Now Hiring

George Rebane

“New college graduates may be entering the worst job market in decades, but there are still some majors that pay off—and all of them are in the applied sciences.”   So starts Joe Walker’s piece in the 12mar10 WSJ covering the current job market for recent graduates.  A table of average starting salaries for engineers compiled by National Association of Colleges and Employers is shown below.

 

I completed my fourth undergraduate year in the spring of 1962.  As an Applied Physics major with a specialization (electronics) added on to the normal physics curriculum, and minors in math and military science (ROTC), I was not able to complete in the normal four years and had to go one more semester.  I had worked my way through school by spending summers as a design draftsman at a big aerospace company in Glendale.  Through a quirk and a gamble I was able to bluff my way into drafting using the skills I learned in my high school drafting classes.

In no time I learned that the secrets to success still applied here in California as they did in Indiana.  I worked hard with lots of overtime, and made more than enough money in three months to support my profligate lifestyle for the rest of the school year until the following summer.  At which time I would go back to a raise and promotion and so on.  Living in a fraternity at UCLA during those years was not cheap, but oh the collateral benefits …, mmm, mmh!  Some day I’ll have to revisit those days here in more revelatory detail.

So there I was in May 1962 with all my technical courses under my belt, no degree yet, and eyes for something bigger and better than ‘spreading lead’ on a drafting table (For the younger reader, those were the days before drafting/design programs.  You had to actually know how to draw a constant width, constant weight line from point A to B, and print in a pleasing legible font.  And if you made a mistake, there was no delete button; it was a time consuming operation with an erasing shield and electric erasing machine.)

Anyway, I decided that this was the moment in my life that I would leap feet first into electronics engineering.  I strapped on my best Sunday-go-meeting clothes and asked for an interview with the manager of what I thought was the most fun department in the corporation – the experimental circuits design group.  This was the place where the company’s intellectual property was developed that kept it in the forefront of supplying combat systems for the nation’s nuclear attack and fleet ballistic missile submarines.  Soon I was standing tall in front of Werner Nurnberger, the group’s legendary head, a stern, no nonsense German engineer whose face sported worry wrinkles instead of laugh lines.  I think we had both arrived in America about the same time in the forties.  His pedigree was reputed to have been from building Hitler’s war machines.

Werner looked over my transcript, invited me to sit down (so far so good), and gave me what later I learned was the ‘technical handshake’.  The talk was casual, but all business.  I found myself describing details of school projects, offering opinions on design approaches, contemplating the future directions of several exciting technologies at the time.  He said very little in his pronounced German accent, except to nudge me into spilling what beans I had on the next topic of interest to him.

Suddenly he stood up, indicating that the interview was over.  For a split second I saw my failure in that stern countenance.  Then he stuck out his hand, welcomed me to the group, and told me the name of the engineer I would be sharing an office with.  It was one of the happiest and yet worrisome days of my life – now I would have to deliver.  But I finally had a white collar job for which I had to wear a tie (standard uniform for engineers in those days), be on salary, and get to play in the big league.  And as still undergraduates, Jo Ann and I would now present a more proper couple for our wedding planned for later that summer.  I would be making three dollars an hour and bringing home what was left of $120 a week, enough money for our own apartment and even a savings program.

Before our wedding, my salary was raised to $140 a week or $7,280 a year, and more raises came thereafter.  Nice big houses in suburbia were selling for $25,000.  We were on our way!  As an endnote, the following January I was awarded my physics degree, a set of second lieutenant’s bars, and orders to report to Ft Sill and artillery school.  My salary was now reduced to $212 a month, standard fare for a shave-tail GI in those days.  But I would be back.

As an old guy blessed with a technology career that’s hard to beat, I try to communicate to young people starting out in technical careers the agonies and ecstasies that a lifetime of inventing new things can bring.  During the last two Saturdays I had a chance to again sing my song to the students attending the TechTest2010 preparation seminars at NUHS.  To be sure, we will continue importing technology developers.  Nevertheless and more than ever, our country now needs scientists and engineers native to this land who, on these shores, will build and work the innovating companies, companies that will keep America producing the wealth that can power the quality of life and maintain the environment that is still our heritage.

Comments

[Dave C]

Let's not forget the almighty slide rule and having to do equations in long hand if we needed get decimals beyond hundredths or thousandths.

I got lucky. As an under grad I had to use a slide rule. As a grad student I was allowed to use a trusty HP35 calculator.

[George Rebane]

Absolutely Dave, I still have my sliderules and the HP-35 and HP-45 and ... . In mid-60s I recall having to use a 'square root Friden' (now in the Smithsonian?) to iteratively calculate the wire clearance manuever of the then new MK48 torpedo. I can still hear the mechanical gears grinding. But then we all learned Fortran.

Glad to see you were there.

[Jeff Pelline]

I still have my slide rules too. They were still using them in school in the '70s.

[Russ]

I still have my college slide rule, but when I went in the Air Force we were issued Circular Navigation Slide Rules. That one is missing a screw.

[NC_Guy]

You just can't go wrong with a Chem or Mech Eng masters or PHD in a war economy.

Analog calculators! Man you guys ARE old.

Perhaps that is why so few post here, you are late Pliocene. This is the early Holocene.