Bryan Kim ’27 is a junior studying mechanical engineering in the Duffield College of Engineering. He can be contacted at bjk228@cornell.edu.
If you’re an engineer like me, chances are that you’ve been struggling to land an engineering internship for the summer. The cards aren’t in my favor since my dad isn’t a partner at Jane Street nor does my mom work for SpaceX (they actually immigrated to America in the 2000s), so family connections and nepotism are out. But we play the hand we’re dealt, so I spend at least half an hour each day scrolling through LinkedIn, Workday and Handshake, filling out “I am not a protected veteran” multi-select boxes and navigating through job application portals that haven't been updated since the ’90s for the 250th time. It’s a despairing process that hasn’t gotten better with the state of the job market and artificial intelligence upending entry level positions. So why not apply to an industry known for great job security and work life balance and is less competitive than Big Tech? Why not shoot your shot with defense contracting and all its titans: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing and the like?
It’s obvious what this entails. Being labeled a “sellout” or “complicit” is just a few of the titles you earn if you accept the job offer. But are you really just evilly obsessed with amassing money and power if the median salary for an entry level engineer in defense is significantly less than that of those entering the quant or FAANG industries and you don’t want to be next on the chopping block of mass layoffs? Are you really an irredeemable person if these same companies also provide military aid to Ukraine, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which are democratic countries facing an authoritarian aggressor?
With the U.S. military budget expected to approach $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026, defense companies are one of the few spaces where engineers can work on moonshot projects while free from shareholder pushback about pricing or time to deliver. There’s nothing more satisfying than getting something from nothing — abstract equations and simulations fitting together into a plane or rocket, breaking records and setting new ones. Whether it’s watching Mach diamonds spew from a rocket nozzle or the program finally compiling after hours of red error messages, there is always something intrinsically stimulating after facing days, weeks or even months of setbacks and failures. What’s more, these technologies often find their way into everyday consumer use as many of the products we use today originally were designed for the military, such as the internet, drones and GPS, or the Global Positioning System. Defense companies often have a commercial arm dedicated to refining these inventions for civilian use: We fly on planes made by Boeing to go home on breaks and we browse Instagram and TikTok thanks to satellites launched into orbit from SpaceX.
The rapid rise of AI combined with the current political climate has shaped the next big thing for engineers: autonomous systems. Being a forerunner in STEM, it only makes sense that Cornell should take advantage of this; yet it’s clear that not everyone is on board with this since pro-Palestine protestors continue to disrupt recruiting and outreach events as seen last year at a recruiting event with Boeing and L3Harris and this year at an Anduril “Tech Talk.” However, cutting ties and divesting from these companies is not the solution because doing so will result in a ripple effect that makes everyone worse off.
Companies like BAE Systems and Booz Allen Hamilton sponsor research projects and the Cornell Masters of Engineering program, so a loss of funding could cause another wave of stop-work orders, extend the suppression of innovation to non-military areas and even trigger another tuition hike.
Geopolitically, defense companies are a net positive as strong defensive capabilities are the best offense — preventing wars through deterrence, as we’ve seen between Taiwan-China and NATO-Russia relations, where the economic and sociopolitical risks outweigh territorial gains, making the cost of invasion simply not worth it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that innovation in the defense industry reduces civilian casualties in wars as precision strike capabilities made possible through drones and AI-enhanced targeting can provide an alternative over infamous “carpet bombing” tactics that indiscriminately decimate huge swaths of land.
What really strikes me as ironic is the selectivity of the so-called morality that protestors use. If working for a defense contractor makes one complicit, where is the outcry against Google or Amazon, both of which provide support in the form of surveillance and intelligence, or against investment banks like Goldman Sachs that finance and profit from conflicts by distributing war bonds? Is it because you genuinely want peace, or is it because you know you need to stop your performance where your own career begins?
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