineers compete against other production engineers.