Did you work in college?
I have an engineering degree and one of the reasons I got picked up but a prime defense contractor right out of school is because of the work I did 24-32 hours/week for most of my college career.
I also paid attention to many aspects of my dynamics, and showed I could digest the 'rocket scientist' stuff -- including lot of legacy code written in Fortran -- and recode it into real-time C for avionics, telemetry, etc... Actually understanding 6DOF, triple integrals, etc... including angular momentum and other details involved with launch systems through orbital mechanics, etc... Even though I had an Electrical Engineering (EE) degree with a focus on system design, and not mechanical-aerospace.
Understand I didn't intern with Lockheed-Martin or anything. I could have been making $10/hour and sitting on my ass there doing simple things (although some did actually work). I had several colleagues that did that a semester or two. I remember the one intern spend two weeks just copying floppy disks. Hell no I don't want that job, and would work for less to avoid it.
I actually went out and got my own position, for a measly $6/hour (covered my tuition and expenses for work), and worked in that company for 3 years at that rate. The only reason I left is because they offered me a $15K/year salary (essentially $7.50/hour) which was a 25% raise from their viewpoint. Didn't matter I had the 2nd lowest employee number in the division, was responsible for a crapload (so much so that they threatened a bad reference if I left because they couldn't let me go), and was making the least. This was as an insult which even a VP in the company later apologized fo, especially after he saw the board results and I got the highest FE score of everyone who sat the test 3 months earlier when the grades came in the following month after I left -- including engineers they hired as engineers (at over $40K/year, including some that failed it).
Not even a year later, I was picked up by that defense contractor, much smaller than Lock-Mart. The icing on the cake is that I built an entire engineering IT infrastructure over 3 years at that previous company, and it was all the same type of engineering workstations, servers, networking equipment, etc... they needed as well. I've always been the combo engineer-technologist, and it's made me flexible -- the former because of my education and post-education career, the latter because I spent over 3 of my 4.5 years in college doing both IT and engineering technician details in an engineering company. Not long afterwards, a lot of the system and development approaches I were pursuing were proved by NASA in the Sojouner mission, and they became industry standard.
I grew up in an engineering household. I was doing trig at age 9. I lived at home and went to the local, state college (which still had a good engineering program), and had nothing handed to me. I did have my parents provide me a roof over my head until 22, but I did college on a shoestring budget. It's not that hard to go to a state college and live on under $10K/year today, maybe a little more but there are loans (I never took any loans, and glad I did not). I had opportunities that I took, even if I got fucked at times. I've never stopped getting fucked. However, I always blame myself for being naive when getting fucked, and learn from it.
Experience, even the lowest-level experience at bottom dollar, is better than no experience. The best time is in college, when you have the traditional theory, and you add the practical experience, the two are complementary. If you didn't get any experience in college, take any position to "get a foot in the door." Admit to the employer you realize you don't have experience, and you're willing to work at an hourly wage with a move to a salary position and salary adjustment in 12 months based on your performance. If you prove yourself, they'll be willing to pay not to lose you.
Did you work in college? It really makes a difference.I'm a fresh graduate. My major at university is business administrations. I am concentrated on total quality management, negotiation techniques, entrepreneurship and small business management, retailing and international human resource management. I wonder how i can remain unemployed. I suck.
I have an engineering degree and one of the reasons I got picked up but a prime defense contractor right out of school is because of the work I did 24-32 hours/week for most of my college career.
I also paid attention to many aspects of my dynamics, and showed I could digest the 'rocket scientist' stuff -- including lot of legacy code written in Fortran -- and recode it into real-time C for avionics, telemetry, etc... Actually understanding 6DOF, triple integrals, etc... including angular momentum and other details involved with launch systems through orbital mechanics, etc... Even though I had an Electrical Engineering (EE) degree with a focus on system design, and not mechanical-aerospace.
Understand I didn't intern with Lockheed-Martin or anything. I could have been making $10/hour and sitting on my ass there doing simple things (although some did actually work). I had several colleagues that did that a semester or two. I remember the one intern spend two weeks just copying floppy disks. Hell no I don't want that job, and would work for less to avoid it.
I actually went out and got my own position, for a measly $6/hour (covered my tuition and expenses for work), and worked in that company for 3 years at that rate. The only reason I left is because they offered me a $15K/year salary (essentially $7.50/hour) which was a 25% raise from their viewpoint. Didn't matter I had the 2nd lowest employee number in the division, was responsible for a crapload (so much so that they threatened a bad reference if I left because they couldn't let me go), and was making the least. This was as an insult which even a VP in the company later apologized fo, especially after he saw the board results and I got the highest FE score of everyone who sat the test 3 months earlier when the grades came in the following month after I left -- including engineers they hired as engineers (at over $40K/year, including some that failed it).
Not even a year later, I was picked up by that defense contractor, much smaller than Lock-Mart. The icing on the cake is that I built an entire engineering IT infrastructure over 3 years at that previous company, and it was all the same type of engineering workstations, servers, networking equipment, etc... they needed as well. I've always been the combo engineer-technologist, and it's made me flexible -- the former because of my education and post-education career, the latter because I spent over 3 of my 4.5 years in college doing both IT and engineering technician details in an engineering company. Not long afterwards, a lot of the system and development approaches I were pursuing were proved by NASA in the Sojouner mission, and they became industry standard.
I grew up in an engineering household. I was doing trig at age 9. I lived at home and went to the local, state college (which still had a good engineering program), and had nothing handed to me. I did have my parents provide me a roof over my head until 22, but I did college on a shoestring budget. It's not that hard to go to a state college and live on under $10K/year today, maybe a little more but there are loans (I never took any loans, and glad I did not). I had opportunities that I took, even if I got fucked at times. I've never stopped getting fucked. However, I always blame myself for being naive when getting fucked, and learn from it.
Experience, even the lowest-level experience at bottom dollar, is better than no experience. The best time is in college, when you have the traditional theory, and you add the practical experience, the two are complementary. If you didn't get any experience in college, take any position to "get a foot in the door." Admit to the employer you realize you don't have experience, and you're willing to work at an hourly wage with a move to a salary position and salary adjustment in 12 months based on your performance. If you prove yourself, they'll be willing to pay not to lose you.
