Graduate Finances

For IEs starting out in the world, your first six months pave the way to your future 

By Kevin Drevik

In 2007, I started teaching as an adjunct professor, partly to provide some business world lessons for the university’s seniors. This included, at times, some financial advice for engineering graduates to use when they started their first jobs.

I kept in touch with my graduates and was shocked to find out how little they knew about basic personal finance, like the Medicare payments subtracted from their paycheck. Before graduation, they had been exposed to a great deal of information on resumes, networking and interviewing skills – but almost nothing on personal finances. May is prime time for industrial engineering graduates to start bringing their analytical education to the real world. It would behoove them to apply those research skills to learning about the financial and benefits decisions they will make in the near future.