As Susan Brewton prepared to graduate this spring with a degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, she lay awake at night fretting about the tough job market she was about to enter.

She needn't have worried. Before she was even able to don her cap and gown, she had four job offers. Even after she accepted a position as an engineer for the Naval Surface Warfare Center in West Bethesda, Md., the calls from eager military contractors hoping to employ her kept rolling in.

"It was very flattering," said the 36-year-old Ms. Brewton, who worked as a journalist for 10 years before going back to school to pursue engineering. "My professors had told us all of these horror stories about getting a job in the down economy, but I didn't seem to have any trouble."

Ms. Brewton is undoubtedly among the cream of the crop of entry-level engineers. She graduated summa cum laude from a top engineering school and has three internships under her belt, not to mention 10 years of experience in the working world. And she had a keen interest in fluids and turbomachinery, something that impressed her new employer, a government research group that studies ships.

Even so, career experts in the engineering field say that Ms. Brewton's job-hunting experience is not so unusual.

In the weakest overall employment market in many years, the engineering field may be one of the few bright spots. According to a recent survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, employers predicted that members of the class of 2003 with backgrounds in computer engineering, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering would be in high demand upon graduation. All three of those degrees were listed in the association's top 10 list of degrees that are considered most desirable by employers.

Experts predict the need for engineers in many sectors will only increase. Yet, the number of high school students interested in studying engineering in college has been on a steady decline. Among the more than 1.1 million seniors in the class of 2002 who took the ACT Assessment college entrance exam, less than 6 percent indicated they were planning on studying engineering in college, down from 9 percent in 1992.

One area that has heated up significantly is the military sector, where engineers are being heavily recruited to work for the newly created Department of Homeland Security, and for private companies that do contract work for the agency. With a proposed budget of $36.2 billion for 2004, the new department has more openings than qualified professionals to fill them, says Ken Selzer, president of Defense Placements, a Washington subsidiary of Management Recruiters International.

Mr. Selzer's team has recently been asked to find candidates with electrical engineering backgrounds to do classified communications work in the areas of border and transportation security. He has also been recruiting mechanical engineers with experience in installing air handling systems to help detect and prevent chemical and biological attacks.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, "there was always a demand for these kinds of people," Mr. Selzer said, but the need has "skyrocketed" in the last year. Complicating the search, many positions require government security clearances that can take a year to 18 months to complete.

As a result, Mr. Selzer typically limits his recruiting to candidates who already have them. Salaries average about $70,000 for people with three or four years experience, he said, with some engineers making upward of $120,000.

Some are even seeing a resurgence of demand for engineers at high-technology companies. Clint Staley, a professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, says he has been pleasantly surprised this spring to be getting calls once again from employers looking for recent computer engineering graduates for jobs in software development. "It's been pretty quiet the last couple of years," Mr. Staley said.

AirPrism, a software start-up in Redwood Shores, Calif., has hired 18 engineers in the last several months to design and support hand-held devices. It plans to hire at least eight more by the close of the year, according to the president and chief executive, Steve Sommer.

Marc D. Lewis, North America president of Morgan Howard, a global executive-search firm for the technology industry, has been busy placing those with computer engineering backgrounds into high-level positions like chief security officer and chief information officer. "The market for technical talent has warmed up significantly in the last three months," he said.

All of this is not to say that landing a job has suddenly become easy. Generalists are probably less desirable than engineers with niche specialties, for example, said Wayne Voris, a vice president for the Cincinnati office of Spherion Professional Recruiting. "Conventional wisdom says you should round yourself out, but that's not the case in engineering," Mr. Voris said.

Recent college graduates, in particular, need to be aggressive in their job hunting, recruiters say. Jamie Fox, who graduated this month with a degree in electrical engineering from California Polytechnic, says it took nearly nine months to secure a job offer from Mazzetti & Associates, an architectural engineering and consulting firm in San Francisco.

He began looking for full-time work last fall, attending career fairs sponsored by his university. At such events, he said, you usually "give your résumé to a bunch of people and no one ever calls you back." But at a fair in January, he took a more forceful approach, handing the people at the Mazzetti booth a list of reasons he wanted to work there, directing them to his personal Web site, and showing off his familiarity with the company by spouting information he had gleaned from its Web site.

He left the meeting all but securing the $50,000 position on the spot. "The C.E.O. joked with me and said, `When can you start?' " Mr. Fox said. The lesson he drew from the experience: "You've got to search pretty hard, and be pretty determined."

Even Ms. Brewton, the Virginia Polytechnic graduate who was in such high demand while still in school, had to exert herself to be noticed. She spent her entire senior year going on interviews, some of them pretty grueling. For her final interview with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, her current employer, she was grilled from 7:30 a.m. through the late afternoon. Like Mr. Fox, she came armed with information about her employer that she had gathered not only from the Web but from employees she had contacted. "I already had a good feel for the job and what kinds of things I would be doing," she said. "By no means did I go in blind."