Salary
Average Salary: $85,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $3,548,580
You're an engineer, not a waitress at Denny's. Once you fill up that big brain of yours with differential equations and quantum mechanics, you'll be making a pretty penny when it's put to good use with an engineering company.
That's true even at the start of your career. While the rest of your friends are making $20,000 as starving art curators for also-starving artists, or working as unpaid interns for a vegan magazine, you'll be making an entry-level salary of about $67,000 (source).
Sure, after a bachelor's and a master's degree, you might be roughly that same amount in debt. But when your job prospects are good and the median salary in your field is $85,000, you'll pay that back quicker than you can say "optical and dielectrical properties" (source). By late career, you could be making around $110,000 per year.
Want to really cash in? While the most popular employers of materials engineers are private companies, like Boeing, General Electric, and Honeywell Aerospace (source), the highest salaries overall are in the federal government (source). Go figure. The second highest-paying, though, is in aerospace products and parts manufacturing, where the average salary is roughly $97,000 (source).