I'm going to be a junior in electrical engineering at Montana State University-Bozeman, but I'm quickly heading toward the five year plan.

I don't want to go into engineering right away, I'd like to take a year off and be a traveling consultant for my fraternity.

Interesting stats on EE Employment
 

My guy got his IEEE mag today and said that it said unemployment rates for EEs are at an all time high - 6%. Interestingly enough, something like 20% of the jobs are held by people on work visas.

:mad:

EXACTLY!! Most of my hardest/most time consuming classes/labs were worth only one credit. My easiest classes were the economic classes I took for my electives that were worth 3-4 credits. Go figure. Oh and my business major friends never had class on Fridays.

Did any of you guys have to endure field session. Here field session is a six week summer course that is required to graduate. It is monday - saturday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm(usually later). Where we complete 10 process labs and write 20 page reports or give oral presentations. A.K.A. HELL!!!

I used to be an engineer major.. then I decided I didn't like math too much :p

douht I always thought engineers ran trains till a John Wayne Movie!

Take the Time and be a Consultant it is well worth it and wish I could have done it but was married!

Should have gotten divorced then!:)

It will be a lifetime of experience that very few have the pleasure to do! It is tuff but very rewardable!

Dont look bad on a Resume either!

What did you do? Yepper! Go For It! Good Luck!

Update
 

I found out last week that I passed the EIT exam. They forwarded my results to my sister in Florida. We both moved this summer, so the post office must have just grabbed the wrong forwarding address :). I got a 77. 70 was passing.

My husband is an mechanical engineer and my boss is a biomechanical engineer. About 95% of my male friends are also engineers.

I was going to be an mechanical engineer...boy am I glad that I decided against it!

I'm sure everyone here has.....but have you all learned the absolute brilliance of the TI-89? It is a beautiful thing....Entering state-space matrices and it returning the appropriate TF, or entering the TF, and it returning a nyquist plot. I wish I had discovered the wonders of this things years ago. But I guess once you learn something well enough to write the code for it, you know the process thorough enough.....but nevertheless....if you're an EE, you may want some of my 89 programs friends and I have written.

structural engineer

BSCE, MSCE....Purdue....

Re: Interesting stats on EE Employment
 

What is there to be mad about?

Companies are attracted to international workers for a few reasons:

1). They are willing to take those jobs that other people don't want--like offshore EE in Louisiana. Or jobs with high travel
2). They will work for less, for the most part, than many American workers will work for.
3). Many of those companies are multinational--an engineer might work on a project in his home country for a few years, then train others in the same project in another country for a few years--necessitating a work visa. This happens to the engineers who work for my father all the time.

So, given those factors, I'm surprised the work visa rate isn't higher. The unemployment rate, to be sure, is rotten, but the fact that there are people willing to do the work that some of us don't want to do isn't rotten at all.

Good stuff!

****

BS Architectural Engineering.
Currently an Assistant Project Manager.

Re: Re: Interesting stats on EE Employment
 

It's true that international workers are often more willing to take "undesirable" jobs and to work for less pay. If the international worker can do as good a job as the US worker but at considerably less pay, it makes good business sense to hire the international worker.

That still doesn't make it any easier to be a US worker sitting around on unemployment while all these people are shipped in from overseas to do what used to be your job. Even taking a less-desirable job or a job for low pay can be better than being unemployed, especially if you've exhausted your unemployment benefits and still have to pay the rent, eat, etc. - but the US workers often don't even get the chance to apply for these jobs.

The concept of "Buy American" just hasn't filtered into the job market. :(