<p>I haven’t read the entire thread, but I can tell you that in a rough economic climate (not quite as bad as today, but still bad), I came out of a ChE program and had 21 job offers (42 interviews) in fields including environmental consulting, chemical manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, business consulting, paper manufacturing, consumer electronics, and food production. The trick was a decent GPA from a top engineering school.</p>
<p>In ChE, to make the big bucks (the people coming out making $70,000 per year), you need to go into either chemicals or petroleum. Both of those greatly limit your location options to the Gulf Coast (Houston, if you’re lucky, but ranging from Corpus Christi to Baton Rouge) and the Mid-west (Iowa, Southern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, etc.). There are some manufacturing plants in places like California and New Jersey, but those areas are in deep decline in terms of on-stream capacity.</p>
<p>If you’re willing to take less money, you can go into non-chemical manufacturing (food, pharmaceuticals, plastics, etc.) and have many more options in terms of location. </p>
<p>To be even more flexible, you can leave engineering completely and go into consulting, law, finance, medicine, supply chain management, etc. Many of those fields make more than traditional engineers, but are also more difficult to break into and riskier. </p>
<p>The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that the ChE degree is arguably the most flexible degree out there.</p>