Re: Wall Street Journal on IT career craze

Threeducks wrote:

<snip>

First of all, those prized Dow/Kodak internships are mainly for
students with high GPAs and without those job descriptors, one is
virtually guaranteed a rejection notice from a mainstream ChemE
employer.


These are the best companies. There is competition to get a job there and they can skim the best students off the top. That's how it is everywhere.

Uh-uh. When I was an undergrad, I knew of people with lower GPAs than mine getting the jobs I wanted. One company, in particular, went through a whole song and dance when it interviewed a bunch of us at its plant. I didn't get a job there, but I found out later that one common factor with those who I knew who did was that they were either married or about to be. So much for having a high marks.

<snip>

Even Proctor and Gamble, providing possibly the best career path for a
business oriented type of ChemE, only second interviews, once they've
screened out GPAs below a 3.4 or 3.6, depending of course, upon the
school and perception of its relative difficulty.

Then, upon finishing the PharmD, he had 3-4 offers, and within a few
years was at ~$95K. I think there's no comparision between the
difficulties of the engineering job market and that of healthcare and
the other major alternatives.


If you like that sort of thing. Now why aren't pharmacy, nursing, MD, etc programs flooded with students if they're so great?

It might be that the jobs are located in some out of the way places, far from any major cities. While I was an undergrad, I knew of people who took jobs in a certain location because it was close to the mountains and skiing.


Sure, there's a current big hiring spree in the petrochemical
industries but as you know, think '79 (and talk to BMJ), those
phenomena are short lived.


Chemical engineering is a lot more that petrochemicals. A large fraction of ChE graduates are going into electronic materials, and biotech.

That may be the case now, but it wasn't that way in the late '70s. The oil industry was where the action was for many engineering disciplines.

<snip>

If I could do it again (and
wanted a quicker career track), I'd take the LSAT and try to get into
either Harvard, Stanford, or Columbia law school and work as a patent,
tax, or corporate attorney at a big 100 firm and try for either bigwig
partner or go for partner at a smaller firm, after 5-7 years while
earning $120K+/yr during that time period so that if I burn out, I
could take a few years off while developing a small client base for my
own work. BTW, my tax attorney friends make $200K-$300K/yr, so the
upper boundaries in those areas are pretty high. One of them is
appalled that engineers earn so little because he couldn't hack
integral calculus whereas my ChemE turned pharmacist friend had no
problems with any of his math courses but yet, he couldn't get an
engineering job because process design, catalysis, and transport
phenomena graded tougher than the courses in the math dept.


I probably grade harder than the math department, so what? I still have a lot of students getting A's. You do what you got to do to get where you want to get. You need a 3.5 GPA to land a good job, get a 3.5 GPA.

But how many companies advertise that requirement? I haven't seen any that do, though some will ask for transcripts.

Don't act all surprised when your very average GPA doesn't rocket you to the top of an applicant pool. I personally feel that a lot of engineering grades are inflated so that the average is set to a B. If one grades on a curve, the average should be a C, not a B. I don't grade on a curve because I think it's a crutch for writing crappy tests.

Where I used to teach, 50% was considered a pass and many people were happy just to get that because it meant they could graduate and still find time for partying.

Instead of curving, I write exams to give me a specific distribution of grades.
.

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