Choosing the right major/ How to land a great job after college 2

[Jmax8910]

I'm a sophomore physics major at a state liberal arts college in Colorado. I went here to save money -- it's walking distance from my parent's house. And though I'm learning a lot, I'm worried about job placement, from being qualified and having a competitive degree, to vital networking availability: we're a few hundred miles from Denver, the closest bigger city. There's no high-tech industry here either. On another level, Colorado doesn't offer great scholarships, even for in-state students. It scares me to take on a hundred thousand dollars of debt to go to CSU or CU Boulder. Furthermore, I'm having trouble deciding which branch of engineering I want to specialize -- it's a tie between electrical engineering, computer engineering (not computer science), aerospace engineering, and optical engineering. Right now I'm leaning towards electrical engineering after taking an intro to electronics course.

Would it be professionally and, in the long-term, financially advantageous to transfer to one of the bigger schools to study electrical engineering? Am I too late in the process? Also, for those of you who majored in electrical engineering, how competitive are jobs? Can I find a job designing processors for Intel with a physics degree from a relatively unknown school?

Also, how would job placement be if I finished my physics degree here and got a masters in a specialized engineering field?

Thanks so much for taking your time to read this post.

 

[IRstuff]

I suggest you do some more careful research in the future. CSU tuition for in-state residents is even cheaper than UC Berkeley, which is about 1/3 of private schools in California. Your state universities are subsidized by your state, and you should take advantage of them if you're interested in a low-cost, quality education.

Where you start matters little; your degree only comes from where you finished. There are lots of students in California that spend a couple years at a community college to clear out all the humanities and other low-level pre-requisites and then transfer to a 4-yr college. Your best source of information should be your school's placement office, which should have better statistics than any anecdotal information you might get here. However, it's likely to be difficult to get a job with Intel designing processors, even if you came from Caltech MIT, simply because there's a limited number of jobs. No one would be able to design a processor by themselves, given that the i7 Haswell processor supposedly contains 2.6 billion transistors; there would be a team of dozens working on such a chip. Nevertheless, there are lots of job openings at Intel:

http://www.intel.com/content/

http://www/us/en/jobs/jobs-at-intel.html

There even appears to be a few dozen job openings in Colorado

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[IRstuff]

I'll just mention in passing that I majored in EE, thinking I would be designing ICs, but life took a different turn, but, it's all good; I have no regrets and I still love what I do, which is systems engineering.

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[Lomarandil]

I'm going to make the assumption that you're talking about Mesa State or Adams State.

First off, IR is right. Neither CU-Boulder or CSU should cost you 6 figures (even starting from scratch). Mid 5, potentially. But you're in luck -- Colorado happens to have some of the easiest requirements for transferring your base credits between public schools (by law). So most if not all of your two years should be applicable -- you may have to lean on the admissions offices of both schools to have them talk to each other, but it can be done. I happened to transfer about a year and a half from CSU-P to Mines with little difficulty (and this was before the law changed). Keep your coursework, especially old tests, just in case there's a question of what material was covered in a given class.

You're right in that there aren't a bunch of in-state scholarships. But I found that there were pretty good work-study packages (at both schools, in my case) that allowed me to cover a lot of the living expenses I incurred during school. I lived frugally, but didn't have to pinch too many pennies.

So in the end, you're talking about 2-2.5 years of tuition, fees and some of your living expenses. Work hard and take a full load for a few short years and you won't have to mortgage your future.

Now, talking about the main crux of your post, I happened to live with a bunch of EEs and one Physics major turned Mechanical Engineer (with an MS). The latter had some difficulty getting admission to the Mech Eng MS program, and some challenges with the job hunt related to his Physics BS (he's doing great now). I'd say that if/when you decide that engineering is where you want to be, there is value to getting a BS that says engineering instead of physics. As a sophomore, you probably don't have to rush the decision -- just keep an eye on the course flowcharts to see when that hard turn into specialized courses really starts.

(I'd risk having to take a few extra classes if if means you have more time and more exposure to figure out what you want to do. This part of life is about exploring what the next 20-40 years of your life might be like. Don't go off half-cocked.)

The EEs I lived and worked with were mostly in Power (which is the focus at Mines), so I can't speak too well to the IC/electronics side. Though you might also enjoy the Mechatronics program at CSU-P.

School "prestige" is overrated. Work hard, ask good questions, and find something you love to do. Any employer worth their salt will recognize that.

 

[IRstuff]

School prestige, "overrated" as it is, is still worth a little. When someone says they graduated BSEE from Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, or MIT, that still counts for a bit of prestige. Not unlike Harvard Law giving a newly minted lawyer some cachet. That said, at the end of your career, it's what you did that counts, not what school you came from. And the subject of school doesn't really come up in normal discussions, so someone from Cal State Fullerton has the same opportunity to develop solid bonafides as someone from MIT.

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[TheTick]

The advice I'm giving my kids...

Internships count more than anything. This seems to be the single greatest factor into getting a good position to enter the job market.

Grades, projects, and extracurriculars are important because those enable you to get the best internships.

 

[IRstuff]

I will second that; my son had a job offer in hand BEFORE starting his last year of college from his internship company the prior summer. Given that it was pretty much his dream job, he accepted the offer in November of that year. I should point out that contrary to previous behavior, he actually sought and got that internship in October of the previous school year. His previous internship was only acquired the day after his freshman year ended, for which we gave him a truckload of grief. Nevertheless, that internship led to the next and final one.

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[MatthewL]

Here's my take on it, having done the transfer route and major change (from secondary ed (chemistry) to chemical engineering). If you are going to do it, you should be looking to start NO LATER than the fall term of your junior year. Most engineering courses start their core classes in the sophomore year, but you may be able to get credit for those from some of your physics classes. If you wait until your "senior" year you will be adding at least one year, possibly two, depending on prerequisites. Keep your syllabi and take a copy of your current school's course descriptions with you when you have to get admissions to give you credit for prior coursework.
Another thing, major in what you love, not what pays the most. You can (through electives) tailor your degree to some extent to match your interests and increase your chances of being hired by the company(s) that you are interested in. I took two graduate level courses in polymers my "senior" year and landed a job out of school in the resins (paint) industry at a plant that made both free radical and condensation polymers.
Also, as Lomarandil noted, shifting to engineering for a MS after a BS in another field is difficult. AFAIK, schools are required in the US to have you complete at least the core BS coursework for the major you want a MS in if you do not have a BS in that field, if the MS is in engineering.
I will also second TheTick's advice on internships. I went to night school to finish my ChemE and had difficulties with the recruiters since I did not have Co-op experience (I went to Drexel, which has a highly ranked Co-op). The rest of the class I graduated with (the night school walked with the engineering discipline they majored in, not as a separate group) had a 97% placement rate at graduation, with most going into industry, not graduate school, and they all had two 6 month Co-ops. Of those who took jobs in industry, most went to a company they had worked for as a Co-op. Also, at the time (2006), the average pay for the Co-op was in the ballpark of 30K total.

Good luck!

Matt

Quality, quantity, cost. Pick two.

 

[IRstuff]

Make sure you know whether you're getting paid, or not. An unpaid internship doing something relevant is still better than a paid internship at some random company. Internship pay can almost be as good as some full-time jobs. My son works in the computer science, and some Silicon Valley companies were offering $6k/month + a place to live for college juniors 3 yrs ago.

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[cvg]

as a former transfer from chemistry ==> physics ==> civil engineering and graduating from Colorado state, recommend you do not wait till fall of your junior year to transfer into an engineering program, you should be making plans right now for next fall. you will need to verify that calculus classes will transfer. the job market in Colorado has not been all that robust for a long time, you may need to look elsewhere regardless whether you continue in physics or engineering.

 

[oldestguy]

for what it is worth, I found that the class standing upon graduating was based only on the grades received at that college, not the previous school. The two guys, not particularly different from the rest of us who went the whole time there, landed the top ranking and got those fancy labels. It probably made little difference in the end but was a sore-point among the long term guys. The goal, it seemed, when we started just after WWII, with high reputation colleges crowded then, was to weed out the lesser gifted by making the difficulty of those early courses real tough,with resulting low grades there. Just sour grapes I suppose.

 

[MatthewL]

cvg,

When I reread my post, I realized I didn't make myself clear. The OP should be looking now to transfer with the intent of starting at the new school in the fall term of his junior year, as you pointed out.

Matt

Quality, quantity, cost. Pick two.

 

[Panther140]

Keep in mind that you are currently a customer of the education industry. Their goal is to make money off of you. Keep it in mind that going to a grade-A school is not a guarantee that you will be Grade-A. It is also not the only way to have a Grade-A career.

You have to know what you want before you know what to chase. If you don't have a vision that you are laser-focused on, I recommend taking time away from school. Go work in the field in any capacity that you can, get exposure to real-world scenarios, formulate a plot, and spend money on tuition when you are all-in.

Vision, some clarity, passion, and experience are integral to learning and planning ahead.

With the price of tuition, you want to either go all in or fold.

 

[IRstuff]

There is no really good reason to spend excessively on college, other than some misguided notion of gaining "prestige."

A retired colleague went to a state university and was just as highly regarded as those that went to "prestigious" colleges, but paid about 1/4 of what those others paid.

But, this is all old news, right? You give one person an HP65 and they use it to calculate sums and differences; give a different person the same calculator, and they're doing calculus and trig and figured out the Easter egg that made the calculator work as a timer. You are only as good as what you've put into yourself. And, if you can't do integrals to save your life, going to Harvard ain't going to help that.

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[weldstan]

your physics background provides an easy venue into an Engineering degree from a suitable university. Seek one that meets your needs/goals and apply or consider pursuing the physics degree and obtaining a graduate degree in Engineering.

Do apply for an internship for this summer. My internship (47 years ago) led to an excellent starting position which directly impacted my future career into my current retirement. The company from which I retired has hired interns still in college and working part time during the year. The majority of those interns were awarded full time employment upon graduation.

 

[RossABQ]

Not sure if it has been pointed out, but CO and other western states have an agreement to honor each others' HS graduates with reduced tuition rates; see

http://www.wiche.edu/wue

Some of the NM universities are cheap to attend and cost of living while in school is low. I believe some NV and UT schools are too.

 

[Jmax8910]

Thanks for all your replies. I'm currently doing a few unpaid research projects with the physics department at my school. The first of these is measuring interference patterns on a fabry-perot interferometer. Second of these is modeling the fluid dynamics of blast waves in python. Lastly, as a side project, I'm building a high voltage dc power source, preferably without killing myself. This will be used for some other projects I have in mind down the road: a nitrogen laser and a tesla coil are a few.

From what it seems, it doesn't matter necessarily what your degree is but your experience and drive that gets you a job. Obviously a specialized degree will give you experience for a specialized job but also closes doors in other fields. My concern is closing those doors too early -- that's why I'm majoring in physics. But by not specializing am I limited professionally?

Again, I really appreciate all the responses. It gives me a lot to think about. Thanks so much.

 

[IRstuff]

A physics degree might get you a systems engineering job, but there's an expectation of a related degree for most other disciplines like ME or SE.

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[Panther140]

"My concern is closing those doors too early -- that's why I'm majoring in physics. But by not specializing am I limited professionally?"

No you are not limited by any factors that are external to the results that you bring.

Even my arduino is having a successful career lately.

if (results);
then (money);
else (failure);

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[xnuke]

Physics is a science program, not an engineering program. Physics students typically get exposed more to analysis and the application of the scientific method than they do to engineering design. It is more limiting to earn a physics degree from my perspective. If you want to be an engineer, study engineering. I have a BS in physics and mathematics, and had to do a significant amount of postbaccalaureate undergraduate engineering coursework to get into my graduate program in engineering because the majors are not similar enough. I'm glad I did. When I went into engineering practice, I was a better engineer for it.

I now teach engineering, and the physics majors that are accepted into our MS program are unprepared for graduate engineering courses or even engineering practice in industry. Their mindset is oriented differently due to science vs. engineering undergraduate coursework. They also need postbaccalaureate undergraduate engineering courses to be successful. I have a former physics student in two of my classes right now who is struggling to pass. While he can analyze problems that are well-defined, the ill-defined problems in engineering design are too difficult for him. If I give him a blank sheet of paper and ask him to design something, he can't do it. He was not required by the admissions committee to take undergrad classes, yet he should have been.

xnuke
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