Sorry about the late reply - I temporarily went AWOL.
Personally, I'm dissuaded from doing postgrad for a few reasons, one of them being that it can actually be detrimental and count against you in the eyes of employers (in computer science / software engineering) as PhD students entrenched in academia tend to be smart (but not always based on my experiences) and good in their areas but often devoid of practicality. So unless an ardent passion to work in a particular field is ignited within me, I probably won't do postgrad (still have this year to decide).
I think you have a good case for doing postgrad given your specialised interests. In which case, I'd advise that you don't start work with the intention of later returning to uni.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
Haha, funny you said something about that. I actually looked at University of Auckland's program, it just isn't the same caliber as American schools. Or maybe they don't have the major industries that attract those jobs. Even so, engineers get compensated EXTREMELY well in New Zealand, presumably because they suffer from such a shortage of engineering programs -- a lot are Australian ex-pats. The jobs I saw were commanding salaries of about $120,000 NZD, pretty ample for even a mid-career professional.
Actually, I think Seltzer should know way more than I do about it.
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Judging from
this, it seems that UoA ranks around the #50 mark for engineering which isn't bad but they simply don't have the resources to compete with the top tier British/American universities. Besides, I don't think the mech eng dept offers much in the way of aerospace engineering.
As far as I know, the average engineering salary here is lower than that of Australia/UK/USA despite the massive demand for engineers which results from brain drain. I haven't checked any figures in a while though.