[bbthorson]

I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job. Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup and even rode my bike 215 miles to a midwest tech event (http://goo.gl/JX1ud). No such luck, unemployed as ever.

On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy will artificially inflate after years of QE.

[jacalata]

I might have misunderstood either you or the article, but the main point of the article seemed to be that people don't really have much use for business/econ grads - they need people who will write the software. So you're clearly pretty smart, but are you hoping to be a programmer/teaching yourself to program, or what? How is your story a response to this article?

[bbthorson]

I think point 1 is largely that business/econ isn't needed, however a large part of econ is dealing with data sets. Regardless, college isn't a tremendous metric of ability; how many times has the fallacy been sold that it doesn't matter what you graduated in, just that you graduate? Programming and comp sci are largely about logic, and teaching oneself how to program is certainly a fine suggestion but it's not a very efficient solution for somebody who has previously demonstrated aptitude and is still going to face a learning curve once employed.

Stepping away from the startup scene and simply looking at businesses in general, it's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training. Also a hire should be a long term strategy, turnover is very expensive and destructive to company culture.

"Building something" is a relative idea. Aptitude is not. My story isn't specifically important, just that hiring is maybe overly focused on buzzwords and the short term. But I don't know.

[nicholas73]

"Tt's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training."

What changed from the past is that now businesses are focused more on the short term. They want someone who is plug and play right out of school. When the managers themselves might hop job in the next year, there is no incentive to do anything but what helps them right away.

The way to show you can do the job is to show you have done something similar. For software it is some side project or open source contrib. I'm not sure for your case, but you need something you can talk about.

[jowiar]

> I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job.

The single best source of job listings you're going to get at this stage are the ones from your school's career services. That is a list companies that are trying to hire a recent grad from your school, which gets you through a filter. When dealing with general-purpose résumé drops online, you end up in a pile of thousands of résumés, and unless you have certain words on your résumé ("Harvard", "Stanford", "Google", etc.), it's a pretty lost cause.

Another big thing is to network. Go to conferences and meetups and such, find people who have a background similar to you doing something you want to be doing and see if they have any suggestions to fill in the middle.

Finally, find some way to demonstrate that you can "do stuff". Take publicly available data and produce something out of it. Build a model with some data in a kaggle competition. Also...

> On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy will artificially inflate after years of QE.

Here's a possible place to start. You're an economist - give me numbers! Turn it into a blog post or three. Demonstrate that you can find data sets, build a model/visualization/whatever, and communicate your thesis clearly. Don't know how to do something along the way? Learn it. Do it. Advertise the fact that you can do it.

> Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup.

> Stepping away from the startup scene and simply looking at businesses in general, it's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training. Also a hire should be a long term strategy, turnover is very expensive and destructive to company culture.

Part of the problem is startups don't often take a long term view out of necessity. When you're 20% of the workforce of a company, you need to be producing from day 1, or at the very least demonstrate that you're a quick enough self-taught learner that you don't need dedicated resources from the company to get you producing in a timely manner - otherwise, the company isn't going to last long enough to realize your potential.

[rcfox]

> ... I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview.

This is where the networking comes in to play. It's easy to get an interview after someone introduces you.

> After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 ... I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job. Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup...

How do you expect that business and economics degrees will help you join a startup? Most seem to want to hire people to build stuff. Perhaps you'd be better-equipped for starting one yourself.

> ... all the while playing Division 1 football ... and even rode my bike 215 miles to a midwest tech event ...

We get it, you're athletic. It's not really relevant.

> it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates

Why?

[erikpukinskis]

> I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview.

I'm a developer, so I have it easy, but I just don't understand this mentality. If you're not getting any interviews, then you're aiming too high, right? Just point the nose down a tad and send out another 50 feelers. If that doesn't work, aim a little lower still. Follow up. Be a stalker.

If you played football, and have good grades, I guarantee UPS will hire you on the spot to throw boxes around. That's your lower bound. The question is where in the middle will you land. Then you start climbing.

[Crake]

"and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future"

Are you serious??