re: Share your advice for a soon-to-be graduate

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I think some of it may be that starting salary. I only know of one civil engineer who made even close to that out of college and they were living in a very HCOL area. You’re going to make 55-maybe 70 out of college as a civil engineer unless you’re in the field and working more than 45 hours a week.

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Salaries might not be as crazy now and I work for a major in the petro chemical industry, so that also makes a difference. We tend to group mechanical and civil engineers together when we hire them since most wind up in management positions. My wife works for a consultant and I just asked the starting salary of the most recent CE out of school she hired and it is higher than the range you mentioned. I don’t think engineers outside of the petrochemical regions realize the salary difference. When I graduated 30 years ago, I chose to focus on finding a job within a few hours of the Atlanta region. For grins I picked one petrochemical company in Texas to interview with. My GPA was nothing to brag about, but my offer was 30% higher than the average starting salary at the time. I had no idea that there was such a difference in salaries between industries and regions of the country.