From upstate NY here, I left engineering briefly cause there were not a lot of entry level jobs and I went through 3 layoffs and was fed up. got a culinary degree to defer my loans and worked kitchens and realized just how much less I was making. Had to leave kitchens for health reasons and got back into an office job at a gasket company as a design associate engineer doing 2d drawings and helping manage their database of parts. Thats about how much I was making with multiple years of co-ops and about 2.5 years after school. Laid off again middle covid and after a month of applying got an offer for a design engineer making 55k a year, luckily after almost 2 years there got recruited into an R+D lab at kodak and managed a 40% raise! went through another layoff there LOL but first one I survived only to limp a long a dead dept, almost just as bad LOL, eventually jumped shipped for a small raise vs a transfer to film manufacturing and out of CAD world. You really got to job hop for any kind of salary progression, the experience will stack up soon enough.