None of those options really fit me. I graduated without any clear sense of what kind of career I wanted. I did some temp work and had another part time job and found a full time, entry level professional job about four month after I graduated. It was by no means a dream job and it turned out that I hated the field, but it’s not like I was unsuccessful, either.
Ha! That was my starting salary in 1995 and I had no idea how I would ever spend that much money…
Yes, I graduated engineering school and went straight to work as an Assistant Engineer. You can’t have the title Engineer untill you have your P.E. license, and you must work for four years under the direction of a P.E. before you can even sit for it.
During the years leading up to graduation I certainly did my share of drudge jobs: waitressing, catering, bartending, etcetera. So you can’t say I ‘never wore a paper hat’.
Speaking of salary, I started in 1989 making $24,000 a year and I thought that was a HUGE amount of money. Prior to that I had been making less than $6,000 a year.
I got the job before I went to college, basically. I had taken some courses at community college after high school, but dropped out because I hated it. I worked full time for several years in a grocery store, and then decided I had to either commit to it as a career or jump into something else. About that time, I knew a guy who knew a guy who needed a guy, and I took my first job in IT.
It wasn’t until more than ten years of IT experience later that I decided to go back to college. I just finished up my BS about a year ago, and I am still working in IT, and for the same company I worked for when I went back to school. The company reimburses me for tuition and books, so I jumped right into an MS program.
So - decent job - check. College degree - check. But I did the working my way up from the bottom before I really seriously pursued any degree.
I got a job in mechanical stress engineering, which is what I’d studied for and pursued in college.
I made 19k in 1998 right out of college. Top that!
Yes. When I graduated business school I received a pretty big signing bonus and they deferred my start date about 4 months. So for awhile I got to live my dream job of doing nothing.
I took my shiny new bachelor’s degree … right to the temporary-help place, which sent me out to sort boxes at the local Frito-Lay factory. (It was something to do for a few months until I had finished making my arrangements to leave Teaxs forever.)
EDIT: Not an engineer.
Straight out of college, an ex-girlfriend working for a startup company that wrote training materials for Internet marketing (this was 1998) hired me on. They were planning a course on building a commercial website, and they needed some reasonably complicated text. For $15/hour, I wrote about ImmortaLand, a theme park dedicated to the world’s great mythologies. ImmortaLand had rollercoasters, restaurants, hotels, evening events, gift stores–everything you could hope for.
The only problem was that they needed the material really soon, and I was planning a trip to New Orleans. That’s cool, they told me: take this company laptop with you and do it while you’re down there. So I sat in a famous New Orleans coffeeshop drinking cafe au laits (no, not that one, a different famous New Orleans coffeeshop), watching people, and writing snarky, silly filler text for an imaginary website.
TLDR version: yes, I got my dream job right out of college. Lasted only a week or so, but holy crap was that the most fun I’ve ever had earning money.
Yes. However, I graduated at the top of my class and only 6 out of 54 in my class started work right away as engineers. The rest landed a job of some kind within a year, but a quarter of those were not doing engineering work at all. Oil was $11 a barrel, it was a bad time to be a chemical engineer.
It was not my dream job, but it was a job I wanted very much and worked hard for. What happened was that I went into the recruiting process during my third year of university and landed a summer internship with one of my top choices. Received a full time offer at the end of the internship and pretty much cruised through the last year of college. It was awesome.
Prestige and money-wise, it was tier one in the industry I went into. If I did not mention what I did, people usually have a hard time believing the amount I made right out of undergrad. But money is not the primary reason I got into it (really). Like I said, it was not my dream job in the sense that I would want to stay in it forever, and right from the get go I’d always planned on spending three years max in it and then bouncing.
Sorta. My dream ‘interim’ job - working for a polling firm (starting at a little over 60k/yr). But then I chickened out because I didn’t want to move and blablablabalablaba.
Damn. I’m incredibly depressed right now.
I have an undergrad in polisci and history and worked on a shit ton of campaigns with media experience. I wanted to study IR at DU and then…I don’t know. Be a CIA agent or a lobbyist or a professor. Haha. But yes, that was the dream interim job in terms of pay…I think the ultimate dream for me out of college would have been a speechwriter, but single moms can’t live on pride alone.
None of the choices really apply to me either… But here is what I did: I applied for and received a fairly competitive internship at a weekly business newspaper, which treated me pretty much like a regular reporter, but with fewer responsibilities. I loved it there! I got to write a lot of feature stories, if you can believe that, most of which I brought in myself.
The internship did what it was supposed to, which is give me the connections to land a job. They kept me on at Business First for a couple months beyond the summer (just because I’m so awesome, you know!) and the I got a full-time job at another specialty weekly, the Catholic archdiocesan paper.
I’ve been in public television for the last 22 years but damn I loved being a reporter! I majored in English/political science FWIW.
Sort of.
While I went to journalism school, I worked with my brother’s friend who was starting a company that built Web sites.
The more journalism school I did, the more I realized I didn’t quite like journalism. But I did like this Web site thing.
I got my BS in journalism anyway, but worked for the new Web business right out of college. I promised myself if I didn’t make at least $20k the first year I would quit and get something in journalism.
I made $21k that first year - and like, $9k, $12k and $13k subsequent years - so I stayed with it and am still here now 10 years later.
I do make a couple bucks more now.
So yeah I did happen to end up walking out of college into a job that pretty much became my dream job, it’s just not what I went to college wanting to do and didn’t quite know I wanted to do it until I got there.
I work in my chosen field, but it’s not my dream job. I don’t see why the poll is so polarized, though - a lot of people I know work in jobs that they wouldn’t consider perfect, but that doesn’t mean they’re working at McDonalds.
I’ve got the dream entry-level job for my career (biomedical research), and I’m very happy with this particular job at this particular point in my life, but there’s many downsides that occasionally make me ambivalent about the career.
Right now I’m a research technician, and I’ve got it good. I’m in a good lab with a great PI who’s given me interesting projects and a lot of autonomy. Many technicians in this sort of lab end up with worse, and are little more than the lab dishwasher. Or they end up doing the grunt work for someone else’s experiments, spending all day feeding samples into a machine or somesuch. But I get to work independently on my own project, and I’m now sitting down with my PI to write a first-author paper.
But the rest of the career has a pretty tough trajectory. Next step is five or six years of grad school, then postdocs, and then I either buy into the tenure lottery or try to find the elusive industry job. I’m probably going to have to move across the country a few times in the process. The entire time I’ll be working my ass off for low pay.
And then in my more optimistic moments I’m just thrilled that someone is willing to pay me to play around all day and solve cool puzzles. The work is exciting, far outweighing the daily tedium and inevitable strings of failure.
On balance I’m happy now, but that won’t stop me from grumbling about the downsides and the difficult path ahead.
I ended up with a job in my engineer profession making a boat load of money (77K) right out of school. I graduated at the right time and got 10K worth of raises in the first 6 months. So yep, dream job with money but not a lot of prestige.
One of my friends graduated last year and make 170K in his first year out of school in the oil field with his Pet. E degree but not working as an engineer. I don’t know too many engineers who graduated without a job in their engineer field and while the money wasn’t always great they could all afford to live on their own.
I’d guess that this is going to break down more by major then anything else. A good friend of mine graduated with a double major in English and music and spent his first couple of year working manual labor at a winery and living with his parents. The only engineer I know who had problems failed a class his last semester and showed up to work without telling them he didn’t graduate, he worked for that company for almost a year before he went back to school but then had a lot of problems finding a job once he graduated for real.
Yep.
I picked option 2 but my chosen field was an arts field and I was working in the field professionally before and during college too, so it probably doesn’t count.
This would be my problem with the poll as well-- after grad school, it took me nine months to land a related job that was the next step up from the job I was working, and I enjoyed it. Right now, I’m unemployed but looking for work and enjoy my field. I would like to not have to leave it to get a paycheck, but I’d like to be employed more.