Simply the Best

Cal Poly Grads Get Jobs!

A Cal Poly education pays off. For the past decade, 92 to 96 percent of Cal Poly students report working full-time or attending graduate school within one year of graduation. A full 94 percent of 2004-05 grads are working full-time or attending graduate school -- 73 percent are working full time, and 21 percent went on to graduate school. And 92 percent of those employed are in fields relating to their college degrees.

According to data on our 2004-2005 graduates, the most recent group surveyed, within one year of graduation:

The median starting salary for 2004-05 grads was $45,000 a year. Grads from the College of Engineering led the way with a median starting salary of $55,000, followed by grads from the Orfalea College of Business with a median starting salary of $45,000 and grads from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design with a median starting salary of $43,900.

Cal Poly graduates are in high demand in the job market. A full 60 percent of the grads of 2004-05 had job offers before graduation. Within three months of graduation, 83 percent of the grads of '04-05 had jobs; by 6 months after graduation, 95 percent were employed.

Hundreds of firms recruit and employ Cal Poly graduates each year. Depending on the status of the national economy, Cal Poly hosts from 300 to 600 different employers each year through its on-campus recruiting program and job fair events, including Adobe, Deloitte & Touche, Gallo, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft...see our more complete list of employers.

Cal Poly's admissions process is a highly competitive one. Fall 2007 was the thirteenth straight year the university experienced a record applicant pool: over 34,000 applications for 4,700 available spaces. Freshmen enrolled for the Fall 2007 term had an average high school GPA of 3.71, average ACT score of 25 and average SAT score of 1183.

*SAT1: reading and math only

For the 15th year in a row, Cal Poly has been rated the best public-master's university in the West by U.S. News & World Report, in its 2008 America's Best Colleges guidebook.

This year, Cal Poly’s College of Engineering was named the No. 1 public engineering program in the nation in the magazine's Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs - for schools whose highest degree is a bachelor's or master's.

A number of College of Engineering programs also ranked high in the Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs in their individual specialty categories. Cal Poly's computer, electrical, industrial/manufacturing and mechanical engineering programs were each ranked as the top program at a public university in their respective specialty categories. Other engineering programs that ranked well are civil and aerospace at No. 2.

In 2004, Cal Poly's architecture program was rated as the No. 3 architecture school in the nation by the leading architecture and engineering journal DesignIntelligence. Read more. Cal Poly's Sustainable Environments program won top national honors this year for "ecological literacy" from the American Institute of Architects. Read more.

The Cal Poly Rodeo Team took top honors at the 2005 National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association championships, earning both the men's and women's All Around champion spots at the national finals. Read more.

Cal Poly’s Orfalea College of Business MBA team placed fifth at the 41st annual International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition this year. Read more.

Cal Poly is again among the "Top 100" universities in the nation in awarding degrees to minority students, according to rankings in Black Issues in Higher Education magazine, which compiles a national list of colleges and universities that confer the most bachelor's degrees on minority students based on data from the U.S. Department of Education. Read more.

Cal Poly now has more than 117,000 alumni living and working everywhere from New York to Washington D.C. to Wisconsin to Idaho to Hawaii to Hong Kong. Geographically, San Luis Obispo County has the largest concentration of Cal Poly alumni (14,479), followed by Santa Clara County (8,480) and Los Angeles County (8,454).

Prominent Cal Poly alumni include:

Richard Bergquist
CTO, Peoplesoft

Gary Bloom
CEO, Veritas

James W. Boswell
President, J.G. Boswell Company

Elizabeth D. Carey
Executive engineer and director, Cummins, Inc.

Jim Considine
President, Ryder Stilwell, Inc.; former chair, CSU Board of Trustees

Joseph Cotchett
Attorney with Cotchett, Pitre & Simon, one of the country's foremost trial lawyers, named one of the nation's 100 most influential lawyers for the past 10 years

Laura Diaz
One of the leading Hispanic television journalists in the nation, Emmy winner Laura Diaz joined KCBS 2 in September 2002 as co-anchor of the News at 5 and 11 p.m. broadcasts.

Kevin Falls
Television producer; former executive co-producer of the 'The West Wing'

Tom Ferguson
Rodeo Hall of Fame 1999

George P. Foster
Owner, Foster Farms

Sally Fox
Founder, Fox Fibre: Colour-by-Nature® & Vreseis Limited, and developer of longer staple cotton grown in several natural colors

Michelle Franzen
National correspondent, NBC News

Robert “Hoot” Gibson
Retired chief, NASA astronaut officer and pilot of five space shuttle missions, including the first docking with the Russian space station Mir

Austin Hearst
Vice president, special projects, Hearst Entertainment

Kathleen Holmgren
Senior vice president, Sun Microsystems

David Karr & Alex Pryor
Founders, Guayakí, producers of yerba maté tea

Peter King
Los Angeles Times columnist

Mike Krukow
Retired pitcher, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, San Francisco Giants; current broadcaster with the Giants

John Madden
Retired pro football coach and current television sports commentator, Fox Broadcasting Company

Al Montna
Owner, Montna Farms; former chair, Farmers Rice Cooperative

Linda Ozawa Olds and Joseph Vergara
Two of the original three founders, Jamba Juice

Loren Roberts
Professional golfer

Monty Roberts
Author of best-seller The Man Who Listens to Horses; owner, Flag Is Up Farms Company

Kenneth Rodrigues
President, Kenneth Rodrigues & Partners

Burt Rutan
President, Scaled Composites, pioneering designer of SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft and winner of the $10 million Ansari X-prize for its historic 2004 flights into orbit and back again. Also the designer of Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling.

Kathy Sabine
Daytime news anchor, KUSA-TV, Denver

Lisa Satriano
Hollywood first assistant director for such films as 'Spider-man' and 'Spider-man 2,' as well as the award-winning independent film 'The Setting Son'

Al Smith (deceased)
Former owner of Orchard Supply Hardware

Karin Smith
Member of five Olympic teams in the javelin throw, first woman in Cal Poly Athletics Hall of Fame

“Ozzie” Smith
Former St. Louis Cardinal; National Baseball Hall of Fame member; Cal Poly honorary doctorate; honorary co-chair, Cal Poly's capital campaign for Athletics

Frederick W. "Rick"Sturckow
Lieutenant colonel, USMC; NASA astronaut; among the crew of the first International Space Station assembly mission aboard the shuttle Endeavour (1998) and 11th mission to the International Space Station aboard the shuttle Discovery (2001)

Bill Swanson
Chairman & CEO, Raytheon Company

Alvin Trivelpiece
Retired, former director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; former president, Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation; former director, U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Research

Gail Anderson Uilkema
Retired, former superintendent of schools, Piedmont, California; national 2002 Superintendent of the Year

Keith Uncapher (deceased)
Associate dean for Information Sciences (emeritus), USC School of Engineering; senior vice president, Corporation for National Research Initiatives

Ernesto Vasquez
Partner, MVE & Partners, international architecture firm

Walter Wilson
Retired senior vice president, Solectron Corporation

“Weird Al” Yankovic
Grammy-winning rock parodist
and entertainer

A Few Alumni comments about Cal Poly: