The interesting companies (Duolingo, Argo, Root, maybe Capital One, etc) in the Midwest won't hire anyone from regular local universities. They get all their people from CMU/Stanford/UCs. If you went to a place like Ohio State the best you can hope for locally is DBA at an insurance company. A lot of the engineers I graduated with have given up on this and are doing real estate or retraining to become a teacher. You can work for SpaceX, Google, Amazon, but you need to move out of the Midwest first. So out of college you need to ask yourself if giving up all your local friends and family is worth having a fulfilling career. It's hard.
The workplace culture is different too. If you're in the rust belt, your managers over age 50 came from manufacturing lines and were taught that they need to literally see you looking like you're working all the time and they'll use phrases like "extract value from human capital". They'll want you to beg and plead for permission to use your PTO, but then put in your performance review that you're getting a 1% instead of a 2% raise for excessive time off utilization. My friend's telecom workplace just announced that their holiday bonus is that they may wear jeans on Fridays all 2022.
The workplace culture is different too. If you're in the rust belt, your managers over age 50 came from manufacturing lines and were taught that they need to literally see you looking like you're working all the time and they'll use phrases like "extract value from human capital". They'll want you to beg and plead for permission to use your PTO, but then put in your performance review that you're getting a 1% instead of a 2% raise for excessive time off utilization. My friend's telecom workplace just announced that their holiday bonus is that they may wear jeans on Fridays all 2022.