Posted on 03/17/2005 10:53:57 AM PST by PatoLoco
I need a little help trying to break into the economics field. I am a first-year graduate student looking to find somewhere I can get a little experience in research while pursuing my masters. My University Honors bachelors degree has not opened any doors for even an internship position, so I am understandably worried about my options after graduation. If somebody has any suggestions, please, let me know
I don't mix well with colleges. Wish you the best. Not only that, an Economist FReeper would rock! Just don't strip off your clothes for grades, ok?
No banking or investment firm will hire you?
My undergraduate degree is in polisci, but I took several classes in econ. I graduated in 2001, but I’d still be waiting tables if I didn’t volunteer for six months on by boss’ campaign. I feel that I’m worse off with my bachelor’s than I was before getting it. And to top it off, I’ve gotten advice that I need to “dumb down” my resume because it may threaten potential employers. So I need to be reassured that my all my work and hard earned money I invested in my higher education is worth it.
I can't even get a response.
Get OUT of grad school. You need to get a job -- any job -- and get at least a couple of years of serious work experience before even thinking about grad school. If you are unemployable with a bachelor's degree, you will be MORE unemployable with a master's and no solid work experience.
I’m working on 18 solid months right now in a title agency, with about 8 months on a political campaign before that, so I got the work experience down. I’ve been trying for the better part of 6 months to get some kind of entry-level research assistant position, but nothing.
So the dilemma is whether to stay at my job and go to school part-time and graduate in two or three years with more knowledge on how to work as an administrator, but absolutely no relevant experience in economic or policy research or to go to school full-time and try to find some internship where I can get some relevant experience and perhaps even make some contacts.
You have your BA so you should be beyond working as an intern. Find a company where you can be an employee and they will participate in your higher education.
My daughter is working in finance at a large NY hospital and they are paying for her post graduate education. Many corporations will do this.
Why do you think you want a job in "economic or policy research" when they are obviously hard to come by?
You’re right. I should just accept that the time and money I invested in my education was a total waste and just be happy with my little secretary job, oblivious to the fact that I would be making more money today if I had skipped college altogether and gotten this job straight out of school about a decade ago. Thanks.
I didn't say your education was "a total waste" or that you should be satisfied with being permanently in a "little secretary job". I'm suggesting that you should get wise to the lie that more degrees will help you get a better job. This is a lie that is heavily promoted by career college administrators and professors, because it benefits THEM for hordes of people to endlessly waste time and money pursuing "degrees".
I have a friend who had an undergraduate major in Russian and minor in Econ from a very highly ranked college. Ended up doing secretarial temping and decided that in order to get a better job she had to go to grad school in Econ. She did, and got a master's in Econ. Guess what she's doing now? Some admin/data entry job that she could have gotten with an Associate's degree from a community college. And this is at least 5 years after finishing her master's and 8-9 years after finishing her BA.
You have to figure out how to get a real job now, or get promoted from your present position to a better position with the same company. If you don't do that, you won't do any better after you've invested a bundle more time and money in another degree. The second degree won't magically open doors, any more than the first one did. And in fact, the more lopsided your resume gets with education vs. serious work experience, the more you're going to hear the "overqualified" excuse for not hiring you.
I know all about that little lie about education. I must say that the cool-aid had worn off about three years ago. In fact, I began to realize this before I even graduated, when I realized that I in spite of all my studying, I had not felt that I was any better off after than I was before going to college. But the problem is that you have to play the game. Nobody looks at your resume unless you have at least one of four things: A master’s degree, significant experience, a clearance, and some good connections. Your best bet is to have at least two, with most emphasis on the last one. Sad to say I have none.
I’ve been sending out resumes like a madman more or less for three years now with little or no response. It’s impossible to get promoted in my current job because there are only three of us here, and one is the boss/owner. And to add insult, he had just hired this lady on top of me with an associates from an art school who asks me daily such asinine questions as “How do you create a folder?” Or “I got a paper clip stuck in my chair’s wheel, could you get it out?” I’m practically doing her job for her. And yet, here I am, gaining such valuable experience on how best to answer a phone or fax out a document. You need to know somebody to get in. The problem is in such a small company, how am I supposed to network with others?
Every day I get conflicting advice. A certain economics professor and conservative syndicated columnist that I’m sure you read advised me that I should think about going to school full-time and going straight through to get my PhD. He told me that was the mistake he made. I send out about ten emails daily to assorted professors, career counselors, and to every policy institute, government department, and business that I can think of. If I get a response at all, it’s usually some avenue that I’ve already tried at least twice. I even had my undergraduate professor and thesis advisor tell me that I might get better results if I “dumbed down” my resume because I may be threatening to the person interviewing me. I could never bring myself to do this because that would tell me all that time and effort and money to succeed were for naught. So which is it? Do I need to be a super-genius with years of expertise or do I need to be a mindless drone yes-man who can barely do his job?
I don’t want to get a job as a director of this or that. I just want an entry-level position where I might be doing something remotely close to where I want to eventually be. I’d be willing to do what I’m doing now if I knew that eventually I could move up within the company, organization, industry, etc. But I can’t even get in the ground floor. My biggest worry is that I get this fancy degree with no relevant experience, then I’ll be exactly where I am now, only two years older and with more debt.
Sorry for all this complaining, but I am understandably frustrated.
My dilemma is that the only person of influence that I know is my boss. Now I will be forever grateful to him for giving me this opportunity when I couldn’t get any help from employment agencies whose sole purpose in life is to find jobs for people. But I feel that I need to find a place where I can do something that I truly want to do. I can tell that he looks to me like another son, and he knows that I will not be here forever. I’m sure that if I came up to him and asked him for some help, he’d open his contacts and pull some strings on my behalf. But how do you go up to your boss and ask him to help you to find another job?
What city/metro area are you located in? If it's any place of decent size, temping is your best approach. And don't decide in advance what kind of company you want to work for, or what "field" you want to be in. Just go wherever the temp agency sends you (but let them know you want only short-term assignments, so you get exposure to a lot of different companies and potential employers). Lots of people get good permanent jobs this way, and it's a lot more effective than sending out a bunch of resumes.
I did this, after getting a worthless law degree. Spent a lot of time taking phone messages, making coffee, typing, etc. but it didn't take long before my agency was sending me almost exclusively to work for senior executives of major financial institutions. Got lots of job offers -- even had one HR manager pleading with me "isn't there ANYTHING you'd like to do here?", after a senior partner had asked her to try to get me into the company permanently (and I literally had never done anything but answer phones, make coffee, and pay his personal bills from his checkbook). I eventually took an admin assistant position with a different firm -- I'm still there, earning well into six figures, and handling huge loan accounts for clients who are "household names". I didn't start out planning to be a banker, and didn't know a balance sheet from an income statement. But somewhere along the line I realized I had a job that lots of newly minted MBA-in-Finance types were dying to get -- and most weren't getting.
You need lots of exposure to lots of people who can SEE that you're smart and hardworking. Sending out resumes is a waste of time, until you already have some very solid work experience and clear, sensible career objectives.
You see, between working on his campaign and coming back here, I was in fact working for a temp agency. I was working in data entry for this firm with a government contract. Within a week-and-a-half, I was in supervising all the data-entry temps and reporting directly to the supervisor. I had just been offered a full-time position when my current boss came calling with his job offer. I thought coming here to work for him was the better opportunity for me. You see, he just came off losing by less than 400 votes in a county-wide office against an entrenched incumbent with powerful groups behind him, and I thought attaching myself to him would be my best bet. But now I’m not so sure.
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