Nick Swanson
After the recent Missouri S&T Career Fair, many students are joining 3,786 others in completing an on-campus interview. The main focus of any college career is to graduate and get a job. Missouri S&T prides itself on being the number six university in the nation for return on investment and the number one in the state, according to College Factual 2018. This means that for the cost of tuition, students see much higher starting salaries than most anywhere in the country. While a major factor to the high return on investment is the fact that tuition is lower than many other schools, it is not the only factor. Forbes 2017 reports that Missouri University of Science and Technology is also ranked as the number 15 public college with the highest-earning graduates.
Missouri S&T students averaged a starting salary of $63,892 upon graduation in the 2017-18 school year. This statistic involves all majors, including non-engineering fields. S&T also boasts to having one of the largest and most diverse Career Fairs for engineers. So, what is it that makes MST such a great choice for engineers, and why do companies seek out these students?
College Factual, a website dedicated to ranking colleges, attributes this success to several things. Small student-to-faculty ratios, design teams, and large amounts of available internships and co-ops are some of the main contributing factors to the success students see here. While any student will admit the courses are challenging, the rigor of coursework is another aspect to this university that many employers look for. “We like to hire from Missouri S&T because we know that the students will be hard working, out of the box thinkers that are ready to tackle the challenges of industry”, explains a hiring manager from Anheuser Busch. As was previously mentioned, internships and co-ops are a large portion of the reason that S&T is ranked as high as it is and awarded so many prestigious accolades. In the 2017-18 school year, there were 486 reported co-ops and 394 reported internships - a much higher average than competing schools. There are 21 different design teams currently, a number that grows every few semesters. While many engineering schools have a design team or two, S&T has enough that any student can find their niche. Companies recognize that students who work on design teams have learned valuable skills such as time management, interdisciplinary cooperation, communication, and real world application to school room concepts. These are skills that are often hard to demonstrate but are highly sought after in the engineering field.
The reason for students success can be surmised with the school’s mission statement, “Missouri S&T integrates education, research and application to create and convey knowledge that serves our state and helps solve the world’s great challenges.” The focus on teaching skills that not only get a letter grade, but help solve the challenges of the world create graduates that are not only good at knowing facts and figures or taking tests, but students who can take in information and help shape it into a solution that helps not just them or their employers, but the world as a whole.
