Sources & Methodology
This site makes two very different kinds of claims, and they deserve different levels of trust. This page explains which is which, and lists every salary citation in one place so you can check them yourself.
Two kinds of claims on this site
Sourced figures
Every salary number on this site comes from a specific, named, linked source — almost always the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each one is dated, and each one is marked with when it was last checked against the source. These are the closest thing on this site to hard data.
Editorial judgment
Everything on the Compare page — math intensity, hands-on work, teamwork, and the rest — is a qualitative read of each field's own written description on this site, not an independent measurement or survey result. Two people could reasonably rate a field a little differently. Every field page includes a comment in its source code citing the exact sentence each rating is based on, but that's traceability, not proof.
Who wrote this, and how
This site was built by a college student (see About), using Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, to help research and write the field content and build the site itself. Salary figures were pulled directly from the source cited for each one. Descriptive content — what a field's work is actually like, common misconceptions, day-to-day structure — was written based on general knowledge of each field and organized by the student, not independently fact-checked against a professional career counselor or industry expert.
That matters for how much weight you should put on any individual claim: treat this site as a well-organized, honestly-labeled starting point for exploring a field — not a substitute for talking to an actual professional or student in that field, or for your own research.
- No number appears on this site without a named, linked source next to it.
- Nothing is presented as more certain than it is — hedges like "if available" and "varies by region" are there on purpose, not filler.
- Nothing on this site is gated by grade level, and nothing you do on it (quiz answers, reflections, grade-level preferences) is saved anywhere — see the note on each interactive feature.
Every salary citation on this site
All U.S. national medians, all from named sources, all dated. If one of these looks outdated, it probably is by the time you're reading this — check the source link directly.
6 fields aren't in this table: Architectural Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Systems Engineering, Structural Engineering, Semiconductor Engineering. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish a figure for them on their own — each of those pages says why and points to the closest related figure instead of guessing at a number.