And when thinking about that first job you have to remember that you're burning 3-4 years of full-time work experience on the degree. That's a lot of time to fumble around and find your fit!
Commonly true, but in my five years of engineering school, in my summer after my freshman year, I was already employed in computer programming. The rest of my school had co-op periods during which I had summer stints in computer-programming-related jobs including at Bonneville Power Administration with a team working on computer monitoring of the system, with the idea that was to lead to control of that system; a stint as a co-op student at Wayerhauser Plup Bleach plant, working on a program to model the flow of pulp through a tower measuring the dose of chlorine-based bleach, working at a medical lab with odd jobs including generating a plot of a sensor measuring tremor in a patient's hand; working at an IBM sales office writing a program to measure the proper fill of a tanker truck based on the day's projected temperature, and finally as the first full-time employee of a company producing the first computer-based commercial electrocardiogram analysis service, all before graduation.
My first job, of course, was prior to all that, driving various vehicles on my Dad's dryland wheat farm in northern Montana.
So I feel that I was particularly lucky about finding good co-op positions, as many of my colleagues were at less interesting gigs at Motorolla, sorting resistors by color code.
