Ignore him. Not because finance/consulting is glamorous or high paying (it really isn't on average), but because 1. there's many ways to get value out of an education, 2. your professor won't be there for you when you need the money or want to live in a certain city. In general when people give advice but don't bear the risk, the value of their advice is dubious.
> In general when people give advice but don't bear the risk, the value of their advice is dubious.
If they are a mechanical engineering professor at a good university, they pretty much have borne the risk of their own advice. Most people in upper-level STEM academia could easily get a higher paying job in finance/consulting and have chosen not to.
While I really hate the “those who can’t do, teach” formulation, professors don’t always have the best advice when it comes to career growth, because their career looks so different from that of their students.
I didn't say they had the best advice for career growth, just that they were also making sacrifices to pursue engineering.
Professors also likely know many other people with developed career paths that are different from their own, while a student has no career at all to draw inferences from.
If you're a tenure track professor today in a STEM field today, you're likely incredibly lucky or privileged as well as being smart. Most people don't want to play the odds and that's absolutely fair. Even a career as real world engineer makes little sense compared to one in finance. You're job opportunities are less, you'll likely have to go live in rural places you don't want to, and your risk of losing your job for long stretches is quite high. We don't have as many important public infrastructure projects anymore so real world engineers are in much less demand and many just work on condo buildings or maintaining current systems.
A priori, it's not guaranteed these people would last long enough in corporate to see a higher total life time income. And the professor is not asking OP to be a professor, but to become a corporate mechanical engineer, which is a very different profession.
I think they would likely have more burnout from the academia job than the corporate job. And at least at my school, pretty much any professor that left could immediately get a higher paying job in industry.
You're right it's not "a priori guaranteed," but when talking about empirical realities, what is?
Yeah fair. I guess the original point to OP is: just to live your own life :), and don't feel obligated to live up to anything others set forth for you.
Off-shoring and layoffs for two. A successful entrepeneur in his fifties wrote about going back to his MIT 30-year reunion. All the folks who were in law were at the top of their careers. The guys in medicine were looking forward to another 10-15 years of work. The traditional engineers were all out of work or in constant fear of being laid off.
I've seen quite a few professors who did a stint in industry and went back to academia with their tail between their legs.
A professor in a good school is like a small-business owner with a guaranteed income and a supply of free labor. In industry, the money is much better, but you're paying with your dignity and your self-respect.
