What did your kid do with an Econ major?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How close to business is an Econ major?

far

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know 2 Econ majors, both are feds. One in the congressional budget office, one in the government accountability office.

They probably have graduate degrees in Economics

given they are GS13s and 14s (see later post), I bet they have masters degrees or are ABD. Or just really young.

Most of the PhDs I know are GS15s

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: I thought that econ was the largest major at a number of the ivies.

because most don't offer business degrees.

[Anonymous]

Went back to school for phd.

[Anonymous]

My son is double majoring in Econ and public health. He just finished freshman year, so he’s not quite sure what his career will be yet.

[Anonymous]

I knew an econ major, not from UVA but a school like that, who was a sales rep. If you're not aggressive about your GPA and/or taking challenging math courses, it can happen to you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:IMF, World Bank, Treasury, consulting

You pretty much have to go on to get your PhD if you want one of those gigs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My son is double majoring in Econ and public health. He just finished freshman year, so he’s not quite sure what his career will be yet.

Lots of great development jobs for something like that. If he's interested in mobile money, econ development in the developing world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m an Econ major and ended up going to medical school. Not common in my experience though - most of my friends went into finance or consulting.

I have a friend who did this also!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP - economist here. I hope your kid realizes that he really needs to take the harder math classes for the econ major to be worth much .

Not calc for economists, but plain old calc.

Not stats for social scientists but real stats, followed by real econometrics.

If he can learn some statistical programming, that would be great.

Without a ton more quant work, there may be plenty of good careers, but not in economics.

This. There’s b-school Econ and Mathematical Econ and they are very different. The latter is very math-heavy and the path taken to careers doing economics and if interested in PhD.

[Anonymous]

Questions like this always make me wonder how little people know about the working world. Is it because of family businesses, SAHP, or something else.

An economics degree is very versatile for entry level jobs in banking, finance, corporate research, and other research based jobs. You do need an advanced degree in most cases to have the title of "Economist" in just about any organization, private, public or international organization.

[Anonymous]

investment banking, then private equity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Questions like this always make me wonder how little people know about the working world. Is it because of family businesses, SAHP, or something else.

An economics degree is very versatile for entry level jobs in banking, finance, corporate research, and other research based jobs. You do need an advanced degree in most cases to have the title of "Economist" in just about any organization, private, public or international organization.

Not OP, but DH and I are both lawyers, so we didn't know what our DS would do with his engineering degree. I didn't ask here, but did ask friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates -- basically anyone we knew who might have some knowledge of engineering (or who might know someone with knowledge of engineering) to help us understand what the career arc for engineers is like.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:investment banking, then private equity.

Better have a high GPA from a very good school. A 2.9 from a state college won't cut it.

[Anonymous]

Think tank, then world bank consultant, then grad school, then consulting was my path