Confused and ready to move on 2

[n00bME]

I graduated this past December from school. The end of the year snuck up on me as I was busy with classes and such. Because of this, I rushed to get a job, any job that I could find that was willing to pay me. I found a job and took it immediately (immediately being my first day of work was 3 months after my last day of class) and within the first month I realized that this was not the place I wanted to be. My first plan was to stick it out and get a masters because the company pays for it but I have been bored at work every day for the past 3 months. All I do at work is add and subtract and look at old drawings and I have seen what the other people in my group do, and it just does not interest me. I'm sorry but I did not spend $120,000 on school to get an average engineering salary and add and subtract all day.

My question is this. I know the company that I work for now, is not the field I want to be in at all. It is nuclear and however interesting knowledge-wise, I find it bland as a job. I like to see things work, not just design huge plates and such that just sit there. I also think that I want to help people in some way. Not just by designing a motor or something, but I would like to figure out things to make people's lives better. I don't know. Does anyone know of any places or sites that can help me figure out what I want to do and where I want to go? Also, should I even worry about this now? Or should I get more experience somewhere else before I try and find the "dream" job?

Thanks for reading and I hope to hear your advice!

 

[prost]

Just my two cents.
Does anyone else out there think as I do that handing what look to be menial jobs ('...adding and subtracting...') is really just a test for newly minted engineers? The thinking being that if you can't handle the easy tasks well why would anyone put you in charge of hard tasks? Becoming a fully qualified 'engineer' is still a long apprenticeship, fortunately! Engineering is a tough and demanding profession, with huge consequences to public safety if the quality of work is poor or if mistakes are made. During your career you will be asked to do many things that you might consider menial or beneath you; I doubt many of these things really are. In any event, someone has to do the 'adding and subtracting'--should it be the experienced engineers, who have already proved themselves capable, and paid $US100k per year or the newly minted engineer paid US$40-50K per year?

$120K for a 4 year bachelor's doesn't sound that bad, really. That's only $30K per year for tuition, room and board, books, travel, etc. My alma mater, Univ. of So. Cal., is approaching $50K per year for their student budget. "Holy guacamole, Batman!"

 

[Ussuri]

Like SomptingGuy the uk student grant system paid for my degree. Is there anything in the US you dont have to pay for?

On the original topic, when I started working I spent quite a bit of time entering data into excel. It was piss boring but someone had to do it, and since my skills were the most limited in the office it makes sense to have the young graduate doing rather than a PE. The work was worthwhile for the senior engineers as they then used the data I entered. And I was still so nervous I made a mistake and everything could go wrong.

The plus side was that I was actually learning and while I felt that my first job should have been to design a bridge, or skyscraper, I was in fact not much use for anything.

It takes time to learn the stuff they dont teach you at University. Once you have that the job should become more interesting.

 

[KENAT]

Prost/Ussuri et al,

My point exactly.

I got to spend most of my first year taking minutes at meetings, doing minor drawing amendments, and generally being one of the project managers secretaries. The one sizeable design job I got was beyond my capabilities at the time (I kind of got up to speed after a few months) and I probably cost my company thousands if they’d done the math right. I like to think I made up for it later but….

My point is think long and hard about this before you make a decision to move/change careers. It may well be part of the learning process.

People who get fast tracked, or skip this, tend to fail a few years into their careers. Of course, they often manage to recover or just hide this from management but those of us who’ve had to work with/for them notice it.

Plus I’m partly guilty of it, too much too soon, I still find things I don’t know that I should have learnt in my first few years.

 

[TechyC]

I’ve been in my job nine months now straight out of a master degree and I don’t know how useful I’ve been to be honest. I switch departments every three months to see all the aspects of the business the down side being that 3 months isn’t really long enough. In each placement I spend the first month doing whatever I can to prove I won’t be a pain taking on filing, photocopying whatever. Second month spent acquiring work and learning about different projects and the work of the function by the third month just as I’m about to leave people start trusting me with new and interesting stuff to do, and then I start the whole process again in a different department.

I’d stick with it for a least a year before making any changes, It doesn’t look good on your CV to ditch your first job that quickly.

Talk to other people about their work and see if there is anything you would like to be involved in and then ask if you can help.