Reply to Squandered elite education

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Squandered elite education "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The thread has obviously moved on from OP’s specific situation to a general conversation about what information sharing looked like in the late 90s when it came to the job hunt.

I’m a millennial who will concede that the Internet wasn’t as helpful back in the late 90s. It was immensely helpful to me in the late aughts. But I haven’t seen anyone answer the question of whether or not they noticed tons of kids (juniors in the spring, seniors in the fall) interviewing en masse at all there big employers. Was OCR not a thing in the 90s? Even when I was in school, my top 10 university frequently boasted about how many of its students went to Goldman or JP Morgan, McKinsey or Bain, Harvard Law or Stanford Med. Were they not doing that either in the 90s? Genuinely curious. [/quote]

It wasn’t about which jobs made the “most money”.

It was about how to have even a modest UMC lifestyle in urban areas required a job like that. Simply being a professional was in no way a path to a comfortable life

For me, I wasn’t interested in being rich, I wanted to have a comfortable life in a better place than the backwater I grew up, and I thought working in most professional careers would afford that. I was wrong. You have to be laser focused on maximizing income,  networking, and considering employee prestige as a stepping stone to future career paths.

The people going into Bain and Goldman literally idolized Gordon Gecko;  I was more interested in being living like Family Ties — whose dad was a manager at the local PBS station!  Sure being a doctor or lawyer is less about the Benjamin’s, but for many of us the debt was a showstopper (some PP keeps saying working class asians go to med school all the time, but I know a LOT of Asian doctors and all of them had doctors for parents OR they owned a successful chain of stores — none were working class, maybe they arrived as working class but at the time med school came around it was different).

It wasn’t just “which careers paid the most money” — it was HOW much more money they paid down the full career path (I knew folks hired by Goldman making $100k ; my bio contracting gig was paying $50k — didn’t seem like huge difference, but of course subsequent years it’s laughable how it diverges).   More importantly, the knowledge of how expensive that Keaton lifestyle really was (no Zillow yet, no online shopping, car guides were going to library for KBB), that was the real knowledge I was missing. I thought if I just got a professional job and worked hard, I could live okay. I’m leagues better off than my parents even before considering my spouses income, so there is that. But I realize now how I could have allowed my spouse to retire early, funded my children’s future, if I had just made a few different choices.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics