Black_Shark, let me give you a piece of advice on the open thread.
As the disclaimer on an open-source piece of scientific software used to say, "Careful! Anything free comes with no guarantee."
1) I expect a salary in the $40-50,000 range commiserate with my skills.
This comes across as demanding. It's an employer's market. There are people (as you say) with 2-3 years experience willing to take that much. Unless you have a hook (you're dating the CEO's daughter) saying what YOU want isn't a good move. It makes you look grasping and likely to jump ship as soon as a marginally better salary comes along.
2) I want the opportunity for advancement if I work hard and prove my worth.
In a field which is full of companies nearly going belly-up (think of the shenanigans to keep the banks from foundering), your individual contribution is of no value. You are a *COST*. Get on board and SHOW what you can do, and they may like you: or your entire division may get axed to cover the rear of someone trying to enter the C-level suite.
3) I want to be on the management/executive track by the time I’m 30.
Have you stopped to consider how many unemployed MBAs there are right now?
And again, you may think that you are advertising yourself as "serious" but there are other, less flattering, messages which might be read into that statement.
4) Life is hard but this is friggin ridiculous. Why did I go to college and work my BUTT off learning statistics and mathematics when I could have bypassed it all and still be qualified for the same jobs?
Where did you go to school? What is your GPA? In what discipline?
It may or not be impressive, but if the big picture is that your field is under the gun, the odds are against you.
Consider your learning as intellectual kindling, find out what area is hot (and likely to remain so), and see how you can springboard from your area to that.
Central_va's advice is not just gold: it's platinum.
Programmers are a dime a dozen; but programmers who understand the business rules and reasons behind the programming, who can contribute in a meaningful way to design, are priceless. Your econ is a good start to that, if you want to go to the financial industry.
On the con side, if you really want to go to management, programmers are considered "outside the loop" for *real* business operations.
Full Disclosure: depending on the situation, management is not all it's cracked up to be. It is mostly political; the pressure never lets up; you are being gunned at by other managers eager to absorb your department AND by those beneath you; and you usually have to work late (9 or 10 pm) most every night just to keep up. It can play hell with a marriage.
Which is yet another reason I did NOT opt for management track immediately.
Cheers!
I appreciate your advice however I am not “demanding” these conditions to employers. That is the last thing I would do in an interview. Instead, I listen to the employers and have a mental checklist. If the employer offers me a job paying $35K, then I expect opportunities for quick advancement in order to compensate for the lower starting salary. If I get offered $35K for a deadend job, I say “no but thank you” and move on to the next interview.
I know the unemployment rate for MBA’s and I’ve also seen their curriculum and I’m not surprised. That is why, if I chose the grad school route, I would get a Master’s in Applied Economics with Master’s Minor in Statistics along with as much math as I could cram in my head during that 2 year span. Math is king in this world.
In regards to the school, I went to North Carolina State University which has one of the top Statistics departments in the nation along with being the top math school in the state. As I said, a BS in Economics here requires Calc, Linear Algebra, Diff Eq, Econometrics, among other math requirements. I have more math than an engineering major is required to have but it’s applied to a different discipline. They do thermo/physics, I do economics. My overall GPA is 3.385 thanks to freshman/sophomore years and major GPA is 3.619 thanks to a C in intro to micro back when I was a poli-sci major. Otherwise it would be a ~3.9.
This economy sucks but there is a certain threshold to which a job is no longer viable. It’s not like I’m expecting that much. I expect a salary near the average for college graduates ($50K), opportunities within the company, and the ability to further improve my skillset. Unfortunately, this does not look likely in this economy and with the amount of cheap labor that is being supplied abroad so I don’t know what the future holds.
I guess my point is that it is depressing giving up 4 years of my life only to discover that I am no more valuable coming out than I was coming in.
Very frustrating.