Oh yeah I know for a fact we make less in Canada, which is fine. I could move if I wanted.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
College graduate starting salaries are at an all-time high—and these 10 majors earn the most
- Thread starter CharlesAznable
- Start date
yup, luckily my working life hasn't been as much of a nightmare as the education was
I got my computer science bachelor's back in June but there are no actual jobs near me. The ones where employers actually contact me to apply for an entry level position are always in another state. The most I saw salary wise was 60k, but I just don't like the idea of packing my things and moving to somewhere I've never been before.
Yeah, cause stem classes are famous for their imprecision and tolerance for mistakes...lol. For the record I've also tutored stem subjects and advanced math courses in college.
Yeah chemical engineering is no lie, the fucking worst/hardest. My senior design project involved designing a chemical plant for a company whose actual engineers didn't have time to design because they were overloaded with projects. We had to design it BY HAND and then confirm our estimates with computer simulations. That was the hardest fucking thing I've ever done. The design documents were 6" thick. We deserve the high salaries lol.
regarding the bolded, i ended up flipping my edu to another less lucrative field of engineering, but yah know. still doing decently all things considered
I saw CNBC so I immediately assumed this was a "rah rah please go to college and gets big fat loans for our stock portfolios!" piece. Does it talk about how to pay for these degrees without selling your future?
Fellow ChemE here, but I ended up not using my degree at all, and going into medicine, lol.
I have a STEM degree in biology and next year I will have one in CS. That's pretty accurate for a bachelor's degree. These classes are a waste of time. You have a lot of time in college, and most of that time is better spent outside of class.
If you have the option to do it go to a local school if it is cheaper. Where you have your degree from can be vastly overrated. Or do your GE credits at a community college and keep a high gpa to transfer to a more prestigious school.
Go to community college your first 2 years then transfer to an ABET-accredited program at a state school.
Big-name schools look nice on a resume, but you don't need it to land a high-paying job. ABET accreditation is the only thing that matters.
Getting a degree in computer engineering is the most difficult achievement in my life and I've been working as a medical simulation engineer/software team lead for the past 5 years. I'm legitimately impressed by others that get engineering degrees with a high GPA. I don't think a lot of people understand how much of a journey it is. Some people can just sail through, but for others the school format is all wrong for their skill set.
It's not even about ego, I think everyone has their own skills and weakness and other jobs and degrees are hard as well, just in different ways.
I wanna repeat though, don't slouch on getting a paid internship during college. It's stressful and awkward to interview without experience but you rather build those skills now than wait when you're graduated and trying to support yourself. It's a much much easier way to get a job after college versus trying to get one without it.
It's not even about ego, I think everyone has their own skills and weakness and other jobs and degrees are hard as well, just in different ways.
I wanna repeat though, don't slouch on getting a paid internship during college. It's stressful and awkward to interview without experience but you rather build those skills now than wait when you're graduated and trying to support yourself. It's a much much easier way to get a job after college versus trying to get one without it.
lmao
Liberal arts classes are literally blow-offs. They're what you take to fill out your credits when you have a heavy load of real classes during a semester.
This was never true for STEM or accounting/finance. It mostly just applies to those who "follow their dreams" and get degrees in low-paying, super competitive fields.
No, you can't be anything you want when you grow up. You can be anything you want that someone is willing to pay you for. Get a degree in an in-demand field and you'll be set.
We still don't have enough people in this country who can code.
There was literally 1 dude in my graduating class with a 4.00 GPA. Literal genius. He works at Intel doing chip design now.
I'm proud of my humble 3.70 GPA in Computer Engineering. It has made every other pursuit in life seem easy in comparison. I got a Master's in Computer Science from a big-name university afterwards, and it was never half as hard as my Computer Engineering BS.
None of these fields are anywhere close to being saturated. Trades are still a good option, but only go into the trades vice engineering if you're more passionate about them, not because someone misled you into thinking engineering is saturated.
To add onto this, programming is probably the single most accessible in-demand skill out there, in terms of the sheer amount of free, high-quality educational material available, and the fact that you only need a computer to get started. And in spite of that accessibility, we *still* don't have enough programmers.
Now imagine what it's like for the traditional engineering fields, like electrical, computer, mechanical, chemical, etc., which has much less material and for which you need expensive lab equipment just to get started.
Last edited:
I will say, one of the hardest classes I took in college was Statistics for Liberal Arts majors lol. I thought it would be an easier way of getting some statistics into my repertoire and IT WAS NOT. They took points off for not writing a little explanation about how you got the right answer even if you got the right answer. I was also taking a genomics course which was heavily stats based at the same time, and somehow that was easier.
I wanted to do CS but it was too intensive for me. I used to think it was too hard, but it was just my bitch ass not putting in the work. My high school work ethic was dogshit so it tracks. Accounting is a lot easier to BS and get a degree(that might go somewhere) but it's quite boring.
I agree to an extent. A lot of my classes were learning concepts and then practicing problems applying them to various situations. After a while it just becomes plug and chug
I found that for a lot of college classes, especially in the covid-era, the biggest hurdle is the bureaucracy of the class and that often causes confusion and frustration and hampers learning.
*Ctrl F Mass Communications*
Oh...yep, that's why I live in poverty. Yay useless college degrees.
Oh...yep, that's why I live in poverty. Yay useless college degrees.
In undergrad? No, not at all. I worked in a research lab in undergrad for about 1.5 years and there were honestly only a handful of times that I was doing something that required me to spend more than 8 hours in a lab. Usually it's because you're doing a long procedure that has a lot of deadtime in the middle as you wait for a mixer or centrifuge to do its thing.
After graduation, I also had a real job in a production lab as an analyst and over there, you are expected to be constantly on your feet. In that environment, precision, speed, and multitasking matter a lot but NONE OF THOSE SKILLS are at all emphasized in my entire undergrad experience. So it doesn't have any bearing on your chances of getting a degree.
In most liberal arts classes, getting an A means getting over 90%. Getting over 90% on a written assignment like an essay can honestly be a bit subjective at times and require a lot of back-and-forth discussion with the instructor and doing edits. From what I recall, the GRE averages for liberal arts subjects were also much, much higher than the STEM subjects. My point is that to get an A in a liberal arts degree, a lot less mistakes are tolerated.
On the flip side, you can be a straight-A student in STEM with like a 70% average in some classes. The hard part is just wrapping your head around a new way of thinking. It's intimidating to a lot of people so they give up because of egos.
And yes, it is 100% an ego thing. This is kind of a tangent so I'm gonna spoiler it:
In my STEM tutoring sessions, I had dozens of students and not once did a guy sign up specifically for my session. The first term I tutored, I had my only male student and that was because he was handed to me by the previous tutor who had to go on FMLA leave and he admitted that a big part of the reason he signed up was that the previous tutor was a really cute girl. Still, I got him to go from a D to a B in thermochemistry. He was a pretty nice guy and a hard worker but he just needed someone to sit down and explain all the weird algebra shit in plain English. A lot of science classes basically are a big Roube-Goldberg machine of facts and formulas that only make sense once you understand every part and integrate it all together.
In the later quarters, I also tutored some Econ classes and I actually had like 1/3 of my students be dudes. My theory is that econ students don't associate GPA with dick size since they are much better looking on average than STEM dudes. Cruel, but true.
As far as sample size goes, I had about 80 (registered) students in the year I spent tutoring and all my STEM sessions were beyond full capacity. My policy was that anyone can still show up beyond the listed capacity since I wasn't trying to milk more sessions out of the school (I was a student employee), but the only time I tutored STEM dudes is when they would email me the questions. It was hilarious.
In the later quarters, I also tutored some Econ classes and I actually had like 1/3 of my students be dudes. My theory is that econ students don't associate GPA with dick size since they are much better looking on average than STEM dudes. Cruel, but true.
As far as sample size goes, I had about 80 (registered) students in the year I spent tutoring and all my STEM sessions were beyond full capacity. My policy was that anyone can still show up beyond the listed capacity since I wasn't trying to milk more sessions out of the school (I was a student employee), but the only time I tutored STEM dudes is when they would email me the questions. It was hilarious.
I think too many MEs graduate every year to be high on the list. I wish that didn't hurt salary prospects lol.
This breakdown is from ASEE:
That's basically what I did. I have a degree in Econ but taught myself SQL (which is really easy) and Python (which can be a bit of rabbit hole but learning enough to use pandas and numpy for data analysis and manipulation isn't hard). I also learned how to use Power BI and Tableau at my first couple jobs, which can both be lucrative.
I mean, this was ten years ago haha. But yes, it was pretty frustrating, given I would get perfect scores on every homework assignment and quiz, then get a B- for not writing a novel about the journey I took to get the correct answer on my midterm.
There is a reason why a lot of people quit computer science and computer engineering by the second year. Once you get into the senior classes, it's literally all math and logic. Abstract algebra was a pain. But algorithm is literally the worse class. It fries your brain. The highest grade in that class was a 70 something for the final exam.
Just finished my BE in CE at a (well known) state school with 3.76 GPA, currently in the accelerated MS program so I'll have a grad degree by next May. My starting salary at a pretty major microprocessor designer is a bit over 6 figures when I start next summer. I live in NY and interned with them since last summer, so YMMV, but yeah, STEM jobs make a lot of money, especially relating to computers in any way. I have another friend who graduated CS (which my school is even better known for) with a decently lower GPA as a super senior bc he failed a handful of classes despite seemingly working twice as hard as me. Took a year break doing freelance bc he couldn't find a job for a while and them boom, $100k job with a Manhattan-based banking institution. Fortunately we both love our respective fields so we didn't suffer quite as much as others who may just be doing it for money and don't care for the material.
Lmfaoooo get the fuck out of here. I guess leaving my room for 2-3 hours a day AT MOST for 8 straight weeks to work on projects and exams EVERY SEMESTER FOR THE PAST 2 YEARS isn't anywhere near as hard as liberal arts classes. Not at all knocking those sorts of majors, they have their place, but there's a reason companies outbid one another to hire fresh engineers and not vice versa like most majors.
The only major in which the amount of new grads is high enough for that to be true is CS, but there are just SOOOOOO many new CS jobs in demand that it's not happening. The pandemic pretty much proved that CS jobs, at least for the next few decades, are effectively in infinite demand.
Basically my life lol. I graduate with a 2.8GPA cause I skipped too many classes and never study. I start making like $50k, 9 years later im making several times that.
Not all STEM jobs are equal. an engineering degree is gonna be worth alot more than a chem or bio BS. we had like 30 people in my graduating class in ChemE, and about half of them were only here for an education before moving back home. not sure if its like that everywhere, but everyone got jobs very quickly
You make me feel like there's hope. That's pretty close to describing me. Pre 5 year time gap. I graduated last year and have been paralyzed by the fear that nobody in the field would even bother with me. Maybe I should reapply myself to the job search.
I wasn't aware that "computer programming" was a separate thing from computer science.
Graduated last spring with a B.S. in computer science, and was hoping that was average salary, not starting. Damn, I'm lackluster. This has to be assuming that the graduate even got a job related to their degree or something. I feel like people who graduate but end up working in a warehouse or something would skew this too much, because I know far too many people who ended up in that situation.
Graduated last spring with a B.S. in computer science, and was hoping that was average salary, not starting. Damn, I'm lackluster. This has to be assuming that the graduate even got a job related to their degree or something. I feel like people who graduate but end up working in a warehouse or something would skew this too much, because I know far too many people who ended up in that situation.
No company in the world will pay you according to how hard you worked. The pay rate is always the intersection of supply-and-demand.
This is kind of engineering related but it seems to me that a lot of game development jobs are more complex than other programming-related fields yet they get paid less than if they were working as a software developer in a typical tech company. It's all about how much competition there is for every available position.
Comp sci suggests a greater degree of theory, and programming suggests a greater focus on application.
Sorry if you're just saying this as a needless hair to split.
I fucked up when I chose CS then.
That explains a lot of the courses they made me take in order to graduate then, lmao
I think I would've been much happier with computer programming.
We had an engineering suicide at my college that was pretty extreme so I won't mention the details, but a good number of engineering students made their way into the art degrees. They didn't realize art degrees are also associated with a lot of crunch time and working all weekends to finish assignments.
OP
OP
The average starting salary for a teacher/social worker is 80k????
lmao I met so many STEM students who thought like this and ended dropping out of advanced liberal arts classes in the first month because they couldn't handle the workload
Going from a BA in English to going back to college to get a CS degree would be…….interesting? Thinking 💭
OP
OP
A lot of schools offer accelerated bachelor's programs if you already have a BS degree. You can also go the masters route as a lot of programs also don't require CS Bachelor's as well. There's also the 3rd option fo a bootcamp (which is what I did). Though I feel like this is becoming less and less of a viable option with each passing year.
In terms of opportunities, is there much of a difference between a BS and an MS
Go take an art class and come back to us when you have to complete a shitload of CREATIVE projects in a timely manner :P For STEM degrees you can look up your solutions on google/ask for help. I took a Life Drawing class in community college and had a project to do. It was hell. Liberal art students are troopers. God bless them.
I'm devastated to learn Film Studies and Gender Studies are not on here. I was told my double major would count for more on the market.
My cousin graduated with a biology degree and proceeded to ignore her degree. As in she decided she didn't wanna do anything related to her degree so she went straight to a bootcamp after graduating.