A Mechanical Engineering graduate, 5 years in
Meet Daniel.
What a Mechanical Engineering degree typically turns into —
a synthetic person built entirely from U.S. government medians.
Meet Daniel — she finished a degree in
Mechanical Engineering and is now about 5 years into work.
Today she's most likely a Architectural and Engineering Managers, earning
around $159,806 a year. That's up from roughly
$127,420 when she started, hiring is roughly flat.
She walked out with about $22,822 in student debt — roughly $260/mo for ten years.
On the AI front, AI barely touches her work so far. Archetype: The Hybrid Zone.
If the work ever changes, the most natural moves are below — ranked by how much safer and better-paid they are.
Daniel isn't a real person. She's the statistical center of everyone who took this
path — built from BLS pay, Dept. of Education debt, and O*NET/AI task data. She describes the typical road,
not your destiny. Your own number can land anywhere along the curves below.
The pay she's really looking at
Not one number — where people in this role actually land, bottom 10% to top 10%. Her likely spot is marked.
Will AI come for Daniel's job?
Right = how much AI is used in her role today. Up = how much it could automate in theory. Each faint dot is another occupation.
If she ever has to jump — where to?
Adjacent careers ranked by how much safer + how much more they pay, and the skill gap to get there.
See another graduate
How Daniel is built. We take the most representative career for
Mechanical Engineering graduates, then pull real median pay by experience level (BLS OEWS / DOL filings),
typical student debt for the major (Dept. of Education College Scorecard), AI task exposure
(O*NET + automation potential), and skill-overlap escape routes. This is the joined,
forward-looking profile built from real medians — it needs the real distributions and the skill
graph. All figures are group medians and trends, never an individual prediction.
