re: SELA engineers: are things looking doom and gloom for you?

I know enough to know when I'm not qualified to do a job.

Yeah I could've winged it and gotten everything done, but people's lives and lots of money for the businesses I would be servicing were at stake. The training involved was one day to familiarize me with their computer system, and then it was all me working on equipment by myself. I'm not gonna take that unless I'm confident I can do the job

I would. Explain the situation in the interview. If you can't get a job with the experience you have and you're get more experience and paying the bills doing it. Work your arse off and do a good job at everything. I ended up with two job offers from contacts I got doing a job mixing refractory and digging holes in a plant. Just because it's shite work doesn't mean you are wasting time. You'll make good money doing it.

Do the labor man. You'll make contacts in the field who will offer you vertical movement. It's the American dream.

And working in a warehouse doesn't teach you how bad work sucks. Having lots of jobs doing shite work with shitty people teaches you that. You'll develop the skills you need to deal with everyone, from the owner to the pissd off lazy SOB who hates everything about work and everyone around him. shite work is what got me where I am and I'm extremely proud of it. You should have been doing it while in school.

I had to branch out from internships and just do general industrial work. I graduated in mechanical engineering so I did anything that got me in a plant. If I couldn't get an internship, I did contract construction or maintenance. It was a HUGE help in the interviews when I could show how much exposure I had to safety policies and industrial workplaces regardless of what the actual work was. I only had two real internships, but I had somewhere around 10 paying jobs while I was in school (I went for 6 years). There was a 3 month span that I was working on a farm during the week between classes, stocking shelves at a grocery store on the weekend, and tutoring physics and math at night. Invaluable experience.

You can still do that if you don't find the job you want out of school. Put in with any electrical contractors in your area. The first one is the toughest to get but it's amazing how much the game changes after you get that first relevant job on your resume.

Get that first job on there. Its unlikely that any firm who won't offer you a paying job will let you work for free.

What resources are you using to find openings?

There are countless ways to network via Internet. Use indeed.com, LinkedIn, your school site, facebook, etc. Be as diverse and persistent as possible. The opportunities are there, you just need to go get them.

And of course, you're going to get shot down and low balled ALOT. All part of it.

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What resources are you using to find openings?

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Almost exclusively Indeed. UNO itself is worthless. I only have one teacher that has connections in the field that I'm interested in (power), and he actually tried to hook me up with a job last year when he wrongly assumed that I was about to graduate. I will ask him if he knows of anything soon.

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The many billions of dollars that cheap energy will pump into the US economy will likely cause a net positive of EE jobs nationwide. Lots of increased spending in tech and other sectors instead of O&G.

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That's what I always assumed. Not happening in SELA, though. I know a lot of people in this thread are having success (and those are the people that I wanted to hear from), but I feel like no matter how hard I work and how knowledgeable I am, I will never be able to live the lifestyle that I expected to have when I started my education.

Should've gotten a liberal arts degree. I just got promoted

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I feel like no matter how hard I work and how knowledgeable I am, I will never be able to live the lifestyle that I expected to have when I started my education.

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man, I graduated in the mid 90's and the situation was just exactly what you are dealing with right now...the bottom fell out of the oil market and there were few jobs to be had...in fact, there were only about a half dozen folks in the PetE curriculum and they actually talked seriously about dropping it...

I worked my arse off and did ultimately manage to find a job...worked my way up into a decent position with good pay, too and am now making quite a bit more than I ever thought I would....

moral of the story is, your working life is a long one and is gonna have a lot of ups and downs...just make good decisions and work hard every day and you will be suprised how well things will turn out for you over the long term...

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moral of the story is, your working life is a long one and is gonna have a lot of ups and downs...just make good decisions and work hard every day and you will be suprised how well things will turn out for you over the long term...

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That's the problem I'm having: my working life is 10 years shorter than it should be, so I'm anxious as frick. If I were 21-25, I would probably be happy to take a well paying job in rural Alaska or the middle east for a few years.

You're looking for a EE job with below a 3.0 and no internship experience? Best of luck...