Friday Check-in

Hey, it sounds like you’re being pretty hard on yourself. I’m a full time student as well and can’t even imagine having a job in addition to the American engineering school workload. You’re already stronger than I am. That’s something to be proud of!

Lots of people here will talk about internships and whatnot, and like you said, the survey data is pretty biased lol. I know plenty of fellow engineering students who have good GPAs, leaderships experience in pretty technical clubs, etc. and won’t have internships upon graduation. They will all get jobs, and so will you! Finish out your last year strong, it will be worth it. I highly highly recommend using LinkedIn for job hunting, as well as just applying to companies websites. Career fairs can be super nice, but I’ve found that they just give perfect students easy access to companies and it can be hard for average students to find success at them. Make it your personal goal to apply to 3 companies a day, or 10 over each weekend, or something. I did this last year and got a lot more response than I expected.

I’ve had an extremely low work ethic in regards to my schoolwork ever since my sophomore year. I was the guy who stayed up until 6am, slept until 4pm, didn’t do any homework or go to any classes and had a 2.5 GPA because I was at least good at cramming for exams. But being this close to graduating and wanting to not have any more engineering exams has motivated me to get my GPA up to a 3.2 and I think it will go up a bit in my last semester. If I can do it anyone can lol.

Don’t get caught up in not getting an internship. It happens. Engineering is a competitive field and the fact that internships pay so well and there are a trillion engineering students and very few internship openings (think, a company may employ 400 engineers because they are full time, but only have 5 internship openings). You’ll get hired eventually and after your first job, an internship will mean nothing.

/r/EngineeringStudents Thread Parent