<p>I’ve thought about switching schools and switching majors and was wondering what the average entry-level engineering job is like.</p>
<p>Do you sit in a cubicle and solve physics problems all day long?</p>
<p>By the way, I am not interested in software engineering jobs, since the word ‘engineer’ is often used a bit too loosely when it comes to computer related jobs, I’m thinking of mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil and aeronautical engineering jobs.</p>
<p>It varies greatly. Some jobs will give you more field work, while others will give you more office work.</p>
<p>And no, you don’t solve physics problems, you solve engineering problems!</p>
<p>It varies wildly but generally speaking most jobs have little, if any, serious design work. Not many people will be designing the next airliner, CPU, satellite, engine, etc. Most entry level jobs (but not all) are substantially less glamorous. From what I’ve seen, common jobs are maintenance and sales for many different engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>Maintenance is generally in an industrial setting of some sort, such as a steel mill or paper mill. You will ensure that stuff does not break and when it does you will get a team of high school dropouts that resent your existence to fix it. There might be some office work from time to time but you can expect to get your hands a bit dirty in these type of jobs.</p>
<p>Sales means you will travel all over the place talking to clients about various products your company has and maybe trying work with them to get the solution that is right for that company. You can usually expect A LOT of travel, and this is not a vacation - you won’t be doing much sight seeing.</p>
<p>Other engineers may work on an assembly line, but usually not putting things together. You make sure that whatever is being produced is produced correctly and on-time. You might try to optimize a process to make it cheaper and/or faster. This is a pretty broad field and you might work with semiconductors in a clean room or with bar soap and laundry detergent.</p>
<p>There are some engineers who get office jobs and do little engineering work. You will play around on a computer most of the day, maybe make some phone calls, and do a random assortment of other office tasks. You will probably find such a job to be easy, but boring.</p>
<p>Can someone please tell me that PurdueEE did not give me a truthful answer?</p>
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LOL… This sounded like the first 3 months of my first job. It was easily resolved by letting my boss know that I was bored outta my mind…</p>
<p>Go to monster.com and similar and see for yourself. Just be aware that different companies use different titles for the same/similar positions. A maintenance position on assembly line, for example, might be called a wide range of things, such as maintenance engineer, engineer, operations engineer, process engineer, systems engineer, and manufacturing engineer. This is not an exhaustive list.</p>
<p>Remember that it’s called work, not fun. And not everyone can be a superstar.</p>
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<p>PurdueEE, job titles aside, “maintenance” can mean a lot of things. What type of ‘maintenance’ do those engineers do? Is it sort of like the type of job a car mechanic does but fixing industrial machines instead of cars?</p>
<p>It depends on the company, specifically what that company does and what kind of setting you’d be working in. In a more industrial setting you will have mechanics and electricians to do the actual physical labor. That doesn’t mean you won’t get your hands dirty, but you’re not going to twisting a wrench for eight hours per day. </p>
<p>Or you might be in a clean room working on manufacturing memory chips. If that’s the case you obviously won’t be getting dirty and will be doing more high tech things, like some vapor deposition process. You’ll be working with and on some cutting edge technology.</p>
<p>Your responsibilities will include knowing how some process works, often from start to finish. You will need to figure out how making some changes to one portion of the process might affect the later steps. You might have to try to speed up a process, make it cheaper, or make it more reliable… it’s hard to give specifics as so many different things happen in industry.</p>
<p>Entry level jobs can be of many different types. My job was in Research and Development and I did experiments in a lab and at manufacturing sites, analyzed data, and determined process settings at which the new machines would best operate and make the best quality. I developed new raw materials for our products with outside suppliers. Some of my classmates worked at the same company but in manufacturing plants, and they did projects to improve quality or productivity, and/or managed teams of workers.</p>
<p>OHZark, that sounds really exciting to me. I am sort of hoping to go into that. </p>
<p>A question for mechanical engineers: How often would the typical entry-level engineer get to work in teams and/or do some design?</p>
<p>Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I felt it is pertinent to OP’s question and not worth starting a new thread.</p>
<p>It usually also depends who you work for. If you work for a big, established company (i.e. Michelin, BMW) you probably would work as part of a team. They tend to be more organized and efficient. If you worked for a smaller place, you probably would on a wider range of things (i.e. jump in to fix something when it is broken), but the advangtage of this is that you could learn how to do more.</p>
<p>The best way to get to be part of a team that does a lot of design work is probably to go to a good school, get good grades, and perhaps get an advanced degree (MS). The latter is probably the best way to get a more “advanced” position as a entry-level engineer.</p>
<p>Here is some more stuff I just thought of:
-Research and Development <em>usually</em> requires an advanced degree.
-A good career path to follow if you want to work as part of a team working on different design oriented projects is to work for a big engineering consulting firm that handles different projects (i.e Jacobs engineering, etc).
-I agree with the above posters that said that most engineers work is not “glamorous” and they dont design things such as planes or cars.
-While BS entry level jobs here sound boring, they are actually very good jobs. They pay well, and can lead to management. For exmaple, many of the guys that run industrial plants started out as Process Engineers with a BS in Chem Eng.<br>
-These types of engineers are usually involved with the running of the plant, making it more efficient, fixing and trouble shooting problems. They are also usually also involved in upgrading the facilities.</p>
<p>The best part of being such an engineer is that you usually work under degreed individuals, and with management.</p>
<p>I was under the impression that most engineering jobs are spent at a desk…Purdue’s post was a real eye-opener, assuming it’s truthful.</p>
<p>Don’t take my word for it, browse job search sites (like monster.com) and company sites directly. When you browse company sites you need to make sure you broaden your search beyond the obvious (Intel, AMD, Analog Devices, NVIDIA, etc.) and look at companies that manufacture consumer goods, steel mills, power plants, oil field services companies, and a lot more. A lot of companies hire electrical engineers to fill a wide array of positions.</p>
<p>The main reason I am posting on here is I believe that many students have a mostly incorrect view of electrical engineering (and most likely engineering in general) and I have often talked to prospective engineering students about what to really expect from engineering. They seem to believe they will have jobs sitting behind a desk with a TI-89 in hand solving problems. Or messing around with some design software on a computer. Or designing the next fighter jet. While there are, no doubt, those kind of jobs out there, they are not in the majority. There are many more jobs not involved in design, particularly to new graduates. </p>
<p>It’s also important to note that there will be always be that one person that does something really interesting or amazing. There will always be exceptions to the rule and while it can give you an idea of what you might end up doing, statistically speaking you probably won’t do something awesome. Not everyone will do something interesting or amazing, some engineers will perform mundane tasks for their entire careers. This is the reality of the working world as ultimately SOMEONE has to get it done and if everyone just sat around and designed things all day long nothing would ever get built.</p>
<p>I may come off as being a bit “negative” and it is not really my goal to scare people away from engineering. My goal is to present my honest opinion and observations of the engineering field from a recent graduate / new hire perspective. I spent a substantial amount of time looking for a job after graduation that I would be satisfied with and as a result spent countless hours searching for engineering jobs and going on interviews to a large number of diverse companies. You hear tons about how engineers will make good money, tons of companies want them, there is a shortage of qualified engineers, etc. so while I could continue to beat the dead horse, I’d rather just skip over that part and give the other side of the story.</p>
<p>Almost every job on monster is asking for at least 5 years of experience…that’s a bit unsettling, but then again they wouldn’t advertise internships and the like on such a website, now would they?</p>
<p>Job requirements are not always set in stone. A new graduate may be able to get a job that requires a few years of experience if he did well in school and has some relevant experience. Just because it requires X+ years of experience doesn’t mean it requires that many years, although if it says 5+ or 10+ years of experience it’s probably not going to be a job available to a new graduate.</p>
<p>Internships may or may not be listed. It’s probably best to check career fair websites from colleges and company sites to find those. Internships are also not necessarily a good reflection of what you can expect to see in a real job. While I’m sure there are some internships that are just like real jobs, companies have to try to assign something that can be done in a ~2-2.5 month window, which is very short, with minimal training. You cannot spend 6 months in training for a 2 month internship.</p>
<p>I’m interested in hearing more about the kind of work that process engineers do. Is it, at the very least, somewhat exciting/interesting in comparison to a desk job? Is there a certain degree that most of them have? I ask this because I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone majoring in process engineering.</p>
<p>Also, on many of these job sites, I’m seeing terms such as “Level X Engineer”, X being a number. What does this mean?</p>
<p>Pardon the necromancy, but I figured this would be better than making an entirely new thread.</p>
<p>I would have to agree with purdueEE. He’s hittin it on the head. I don’t know why everyone glorifies engineering to such a high level. Work is work…</p>
<p>wow this thread is a real eye opener…purdue do you know what kind of work an entry level aerospace engineer would be doing? like the same type of stuff or more in the field?</p>
<p>lol…and there go my hopes of desiging engines X.x</p>
<p>There are definitely R&D jobs available to recent grads, but as has been stated, they are a minority. As an anecdote my uncle, an EE grad from a less than stellar school with a less than stellar GPA started his career for Raytheon working on guidance systems and absolutely loved it, although it was stressful and required long hours. With that said, he now makes multiple times what he did in that job sitting behind a desk a Lockheed Martin basically being bored to death. His wife, also an EE grad has taken pretty much the opposite route. She started in a mundane desk job hardly seeing any engineering work and now works with the military through Lockheed Martin designing for various projects(she has her MS though). My point is, engineering jobs are varied and will likely change throughout your career. Many engineers end up in management. If you truly want to design engines (awfully specific if you ask me for someone who hasn’t even taken an engineering course…) you can probably get a job designing engines. However, that job may not pay as well as other less desirable jobs or be as stable. R&D jobs rely on the project you are working on, meaning that if your project loses funding you lose your job. They also usually require longer working hours and more stress for not so great pay, unless you are the project manager or higher up, in which case you will be doing less engineering and more management. </p>
<p>You mention aerospace engineering… Considering the aerospace industry is very dependent on airline and government demands, you may want to consider ME. You would still be able to get entry level AE jobs and take most of the same classes, but it would also keep other options open for you in case the aerospace industry is not doing so well when you graduate or sometime down the line in your career.</p>