r/ChemicalEngineering • u/Ok-Poem653 • Apr 26 '23

Salary Entry level salary right after university

Hi yall, I recently landed an entry level material engineering job and received a salary offer of $63k per year. I graduate with my chemical engineering degree this May. I am wondering if this salary offer is fair or if I am underselling myself.

When I attempted a salary negotiation with the recruiter in HR, they mentioned that the salary system is based on an annual evaluation and that the company has seen an average salary increase of 10% to 12% due to inflation.

I have accepted the offer, but I would appreciate any input or insights from those with more experience in the field. Thank you in advance for your help!

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u/Chance-Bison3132 Apr 28 '23

OP, im a senior engineer graduating in may. You should not take anything under 75k starting. I literally wouldn’t take interviews for less than that when I was applying (yes, I have accepted a job offer). Keep in mind, just because you accepted an offer, doesn’t mean you can’t keep applying. If you find something better, you are not under any obligation to honor the first offer you accepted.

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u/McArthur210 May 08 '23

Even if you only have research experience? I just graduated and one of the few offers I got was at 55k in PA.

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u/Chance-Bison3132 May 08 '23

I applied with only one summer of research experience. I went to a decent engineering school and had relative high gpa (3.7ish). Depends on the position you are applying for I guess, but I really wouldn’t consider anything less than 75k. I got multiple offers for that and more and didn’t apply to that many places. Just send out tons of applications everywhere. Some of my friends are starting out at 90k+

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u/McArthur210 May 09 '23

What industry was it? Because I went into the pharma industry. I also had the opposite experience; I sent out around 200 applications over the course of 6 months. Out of all that, I only had 10 or so give interviews and of those I only had 2 jobs that I got accepted to. One of them was the job I am at right now and the other was for a lab technician job that paid even less.

Idk if it was because the pandemic or whatever, but it just seemed extremely hard to find a job after all the job fairs and refining my resume based on feedback from others. My GPA was 3.59 and never dipped below that so I really have no idea what else it could have been.

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u/Chance-Bison3132 May 09 '23

Had to be the pandemic my friend very unlucky. Such a hard time to get into anything other than tech. I work in pharma consulting actually. my technical title is Systems Engineer I and I work out of Nc. If I had advice to give (take with a grain of salt), I would say it’s time for you to start sending out some more applications. The biggest jumps in pay come from switching jobs. I would have to ask are you in pharma manufacturing, design, R&D? Do you have your FE? PE? What I can say is that your certainly more experienced and qualified than me, as I just graduated. It may be worth even going back to your university’a career center or hiring a career manager for some advice. Because it sounds to me that you are being drastically underpaid. I have a ton of ChemE friend that just finished applying and accepting jobs and I promise you none of us even looked at less than 70k. Happy hunting my friend, feel free to message me if you have any more questions!! I try to respond to these job hunting posts when I see them since I just went through the process myself.