Andrew*, a Washington University engineering student, was moving all too quickly through his senior year in 2022. He was painfully aware that soon he’d need a job. So he did the same thing as many of his classmates at the McKelvey School of Engineering: he signed on at Boeing. After a quick recruiting process — he didn’t have to leave campus to be interviewed — he was offered a job as a Quality Engineer, working in Boeing’s Berkeley plant, out in the North County suburbs in the shadow of Lambert St. Louis International Airport.
Each day, he drove out to work past derelict buildings, dodging potholes on under-maintained roads. He flashed his ID at a guard on the way into Boeing’s sprawling complex. Sometimes, as he pulled into the parking lot, he heard the roar of F-15s flying low overhead.
About 16,000 people work at Boeing in the St. Louis area, according to St. Louis Business Journal research. (Including subcontractors, about 34,000 people across the metro area work for Boeing.) It’s the #4 employer of Wash U graduates nationwide, and the university’s website boasts that one-fourth of current engineering master’s students are active Boeing employees. The starting salary for white-collar employees is around $80,000, Andrew told me, in a city where a new college graduate is going to earn on average about $50,000.
“Sure, there are other ways to make money,” Andrew said. “But in St. Louis, Boeing is kind of inescapable.” For a young engineering graduate like Andrew, now 24, Boeing felt like that all-too-rare thing: a place where people stayed, rather than bouncing from gig to gig.
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Military-industrial jobs, for some recent graduates, have become almost trendy. At Stanford, as reporter Jasmine Sun recently explained, defense-tech jobs have eclipsed the allure of employers like Google or Meta. (“My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” one student Sun interviewed memorably declared.) Stanford, like Wash U, holds a class called “Hacking 4 Defense,” in which students partner with military sponsors to work on national security problems. Courses like Hacking 4 Defense — as well as Wash U’s Boeing Accelerated Leadership Program, which pipelines undergraduates directly into the company — mean that for some Wash U students, working at Boeing post-grad almost feels like a foregone conclusion.
This dynamic isn’t unique to Wash U or Stanford, according to local activist Sandra Tamari. Tamari, who is Palestinian-American and a longtime St. Louisan, puts it simply: “A young graduate is going to go where the jobs are, and that, unfortunately, is at places like Boeing,” she said. “The jobs in this country are built by the demand, and the demand is in militarism. That’s where the federal government budgets are going, where there’s investment, where there’s growth.”
Natalie Click, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville – which, like Wash U, funnels students into jobs at defense manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing – agrees with Tamari that, to some degree, it’s a numbers game. Click spoke independently, not as a representative of the university.
“Engineering pays pretty decently, and a lot of students are motivated by the money,” she said. Half of the top twenty best-paying bachelor’s degrees in the US in 2025 are types of engineering degrees. “You can get a decent paying job like $50,000, even $70,000 and just have a bachelor’s degree.”
Click, whose father worked in defense contracting, cautions that the industry’s frantic hirings and mass layoffs can undercut that promise of stability. “It seems like a pattern. Growing up, about every three to four years, all of my friends would be like, my dad’s really stressed out right now because he might lose his job.” But as another recession looms, even the promise of employment that lasts as long as the next government contract can feel like a safe harbor.
When Andrew started at Boeing, that promise of growth was what he saw. “It feels like they set you up to stay there, and live your whole life there,” Andrew said. But only nine months after his hiring, Andrew left his job — and by the end of the year, he’d decided to quit engineering entirely.
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The specific planes Andrew worked on didn’t bomb anyone. At first, the problems he faced at work were mostly bureaucratic: a lack of communication between office workers and shop-floor workers, and a company that, to him, appeared to be riding on the legacy of the F-15s it first manufactured decades ago. He was assigned to a newer jet program, to be used by the US Air Force to teach pilots maneuvering. “I guess it made me feel a little better that I wasn’t working on F-15s, or in the St. Charles plant,” he said.
In St. Charles, Boeing manufactures JDAM guided-bomb kits, which turn unguided 2,000, 1,000, or 500-pound bombs into “precision-guided munitions.” In the weeks following Oct. 7, 2023, at the outbreak of the latest conflict in Gaza, Israel ordered accelerated delivery of 1,000 smart bombs from the St. Charles plant and Boeing rushed the delivery of JDAMs and GBU-39 small diameter bombs. They had been produced just ten miles away from Andrew’s office.
In the same complex he worked in, workers manufactured F-15 jets — one of the kinds of aircraft that drop those bombs. And the presence of those planes was constant: he could hear the test flights taking off from his desk. “Car alarms in the parking lot went off” thanks to the vibrations. “This was an everyday thing.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine hearing those same sounds from Gaza. “I had to do some moral gymnastics,” he said, in order to reckon with keeping his first post-grad job.
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Oct. 7 came about three months after Andrew started at Boeing. His Instagram newsfeed began to fill with images of the devastation in Gaza. But when he tried to bring it up at work, he said, he didn’t get much of anywhere.
Andrew said about half a dozen of his Wash U classmates had joined him at Boeing. Under a month into Israel’s war on Gaza, in early November, a group of activists blockaded the Boeing St. Charles plant, Inkstick’s Taylor Barnes reported. Andrew said that his coworkers were baffled.
“These guys were saying, this makes no sense, you’re not going to solve the problem by [protesting Boeing],” he remembered. “They were saying it’s Boeing’s job to make the bombs, Boeing can’t control where they go or what they’re used for. It’s not in our hands, we just do the manufacturing.”
Outside of work, Andrew began to seek out the political conversations he was missing in the workplace. He spoke with some of the same activists who’d blockaded his workplace; he even chatted over Instagram with a young Palestinian man in Gaza who, like Andrew, wanted to be an engineer. Those conversations, stretching across months, led him to the student encampment on Washington University’s lawn. On April 27, 2024, he was one of over a hundred people arrested protesting the university’s extensive ties to his employer. As far as he knows, he was the only Boeing employee there — and he watched as people protesting the company’s ties with the university were beaten and dragged by police across the campus he had just one year earlier called home.
He called in sick for two days to try and “process what happened.” Then, he put in his two weeks and left the company.
“That stability that I had there wasn’t worth it for the role I was playing in the world,” he said.
The following months were hard. He struggled to find another job. Andrew walked dogs through the app Rover, and built people’s furniture and did errands on TaskRabbit. (“I love dogs, so that was great for me!” he said.) He got by. He fell out of touch with his Boeing colleagues and watched as the student movement that brought him away from Boeing was suppressed. Nearly a year after the breakup of the Wash U encampment, some cases are still being litigated — and the university maintains that its response to the protests was justified.
Meanwhile, Boeing kept racking up contracts. As of 2020, Boeing’s internal documentation stated that Israel was expected to purchase $10 billion worth of Boeing products “in the next decade.” The real number will likely surpass that significantly. In November of 2024 alone, Israel announced a $5.2 billion deal to buy 25 F-15s made by Boeing; in early February, the State Department formally announced a $7 billion weapons sale to the country, including thousands of guided-bomb kits manufactured in St. Charles.
Almost a year after his arrest, Andrew is prepared to leave engineering entirely. This summer, he will leave St. Louis and become a teacher.
“Young people are going to work in Boeing with ideals,” Tamari, the Palestinian activist, said. “They go into engineering with this idea that they’re going to be building something, contributing their skills in some positive way. And instead they’re using all of that talent to destroy lives. So it means a lot to have someone standing up and saying, you know, not me, I won’t do it.”
After all, Andrew said, he didn’t get into engineering to build warplanes. “I knew that I liked math and science, and that I was a good problem solver…it seemed like the logical thing to do,” he said. “I wish I knew, going into it, how heavy the military influence is in the field.”
*Andrew requested to be identified by a pseudonym.
