From University to Industry

>>7997653
Bump.

>>7997653
>Implying there's people on /sci/ who have graduated, let alone have had real jobs

>>7997774
Well, you don't need to have graduated. Any paid internship that relates to your field is acceptable.

I know there are people here with actual jobs.

>>7997653
mech e.

field engineer for a turbine company

i'm basically an overpaid, overeducated mechanic. i do tests on equipment, oversee maintenance and installation, reports. lots of reports.

it pays pretty good, and the travel can be nice when you aren't in butt fuck nowhere.

File: 1459465484467.png (66KB, 431x282px) Image search: [Google]

66KB, 431x282px

>>7997653
>BS in biology with a minor in computational biology
>Genetic Analyst
>pipetting and sequencing

It sucked dick and I quit like three weeks later. Mostly because the work environment sucked dick, the trainer was a complete bitch, management was aware of problems that would occur all the time but did nothing to fix them, I was lied to about the hour and the commute was long.

My second job that I got
>Associate Scientist/ Water Micro tech
>just test various volumes of water for bacteria
>7/10 job is easy as fuck and my co workers are nice but the job is beyond boring.

I've been working there for about a year now. I'm thinking about jumping ship because of the pay and it really wouldn't be that difficult.

>>7997792
Those jobs sound very boring indeed. Is this the case with all pure science grads? That they rarely find interesting jobs in science fields? Maybe focusing on only CS jobs would be more interesting? Why didn't you pursue grad school anyway?

>falling for the stem meme
>When Malik and Pajit can do your job for pennies on the dollar
>500,000 engineering graduates/year in india
nice meme

>>7997807
Most jobs, where you work in labs, are boring as shit. It's essentially you do the same thing every day. I mean your boss is just going to tell you run this reaction 700 times a day. I've worked in a few other as an undergrad.

One of the saddest things I learned after graduating is that all those really hard classes I spent hours studying for are pointless and I won't ever use them again. It' like what was the point of taking diff eq and all the bio math classes.

The job pays well honestly and one of the benefits of working there is that they'll pay for grad school after a year. The only reason I'm thinking of leaving is that I get like 16 an hour and I know that I could find another job that would pay me at least 20 an hour.

I'm thinking about going back but if I can move up with a BS what's the point.

>>7997814
Thanks a lot for responding. The reason I mentioned grad school is that at least you will get to work on more interesting stuff and build up on the things you spent time studying at undergrad. Or is it that you would never like to go into research anyway?

Another reason would be to go to grad school to get a CS master's so that you can get higher paying jobs in CS, which might potentially be more interesting?

Damn. Seems like engineers get the best deal, both money-wise and job-wise. You don't think about that a lot when you're studying interesting topics in the sciences, but you start to care when you're in the job market.

>electrical engineering
>worked as a student trainee for R&D
>soldier simple schematics
>Python codemonkey for sensor data visualization
>some LabVIEW automatisation
>read some paper on RFID

5/10 well payed though. Quit after a year. Did I really study my balls off and waste my youth to rot in an electronics lab? Well meme'd world, 3/10 would not live again. Right now I'd rather work as a night watch or electrician.

File: 1454555635001.gif (3MB, 557x605px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 557x605px

>>7997827
Don't get me wrong if I had enough resources I'd like to go back to grad school. It's expensive and I have bills and stuff to pay.

One thing that I do like about working in a lab is that the work is easy. There's very little stress/ deadlines to meet. It's just running stuff. I know as engineer/ programmer there would be a great deal more stress on me to do stuff. Which I'm fine with but I'm also a very laid back person.

If I could have a do over I'd like to go back for computer engineering as I found out, unfortunately too late, that's actually what I enjoyed doing. Which is why I'm trying to get at the university I graduated from. I study that on my own time now.

PHD Math
God
300k
always cumming

File: 1349170249149.png (103KB, 401x520px) Image search: [Google]

103KB, 401x520px

>>7997653

>Computer Engineering
>System Integration Engineer Tester
>Manual testing, automated testing, test plan design, some fun independent projects
>I'd be hard pressed to say anything but 10/10. The pay was great for a co-op at $20 an hour. I managed to finish two online courses, had an hour and half to go to the gym at lunch, and built one of my side projects into my senior project and won 1st place with it. A monkey could have done the core job, however they gave me the platform to do my own thing and in a big way. Lots of hands on experience with server side now.

I'm an embedded systems engineer. It took me three months to find a job after graduating. Luckily I'm doing a Masters so I kept busy.

I have a girlfriend too and smoke weed too.

You physics and math people make me incredibly envious. In many ways I wish I had just jumped head first into a really out there topic and stuck with research. That said I love the practical application and it's always felt like a hobby to me.

>>7997847
140 IQ?

MSc in engineering in 5.5 years straight in to 65K

>>7997847
Pretty sure you could make a bit more money as God.

>>7997653

>BS in Computer Science

Jobs I've held:
>1 (summer after freshman year)
>Software engineer at a rural technology startup
>Built a search engine for classified ads
>Wrote a machine learning-based recommender system
>Pretty satisfying to get to build a large part of a product from the ground up. Pay was barely better than minimum wage.

>2 (summer after sophomore year)
>Intern software engineer
>Wrote military visualization tools that dynamically generate KML for real-time plotting of maritime threats on Google Earth; worked on little side projects like an application-level distributed scheduler
>Learned a lot about formal software engineering; enjoyed getting the opportunity to build something with practical relevance. Pay was better: equivalent to approx. 30k/yr.

>3 (summer after junior year)
>Intern software engineer in cloud security
>Implemented an entire IaaS and PaaS platform from the ground up on top of the VMWare suite. Implemented machine learning-based network intrusion detection and lots of other cool stuff. Definitely enjoyed the chance to directly implement a large system meant to address such a large breadth of security-related and practical concerns. Pay was pretty nice. Equivalent hourly pay of a ~60k/yr job.

>4 (summer after senior year; pre-MS program)
>2-in-1 cryptographic analyst and computer scientist (straddling two departments)
>Theoretical formalization, analysis, and proposal of quantum-safe crypto standards to NIST. Secondary project involving analysis of security concerns and solutions in a new paradigm of networking called 'data-centric networking.' Cool projects; pretty comfy pay. Equivalent hourly pay of a ~90k/yr job.

>5 (post-MS program)
>Software engineer
>First full-time position; pretty famous and competitive company (hiring rate is literally less than 1%). Hoping to soon take on more research-oriented projects. Pay is extremely nice. $130k/yr salary.

>>7997971
nah man, they get you back with the perks.

>>7997979

damn man post your git or website. That's pretty impressive.

>>7997979
Did you learn on the job for your stuff or what?

>>7997979
Damn dude that's pretty neat. So you work for the NSA or something?

>>7997986

Lol, my Github is a bit of a mess. I won't put the details here to preserve anonymity, but here's the gist (get it?):

>a dump repo that has my futile attempts at solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time [ this will soon be replaced by a repo containing more legitimate algorithms that I devised using a paradigm for algorithm development I think could be useful for solving intractable problems]
>a(n accidentally) forked branch of a documentation repo for a framework I used in an old research project in college
>a stub of a language I had started to implement which aimed to abstract elements of manipulating relational databases into the language [and later gave up on when I realized that it had been done a million times]
>a(nother accidentally) forked branch of a repo of another framework I used in another old research project in college
>a simple distributed storage system implemented as a proof of concept of a cryptographic protocol I proposed
>a million private repos (made back when I got the free student private repos) containing little projects I tinkered on for school or otherwise

>>7997996
What is your background? How did you get skills in all of that? What courses did you take? What were the steps (learning wise) to get to where you are now? I come from a pure math background but getting into CS now.

>>7997991

I definitely learned a lot on the job. I would take what I learned at work one summer as motivation for what to study in school the next. I would then choose my projects for the next summer based on what I became interested in at school the following year. It goes without saying that this cycle eventually brought me to a point where I had very theoretical interests.

>>7997994

The company I worked for on the crypto projects works closely with the NSA and other government agencies. Once I've run my course at the job offering the meme salary, I definitely plan on returning to that company as a possible retirement-track position. I'm trying to keep my options open for now, though.

>Bachelor's in Mathematics
>Master's in Mathematics
>Relevant Master's work in Analysis, Statistics, Probability, and Machine Learning
> RND Analyst for a major insurance company
> I start said job in June, and my responsibilities will include model-building and assessment, which naturally includes data-mining and lots of other things.
> I'd imagine that I am going to be very satisfied.

>>7997999

My background is pretty boring. I'm from a rural part of the US. In high school, I did pretty well, opting to study computer science in college because I did the whole meme >i like to make vidya thing during my teenage years. The most advanced things I was familiar STEM-wise coming into high school were at the level of AP Calculus AB and AP Physics.

As for a general overview of the courses I took:

Freshman year:
Calculus II-III, an intro to computer science for engineering applications, intro to computer science (general), discrete math and combinatorics, and an applied mathematics class on using computation for problems in math and physics
Sophomore year:
Class on digital design and machine-code level optimization, an 'intro to advanced software systems' in C, a class on data structures, an introductory class to databases, an introductory class on operating systems, and a class on compilers
Junior year:
Computational linear algebra (linear algebra from the perspective of its relevance in computing), computer science theory, a class on security architecture (shit--didn't learn anything), a class on computer networks (shit--couldn't understand the professor's Indian accent), a class on network security, an advanced topics course on OLAP database systems, and a more advanced course on algorithm design, research project for credit (antivirus stuff)
Senior year:
Introductory course on cryptography, research for credit (symbolic execution and antivirus stuff), machine learning, natural language processing, another research project for credit (crypto protocols), a class on cloud computing, a class on database system implementation, a class on computer graphics

MS program:
class on computational complexity, class on algebraic coding theory, class on the 'logic of mathematics,' class on combinatoric optimization, class on computational learning theory, class on advanced topics in cryptography, research project on secure computation

>>7997999

My tips: just do it. Literally just work on projects that sound out of your reach. Just be up front about not knowing what you're doing at first.

Full disclosure: I'm a minority, so I have some advantages when it comes to getting my foot in the door. This is only superficial, however: once you have some concrete experience, that experience speaks for itself.

>>7998017
Thanks. Some of my math courses overlapped with the courses you've taken but I haven't taken majority of the CS courses you'e mentioned. I'm planning to take data structures and algorithms very soon. I already took two theory courses in CS (one in automata/complexity and one in computability which was a math class). Most of the courses you mentioned are ones I was planning to pick up on. Thanks for the insightful replies!

>>7998021
thanks man good advice.

>>7998033

No problem! I think you'll probably find that the majority of the really important topics you'll come to understand are the ones you learn on the job.

>>7998043
Ok good to hear!

>be me
>27 years old
>never had a job besides working at McDonalds for three days
>Community College
>finishing up my GEs
>get admitted to Cal Poly Pomona for computer Engineering
>will start in the Fall of 2016

The degree won't lead to anywhere and I'll just be in debt, but I'm gonna enjoy the education and experiences that will come from going to the school. I'll dabble here and there, but I know that I will forever be nothing. At least it will be fun for the next 2-3 years.

>>7998048

Dude, you can totally get somewhere with a CE degree if you know what to do with it.

My suggestion: find something you really like about your first CE-related class. Then start looking for an internship working in that topic for the following summer. If you can't find one, then come up with your own project. Do what you have to do in the meantime, but just keep busy. If you show that you can produce something with your knowledge, you'll be extremely valuable to companies as a computer engineer.

would it be stupid to go into Physics for an industrial R&D position?

File: 1376860846216.jpg (69KB, 627x429px) Image search: [Google]

69KB, 627x429px

>>7998048
>>7997912

It'll be worth it. Seriously, if you can sell yourself as a competent software engineer and electrical engineer there's not a tech job you're not qualified for.

Really make sure you make yourself stand out. Get involved with robotics or some shit. I built in FPV cameras with a wireless headset into the competition and it was a great talking point.

Take this shit seriously, it's hard work. My last month of my undergrad I was running on 4 hours of sleep everyday. Rise to the challenge bitch.

>>7997979

>mfw see this post after starting to accept the cs is code monkey meme
>mfw i have no face

so can I actually study cs and be able to have some kind of interesting career, or is something like this extremely rare?

File: 1364772370866.gif (897KB, 230x164px) Image search: [Google]

897KB, 230x164px

>>7998071

Did you read nothing he said?

It's not a matter of studying, it's a matter of doing.

Go on git and get involved with something over your head. Exhaust all your questions and start over. That's how you get gud.

>>7998071

You should know better than to trust the popular opinion of a board on 4chan. Study what you want to study. If you educate yourself on the opportunities out there for someone with a degree in computer science, make a reasonable plan, and have a legitimate career plan, there's literally nothing wrong with pursuing a degree in CS.

>>7997827
Applied math masterrace

File: oUB2eGzz_pe9bcoBTRm6HRl3m1fszOaRI5NShpj_PrI.jpg (61KB, 320x477px) Image search: [Google]

61KB, 320x477px

>>7997811
>numbers mean quality
Wew lad, come back when they stop shitting everywhere.

>>7998071
>so can I actually study cs and be able to have some kind of interesting career
Yes, but you need lots of initiative. Look at what this guy was doing; summer after freshman year he's building search engines and dealing with machine learning. He sure as hell didn't learn all that in one year of uni.

If you pulled an average freshman CS student out of a lecture hall and asked them what a pointer is, you'd be lucky to get a clear answer.

You get out what you put in.

Thread is going great. Bump so that more people see it and post their own experiences.

>>7998506
That wasn't even his point.

Most engineering jobs are basic, and you don't really need to hire the best engineer in the world to have him write some documentation or do some CAD monkeying.

>>7998502
> applied
> masterrace