Congratulations May 2016 Graduates! This is an exciting, and yet pretty scary, time of your life and there are many questions on your mind. Let us try to help answer a few with the help of the UGA Class of 2015 Career Outcomes Data.
1. Who is hiring my major?
For help answering that question, let’s turn to the Class of 2015 data on the UGA Career Center website. You may think that identifying the industry in which you want to work and the employers within that industry is sufficient for your career research. Think again! Not all companies recruit UGA students. Academic reputation matters. The better the school’s reputation, the more employers you find recruit there. So, take some time to learn which companies hire UGA graduates the year or two before you graduate and apply to them. Fortunately, you have a very large selection from which to choose! UGA graduates from the Class of 2015 are employed by 2,600 different employers, and we’re not even counting those who identified as self-employed.
2. What can I do with my major?
Some majors seem to have a pretty clear professional path to follow. If you are graduating in Computer Science, unless you have earned your PHD, you’re more than likely going to look for a job as a software developer, system analyst, consultant, etc. For majors like English or Philosophy, it may not be so clear cut. The UGA Career Outcomes Survey displays all position titles landed by Class of 2015 graduates by major. Check out the list here - it might open your horizons and give you some ideas of all of the careers you can pursue given your current major. Computer Science graduates, do not skip this step! Each company may have slightly different job titles for similar positions. Plugging in a variety of position titles in Internet job searches, such as Handshake, will yield better, more fruitful results.
3. What is the salary I could expect after graduation?
UGA’s Career Outcomes Survey reports median salaries for Class of 2015 by college, degree level (College of Family & Consumer Science example), and major (Grady Majors example). Know that while we provided you with several direct link examples, the information is available for all colleges and majors at UGA! You may ask yourself, “why did we choose to report median instead of average?” The median is the middle number in the raw data range of salary numbers reported, sorted from the lowest to the highest. Reporting median salaries helps us avoid extreme cases involving professional athletes or high earning non-traditional students.
4. How believable is the salary data?
When reviewing the survey data, always keep in mind that salary data is self-reported and unedited. Along with the median salaries by degree and major, you can view the number of people who have reported salaries by College (College of Education example) and major (Psychology example). To protect the privacy of UGA graduates, we display salary information only when 4 or more salaries are reported for a specific major. Please keep in mind that many factors, such as geographic region and corresponding cost of living, vary widely and should be considered when interpreting salary numbers. Although over 75% of our full-time employed graduates reported employment within the state of Georgia, full-time jobs have been reported from 48 different states and 38 countries.
5. How did UGA’s graduates find their jobs?
As career services professionals, we wanted to know that too! Ultimately, we want to help our students find their dream jobs quickly (preferably before graduation). So, we ask our graduates this very question in our Career Outcomes Survey. Their responses were captured and represented in the following Word Cloud. The more students mentioned a resource, the larger the font grew. Check it out below and happy hunting, but be sure to do your research first!
