Anonymous wrote:I remember buying Vault guides at the bookstore. That was where I learned about ibanking and consulting salaries and bonuses.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

None of which ever discussed salaries, which is the point of OP. Career center was all about passion and interest and how to help the world. Recruitment might have alluded to starting salary and “growth” but never talked about hard numbers unless maybe at the final offer stage.

If you could not figure this out on your own, you did not and still don’t have the skills to navigate the big jobs with the big salaries. High paying jobs are extremely competitive, no one will tell you how to get them.

Figure out salaries on your own? Talking about salaries was very gauche in the 90s — so basically if you weren’t already in the inner circle of UMC professionals you were screwed either way?

Not to be pedantic but c’mon, you don’t need the actual salary to have a good sense of ballpark for IBanking, Medicine, Law, Accounting, Teaching etc etc. That info was easily available in books and newspaper and magazine articles if you cared to do the research.

OP’s issue is not that he did not negotiate well, he missed the ball completely by picking a non lucrative path. The people who need to be handheld like this cannot rise up the ranks to make the big bucks.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

None of which ever discussed salaries, which is the point of OP. Career center was all about passion and interest and how to help the world. Recruitment might have alluded to starting salary and “growth” but never talked about hard numbers unless maybe at the final offer stage.

If you could not figure this out on your own, you did not and still don’t have the skills to navigate the big jobs with the big salaries. High paying jobs are extremely competitive, no one will tell you how to get them.

Figure out salaries on your own? Talking about salaries was very gauche in the 90s — so basically if you weren’t already in the inner circle of UMC professionals you were screwed either way?

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

None of which ever discussed salaries, which is the point of OP. Career center was all about passion and interest and how to help the world. Recruitment might have alluded to starting salary and “growth” but never talked about hard numbers unless maybe at the final offer stage.

If you could not figure this out on your own, you did not and still don’t have the skills to navigate the big jobs with the big salaries. High paying jobs are extremely competitive, no one will tell you how to get them.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

Older Ivy Grad here. We did have a career center. I used it. I read what color is my parachute. I knew campus recruiting was happening. But I had no appreciation for how marketable my undergraduate degree in history was. I had no idea I could participate in corporate recruiting. I thought all I could do was teach high school (more or less). Luckily I went to graduate school after a bit. It all worked out well. But for the basically second chance in graduate school (which happened later around 2000) I may have never figured out the degree itself opens doors, even in a liberal arts field.

(The experience of reading what color is your parachute when your parents are blue color and you have struggled to buy food was pretty funny looking back. One of the things you are supposed to think about is what would you like in a work environment. Well i wanted to get paid. I had no idea what my options were. I knew I didn’t want manual labor. Apart from that I had seen class rooms. I had worked in on campus jobs. I had no frame of reference to even understand the question asked much less answer it. I thought for a minute I might like publishing but crossed that off the list when I realized you couldn’t get into the field at a living wage. So I graduated. Tried some things. Ran into a lot of brick walks because I was dumb. Then ran into more. And i kind of figured it out after graduate school-but still feel like I am catching up.

You are lying to yourself. No one who wants to be paid well chooses to major in History. Not in 1999, not in 1959 and not in 1899. It is ok for you to say that during that point in my life I valued other things and over time I have switched focus to making more money.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

Older Ivy Grad here. We did have a career center. I used it. I read what color is my parachute. I knew campus recruiting was happening. But I had no appreciation for how marketable my undergraduate degree in history was. I had no idea I could participate in corporate recruiting. I thought all I could do was teach high school (more or less). Luckily I went to graduate school after a bit. It all worked out well. But for the basically second chance in graduate school (which happened later around 2000) I may have never figured out the degree itself opens doors, even in a liberal arts field.

(The experience of reading what color is your parachute when your parents are blue color and you have struggled to buy food was pretty funny looking back. One of the things you are supposed to think about is what would you like in a work environment. Well i wanted to get paid. I had no idea what my options were. I knew I didn’t want manual labor. Apart from that I had seen class rooms. I had worked in on campus jobs. I had no frame of reference to even understand the question asked much less answer it. I thought for a minute I might like publishing but crossed that off the list when I realized you couldn’t get into the field at a living wage. So I graduated. Tried some things. Ran into a lot of brick walks because I was dumb. Then ran into more. And i kind of figured it out after graduate school-but still feel like I am catching up.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

None of which ever discussed salaries, which is the point of OP. Career center was all about passion and interest and how to help the world. Recruitment might have alluded to starting salary and “growth” but never talked about hard numbers unless maybe at the final offer stage.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

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Anonymous wrote:I was at an Ivy starting 2002, and everyone my freshman year knew what’s up, even the middle class ones. And Internet was already a thing then.

+100

Same here. Graduated from HYP in 2006.

I don't think these last two posters realize the difference in the internet in 2002/2006 versus 1999 (which is when i'm assuming OP was still finishing school, since she was employed in the dot com bust).

Not only were jobs and internships not reliably available online. More important, there was zero community online. By the time i applied to law school in 2002, there were some rumblings of very basic posts online giving some tips regarding what grades you needed to get into different law schools. It was bare bones info even then. People weren't posting the minutia of stuff like how to work summer jobs, or what info to include in your application essay. But back in 1999 - webpages were like a corporate logo with a "contact us" icon. Big difference in time. By 2004 i was doing my law school on campus interview process all through online applications. Huge change in a short time.

And what the posters are pointing out is that even without the internet recruiting on these elite campuses were intense and with some small effort a student could find out relevant information about careers. Not everything is served up on a silver platter.

I don’t think you understand that there was no discussion about salary with any of my peers, no one mentioned that the job I pursued would top out at 100 K. Meanwhile other careers will go up to have $500k+. It just was not something you talked about. Everyone was starting out within the same narrow range for starting salaries, which was more money than my parents had ever earned together. Likewise COL in metro areas wasn’t really available — especially when you filter for school quality or commute; you might find a magazine article listing metros by average housing prices over the entire region.

I agree - this stuff was incomprehensible in 1998 without internet communities - and especially among women, who don't talk about jobs. Nonprofit "fun" jobs paid $24k out of college. And corporate jobs were paying $40k. That difference was triffling back then, and we didn't know that the nonprofit job was still paying $55k 20 years later while the corporate job is paying $175k. People act like all this was common knowledge, and being discussed by students on campus or with families. But the students in my circles were not discussing those things back then, and if you didn't have families in those worlds, you just weren't even thinking to ask these questions. WHen i went to law school 5 years later, it was a total different ball game - all the information was publicly available and widely discussed among students. But not in undergrad in the 90s.

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Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

And it’s been pointed out for the older Ivy graduates you always had excellent career centers and recruiting opportunities.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

Why do all these 30 year olds keep posting? You had a rich repository of information about COL and career paths on the internet to guide you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn't even attend Ivies (former UVA grad) and I am making 275K/yr working for the Federal government as a SME in Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I am in my 30's and most of my former classmates are making a lot more in the private sector.

No one makes $275k / year in the federal government unless you are a contractor or a senior SES. If a contractor, you're a second class citizen to the fed workers and your salary can change at the next re-compete.

By the way, salaries for cybersecurity and IT folks in general plateau in your 30s and 40s, and job security is low into your 50s. The young kids coming up are always going to be pushing you out of your job.