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Earwicker posted:yeah, my sister in law did exactly this, she got a degree in environmental science and now she works for a consultant in SF going around to various construction sites and scoping them out for their impact on local wildlife, she is always driving around to cool place and lives comfortably, seems like a nice job Environmental consulting is wildly varied as far as job satisfaction goes. Pay isn't awful, but, but it's not great. The hours and travel can also suck hard. Profit margins are relatively low and your job is usually only a month of mediocre utilization rates away from disappearing. If you want to make real money in consulting, you want to get a PG, PE, or at least some business/project management certification. The "good" jobs are all in project management. That means most if your time is spent on budgets, planning, and business development, and using your license to review and sign off in the work of others. It's certainly a job, but after spending 8 years in environmental consulting myself, I was miserable and bailed. I know make about $12k less a year working for a county government. I have way more flexibility, actually use my geology background, and feel like I'm making a bigger impact. LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 23:58
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REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:What is your background specifically? Sorry phone posting and can't look back at the moment. Sorry, I missed this before. I have a B.A. in Geology from a pretty well-respected undergrad program. After graduating, I went to work for a smaller employee-owned environmental consulting firm in 2007. The plan was to work for a year or two and go back to grad school. The 2008 crisis hit, my firm decided to sell to a larger architectural/engineering corporation. I got laid off in April 2009 for several months, and grad school didn't work out since the endowment for the program I was applying to was in the shitter due the state of the economy. In 2009 I had a couple other job leads, but they all actually paid less than my previous job and had shittier conditions. Like, having to fly halfway across the county for months on end. My "old" job with the "new" company came back, after the acquisition had stabilized, and they hired me again with a minor promotion. Following that, I worked with them until 2015. I generally did environmental and geotechnical sampling, drill rig oversight, construction management and engineering inspections, etc. I had a few semi-interesting projects under my belt, but most of it looked like a construction/demolition site covered in some kind of mixture of trash, crude oil, and dry cleaning fluids. Any some other folks did even nastier stuff. I didn't pursue grad school for a few reasons: 1) Because trying to get a masters in the geosciences while working is exceptionally hard given that most good programs require you to be a full time student due to the field work, 2) My coworkers with graduate degrees made exactly the same amount of money, and did exactly the same job as I did, except they had more student loan debt and were a couple years behind me in work experience, and 3) My firm, in theory had a program to pay for grad school, but the costs were never really approved unless you were going for engineering or an MBA. And even then, I had a coworker who got into an MBA program with Drexel University, only to have the firm back out after he had already been enrolled and left him holding a $15,000 bag. Folks who had environmental science degrees, as opposed to geology degrees, were in a weird place since they didn't have the coursework to get a Professional Geologist license, so the only true career advancement was into project management/business development, which is increasingly non-science-y the further up you go. The biologists, which most people see as the fun, bugs-and-bunnies job where you're doing bat surveys and saving endangered species, did indeed do some cool stuff. However, they were also perpetually on reduced pay, laid off, or jumping between jobs trying to get a good gig. Again, it's not an inherently awful career path, but I would say that your job satisfaction is highly dependent on finding a good firm and in a specialization that has some long-term prospects. And even then, firms come and go very quickly. Every one of my senior managers had been through at least two cycles of firms going bankrupt and being laid off/acquired by Conglomo-Corp #42.
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Mar 5, 2017 14:26
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