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I'm in my mid 30's, about a year ago my lovely,educated and well paid wife and I decided that after years of me taking night classes we could afford to send me to school full time. We paid all of our debt, sold our house (six figure profit :) ) and moved into an apartment. I will start a BSEE/MSCE program this summer as a junior. I will graduate with honors, and I will get a great job when I graduate. How do I know these things? Easy, I know myself.

I refuse to believe the situation for engineers in this country is as bad as some of you make it out to be.

Any RF/microwave EE's have any career advice, besides "don't"? Will 5+ years experiance as an engineering technician count when I get my degree, if you were doing the hiring?

The experience will count along side your degree. Knowing yourself is great when you are in control of things, but does not mean a thing when others are in control. In the case of getting hired after graduation, who is in control? The employers are in control, they could easily hire a H1 or L1 visa worker for 1/2 what they would pay you. Keep that in mind as you look for jobs and find pay scales less than what you were looking for.

"Any RF/microwave EE's have any career advice, besides "don't"? Will 5+ years experiance as an engineering technician count when I get my degree, if you were doing the hiring?"

Working as an engineering tech won't help unless you were involved in RF/microwave engineering as an engineering tech. Even then, it will not do a lot to boost your standing as a new grad engineer. Most of the folks you will be competing for jobs against may have some similar experience, so it simply ends up saying that you are familiar with the engineering and lab process/environment, but it doesn't do a whole heck of a lot to prove that you are a better RF/microwave engineer.

W/respect to RF/microwave engineering as a career choice, a great deal depends upon how you choose to employ your skills and in which part of what industry. Government communications is probably the best source of employment for these skills, developing communications products for use by the military. Commercial telecom and communications companies are still in the dumper and work on new products utilizing these technologies is still relatively depressed. Hopefully, this year will see some improvements and an upswing in product devbelopment in these markets but, so far, there isn't any evidence that anything is ocurring yet.

If you want to design ovens using microwave technologies, I strongly recommend you also study Chinese, Japanese, Hindi or Pashtun. Not too many American companies are designing their own microwave ovens these days and most of it can be done from industry "cookbooks".

Best of luck.