Graduating In May, Time to Make Decisions.

chrisw
Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:15:49 +0000

I would like to preface this by saying I don’t know the civil engineering market, but I do know the general job market and career services at your average school.

To find out expected salaries, look at career surveys. Georgia Tech certainly has career surveys broken out by school, so you can get some information there. From a quick glance, it looks like last year’s median salary for civil engineers was $67,000, but that is JUST information about graduates with that major. They could have gone into finance, teaching or any other industry.

When you are looking for jobs, your school matters for the primary purpose of attracting different employers. A #3 ranked school will attract higher quality companies than a #300 ranked school, but as far as your likelihood of getting placed into a job, I’d argue that it is just as difficult at GT as it is anywhere else: instead of 300 average people applying for 20 slots at an average company, 300 exceptional people are applying for 20 slots at an exceptional company.

GPA matters most when you are doing OCR; if you don’t know what OCR is, you are nearly too late. Do research NOW because resume drops are occurring right now, and some interviews have already happened. Now, I don’t know your industry, so I don’t know when the real hiring season is, but I can tell you that if most finance jobs are already in the middle of on site second interviews. When it comes to OCR, you are talking about potentially hundreds of applicants going for a set number of interview slots; these applicants are your peers, so when there are 400 people applying and only 50 interview slots (and 50 is a HUGE number… it’s more likely to be 12 or 20 slots), the GPA is the quickest filter.

Regarding a master’s degree, based on what I saw in the GT salary surveys, it makes no difference, but there are very few results for Civil Engineering MS degrees in spring of 2012, so I don’t know about that.