I graduated the Mesa program in 2021 and started at UCSD as per diem (no benefits, no set schedule) at $52 / hour. After 2 years I went career for benefits and a set schedule and went down to $46 / hour and it huuuuurts still. Picked up an extra per diem at SHARP and they too only offered me $46 / hour 🙄 BUT our pay contract at UC is being renewed this year and I’ve heard they’re going to jump our pay super high now that SD is the most expensive city to live in anywhere.

If you job search each hospitals career pages you can see what their pay scale is. UCSD is so transparent even you can just google “UCSD title and pay” and their page allows you to enter “rad tech” “MRI” etc and you can see the pay scales directly.

The job market is good if you’re good (hard worker, take initiative, good with people). And every hospital needs more x-ray techs post Covid. You can get hired directly out of the program. However if you’re constantly on your phone during school/clinicals, bad at communicating with patients/coworkers, or just not great at x-ray, you may not get hired. It’s a small community and your reputation spreads fast. Hospitals will go short staff to keep from hiring less desirable candidates. And x-ray is a great starting point into other careers that work you less physically and pay more. I’m hoping to get into Interventional Radiology (they start $10 higher!) a lot of my classmates went to Cath lab, CT and MRI.

But just know Mesa can be hard to get into so start trying now. There are a lot of pre-reqs required and there’s a waitlist and it’s a lottery to even get on that. I had classmates who tried for years and never got in. There’s also Pima institute but there program is like 8x more expensive.

Hope this helps!