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Any advice for a mechanical engineering grad with a BS? I graduated in 07 and took the first job I was offered which was for a position as a patent examiner and worked there for about a year and a half. I never took the EIT and worry that I may never be able to having been out of school for as long as I have. I had two solid internships with a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and have what I think is valuable experience teaching Pro/E as a teaching assistant in the ME department back in school. My grades were not great, my overall gpa was just over 2.9/4.0 but my so called engineering gpa is a bit better at 3.3/4.0. I lost my job as a patent examiner some time ago, (I technically quit, but I didn't have any choice, it is a long messy story involving a discrimination case I felt I had against my supervisor which did not go well for me, and I'm rather bitter about the entire experience, but of course I don't let this come through at all when writing cover letters, or dealing with professionals in the few emails I've had with potential employers). My job search has been utterly depressing I've had zero call backs in almost 6 months of applying for jobs every day. I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I am beginning to feel very under qualified for even entry level positions despite the experience I have. I'd like to get a job as a design engineer, but I really don't understand what I could be doing differently or better to improve my employability.
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Oct 15, 2009 18:32
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 13:50 |
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I appreciate the suggestions. I have applied to Schlumberger and Shell in the past, but I never got further than the initial phone interview. This was right after I graduated however, so I will take another look and re-apply in the morning. Not to disrespect oil & gas or military contractors if that is your chosen field but my beliefs and morals (which are quickly being thrown out the window) tend to lean a bit left. I'm sure most the ME's in this thread work in the mil. industrial complex or oil & gas in some manner or another, since these industries seem to be where the smart money is lately, but I would rather not IF I had an alternative. Any suggestions for a liberal, environmentally conscious mechanical engineer? lol Or... beggars can't be choosers, stfu Dukkha, go put your degree to work building the next moab. *edit* I really hope I haven't offended anyone by stating my preferences, some of my best and most respected friends work or have worked for Halliburton, Lockheed and Northrop.
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Oct 16, 2009 05:56
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Most of my colleagues there had or are still having good experiences. Good aspects of the job: You can more or less set your own schedule, meaning you can almost work any 80 hours per bi-week you want and come and go as you please. You are largely autonomous after your first 2 years so you rarely have anyone directly managing you. The DC area is awesome. (I really miss it  )Pay is pretty good, and raises are based on production and are non-competitive. (pretty sure the patent office is the only government office with no cap on the number of GS 13+ employees they can have) They actually encourage examiners to work from home as the office is constantly running out of office space. After your 2 year probationary period you basically have to rape someone or take a poo poo on your bosses desk to get fired. This is also a bad aspect of the job as there are a ton of really really lovely examiners that somehow made it past their probationary period which used to only last 1 year, and since they often can't be fired they are sometimes promoted out of their art units simply to get rid of them and make them someone else's problem. (This is how my supervisor got her position) There are a lot of other nice things, I just can't really think of them at the moment... Bad parts of the job: You don't get a say in what you examine. Production. You will be expected to be over 100% productive, which means that based on the subject matter you are assigned to examine you are given X hours to examine a case from start to finish. (the whole production formula is probably more complicated than you really care about right now, but I can explain it in more detail if you are really interested) suffice it to say examiners for the most part hate production because the number of hours they are given to examine a case was set a long time ago and rarely if ever changes and is generally a very poor indicator of the true difficulty of examining a particular subject matter. You can and some people do actually go insane. Imagine spending 80 hour bi-weeks without speaking to another human being in person. I've seen it twice and I was only there for about a year and a half. No one is very eager to disclose just how common this actually is. There is a 2 year probationary period during which time you can be "not retained" without cause. The DC area is very expensive. Production requirements are set so high that it is common place for junior examiners struggling to keep their jobs to work as many as 40-60 hours of unpaid overtime each bi-week, even though they can technically be "not retained" for doing it. Supervisory Patent Examiners (SPEs) this is definitely the single most important variable that will either make or break you and you are assigned one completely at random. SPEs have absolute control over junior examiners to an almost ludicrous extent. Your SPE can take away all of the good parts of the job I listed above, (flexible schedules, scheduled raises, office mates, even the 'counts' used to determine your production, your performance rating and your potential for advancement). If a SPE wants to keep you from getting a promotion they can simply force you to continuously reexamine the same application ad nauseam. There is virtually no protection or recourse for junior examiners and this is why the office has such an abysmally low retention rate. If you really want my obviously biased opinions I could talk about it a LOT more, but this probably isn't the thread for it. PM me if you have any other questions. To answer your question, I think I could have really liked the job, but I was extremely unlucky and was assigned to an art unit I didn't like under a SPE that didn't like me and it just ruined everything for me.
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Oct 16, 2009 07:42
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