In the vein of asking personal questions of Less Wrong, I need career advice. Or advice on finding useful career advice.
I’m an undergraduate student, my course is “Mathematics & Theoretical Physics”, BSc, but I’m already convinced I don’t want to try to be a career scientist. Long-term, my career goals are to retire early (I’ve felt comfortable enough on what I live on as a student that the MrMoneyMustache approach seems eminently doable), with the actual terminal values involved being enjoyment and lack of stress, so becoming a quant also seems like a bad choice what with having to get a PhD first. Teaching just sounds horrible to me.
What this leaves me with is the much broader range of careers that are either mathematical or sciencey enough that I could use the degree for them, or the jobs and graduate programs that just ask for a degree and don’t care what kind. I have too many choices, every particular one I look at seems okay but not great, I have no idea how to even begin narrowing them down or ordering them.
The concept of a “marketable skill” as it’s been given to me in most career advice I’ve seen seems to refer to a personal virtue that you make a flimsy claim to possessing to make it more likely you’ll get the job. I prefer to just think in terms of qualifications, because it doesn’t put me in a spiral of “I can’t just lie about it, I don’t have any of these virtues they say to say you have, I’ll never get a job”. But at least in terms of actual skills, apart from those I’m presumably working on through the degree I’m also learning Japanese in my spare time, have been learning for a bit over a year and at the current rate would take I think 2-3 years to reach JLPT1 level.
The concept of a “marketable skill” as it’s been given to me in most career advice I’ve seen seems to refer to a personal virtue
By a “marketable skill” I mean the capability to do something that other people are willing to pay you money for. Not a virtue, not a degree, not even a qualification (what matters is not whether you are qualified to do it, but whether you can do it).
In crude terms, if you want other people to pay you money, what they would pay money for?
I don’t think I currently have any skills I could be paid money to do? I expect in most entry-level positions or graduate programs I could apply, I would be doing things that I don’t yet know how to do that I would either be given on-the-job training for or just have to figure out as I go along. What sort of marketable skills might one have, as an undergraduate student without previous work experience, that I should be trying to think of?
I don’t think I currently have any skills I could be paid money to do?
That seems to be a problem. I think you should fix it.
If you can’t come up with a convincing answer as to why an employer should hire you, chances are the employer won’t bother to think one up for you.
What sort of marketable skills might one have, as an undergraduate student without previous work experience, that I should be trying to think of?
That’s basically the question of which job should you get post-college :-) There is a large variety of possible skills—from accounting to website creation.
This graduate scheme at Aldi, which I would be way out of my depth with and I mostly remember because it’s absurdly well-paid for an entry level graduate position, $62,000 in ’murican-money, doesn’t ask for anything that I would actually think of as a skill that you could be paid money to do. You need a 2:1 degree, a driver’s license, and a certain package of personal virtues and personality traits. There are a lot of things like that for graduates, and it’s mostly those things that I’m looking at, with the issue being a lot of choice and difficulty identifying which ones are better than others.
That’s a skill you learn while you’re on the scheme, the applicants don’t need to have the skill already, they need to have the personality traits and qualities that would enable them to quickly learn how to be managers. A qualified, experienced manager, someone who could list “managing people and logistics” among the things they can do that people might pay them to do, would not be an appropriate applicant for the scheme and could probably find better management positions that weren’t entry-level.
If you’re looking for a useful major, Computer science is the obvious choice. I also think statistics majors are undersupplied, though only anecdotal data there. I know a few stats majors (none overly clever) that have done far more with the degree than I would have guessed as an undergraduate. But this could have changed since, markets being anti-inductive. If your goal is effective egotism, you’re probably not in the best major. Probably the best way to go about your goal is to follow the advice of effective altruists and then donate all the money to your future self, via a Vanguard fund. If this sounds too evil, paying a small tithe, 1%, would more than make up for this at a managable cost.
I’m not really considering a change in major as on the table, for various reasons, mostly personal. I’m more thinking of what career to try for given the degree I’m on track for and that I’ve rejected the obvious choices for that degree.
The difference with the “effective egoist” approach is the diminishing returns value of money—altruists want to earn as much as they can over the course of their lives, I want to earn a set amount in as little time as possible, and might want to earn more if I’m making lots of money quickly or without stress. That’s the main reason the “get PhD, become quant” track is ruled out—the “teaching sounds horrible” aside was referring to actually becoming a teacher, which is a common suggestion for what to do with a physics degree when ruling out science, I wasn’t actually considering how bad teaching undergrads would be.
And there’s not really a “too evil” for me, my response to the ethical obligation to donate to efficient charity is to notice the that I don’t feel guilty even though the logic seems perfectly sound and say “well I guess I’m already an unrepentant murderer, and therefore evil” and then functionally be an egoist while still using utilitarianism for actual moral questions.
If they want to live forever the effective egoist still has linear utility WRT money until radical life extension and friendly AI research runs out of room for more funding.
If radical life extension eliminates biological ageing and thereby increases life expectancies by 1,000 years, scrounging together enough money to increase the chance it’s accomplished in my lifetime by 0.1% is worth 1 year of life to me. That would take a phenomenal amount of money, and if I have to spend even two years working to get that money when I could otherwise support myself on passive income, I’ve taken a loss.
Well, yes, that’s why I didn’t compare it to other interventions I could make and say they’re much better investments, because the obvious response would be to do both, and why I described the amount of life extension funding in terms that still make sense with reaching the immortality deadline in mind. Increasing the chance you live forever with personal donations to the relevant research groups has a very low expected value per amount of money spent.
Hey, Math PhD candidate here (graduating this May).
Long-term, my career goals are to retire early (I’ve felt comfortable enough on what I live on as a student that the MrMoneyMustache approach seems eminently doable)...
with the actual terminal values involved being enjoyment and lack of stress....
These are my goals, as well.
Teaching just sounds horrible to me.
It is pretty horrible. My university has a relatively teaching-heavy TA assignment, and it was kind of soul-crushing.
becoming a quant also seems like a bad choice what with having to get a PhD first.
Graduate school could serve the role of a holding pattern for you to figure out what it is you actually want to do. I think it’s possible to become a quant or an actuary with a MSF or other master’s degree. However, I don’t recommend going into debt for graduate school, and as far as I know most graduate schools don’t fund master’s students.
There’s a somewhat sneaky trick: One can apply for a PhD program, obtain a TA or RA, and then after the requirements of the Master’s program you actually want are done, transfer to the Master’s program and graduate out.
Of course that all requires some degree of teaching, probably, and afterwards you need to find a job making enough to balance out the cost of making a TA’s salary for ~2 years.
The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest do white-collar jobs in manufacturing or energy at very large corporations.
The people I know who do the least stressful jobs work either part-time in retail or have tenure of one kind or another. One is an epic-level computer programmer who gets so many job offers that he’s able to choose the least restrictive.
Me, personally? After I defend I’m going to work for a small research lab.
The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest
Cops.
These are my goals, as well.
So, this looks to be a common aspiration, but it strikes me as woefully underspecified :-) A lot of retired people spend their day extending minor tasks to take a lot of time and spend the rest of it staring into the idiot box.
Are all y’all quite sure you have enough internal motivation to do interesting, challenging things without any external stimuli? What will prevent you from vegging out and being utterly bored for the rest of your life?
Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?
A life of just everyday minor tasks plus internet/videogames seems perfectly adequate and I don’t understand why the emotional response would be “boredom” rather than “content”, except for the fact that television is vastly inferior to an internet-connected gaming PC.
I’d probably prefer to do “interesting, challenging things” than just veg out the time (which surely should be enough motivation in itself, unless you’re specifically talking about work-like projects and assuming those are necessary to happiness), but if I have a motivation failure and spend all my time doing inconsequential things at home, that’s hardly going to be such a bad outcome that it would be preferable to have to go to work.
The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest Cops.
Also military. Defined pension benefits and health care (such as it is) for the rest of your life. Of course, you must be in the military for 20+ years, which I’m guessing is not what the OP is looking for based on his/her other comments. :-)
Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?
I experienced this to some extent (a long story I won’t go into here). For a while, we paid for a high-deductible plan on the state exchange since we were both relatively healthy and mainly looking to not be bankrupted should we experience a medical emergency or suddenly fall ill. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), our other income was just high enough that we didn’t qualify for federal subsidies so we were paying over $400 per month for a bare-bones plan for my husband and me. Doable, but not ideal....definitely something people need to plan and budget for when considering early retirement.
Graduate school could serve the role of a holding pattern for you to figure out what it is you actually want to do. I think it’s possible to become a quant or an actuary with a MSF or other master’s degree.
Will they for a Masters in mathematics? Nearly everyone knows that a Masters in math means “I quit or failed out of my PhD program”. This generally doesn’t reflect well on you.
Long answer: The high-paying in-demand jobs mostly fall into four categories right now: business, technology, engineering, and health care. Health care would be the toughest switch for you from where you are right now as you’d nearly have to get a 2nd major to get into a grad program there. Engineering would probably require graduate school since your degree isn’t in engineering, and I’m not sure how easy it is for a non-engineering major to go that route. That leaves business and technology, and just a rough guess from your description is that you would prefer business to technology. You would most likely either be working in finance, accounting, or data analysis. A lot of this is just doing basic work with excel spreadsheets all day long. Those are the types of jobs I would recommend looking into.
The way to figure this out is to work backwards. Find people who have the ideal day you want, with your strengths and skills, then work backwards to deconstruct their careers.
Use that to come up with a list of potential careers, then talk to people in that career (find them using LinkedIn) to answer a few questions:
Is the demand for this career going up or down?
What are the biggest surprises I should watch out for?
What does a typical day look like? Would I enjoy it?
What would be my biggest wins in college be in terms of skills, network, credibility , and projects that would allow me to quickly land a job when I get out?
In the vein of asking personal questions of Less Wrong, I need career advice. Or advice on finding useful career advice.
I’m an undergraduate student, my course is “Mathematics & Theoretical Physics”, BSc, but I’m already convinced I don’t want to try to be a career scientist. Long-term, my career goals are to retire early (I’ve felt comfortable enough on what I live on as a student that the MrMoneyMustache approach seems eminently doable), with the actual terminal values involved being enjoyment and lack of stress, so becoming a quant also seems like a bad choice what with having to get a PhD first. Teaching just sounds horrible to me.
What this leaves me with is the much broader range of careers that are either mathematical or sciencey enough that I could use the degree for them, or the jobs and graduate programs that just ask for a degree and don’t care what kind. I have too many choices, every particular one I look at seems okay but not great, I have no idea how to even begin narrowing them down or ordering them.
Which marketable skills do you have or would be willing to acquire?
The concept of a “marketable skill” as it’s been given to me in most career advice I’ve seen seems to refer to a personal virtue that you make a flimsy claim to possessing to make it more likely you’ll get the job. I prefer to just think in terms of qualifications, because it doesn’t put me in a spiral of “I can’t just lie about it, I don’t have any of these virtues they say to say you have, I’ll never get a job”. But at least in terms of actual skills, apart from those I’m presumably working on through the degree I’m also learning Japanese in my spare time, have been learning for a bit over a year and at the current rate would take I think 2-3 years to reach JLPT1 level.
By a “marketable skill” I mean the capability to do something that other people are willing to pay you money for. Not a virtue, not a degree, not even a qualification (what matters is not whether you are qualified to do it, but whether you can do it).
In crude terms, if you want other people to pay you money, what they would pay money for?
I don’t think I currently have any skills I could be paid money to do? I expect in most entry-level positions or graduate programs I could apply, I would be doing things that I don’t yet know how to do that I would either be given on-the-job training for or just have to figure out as I go along. What sort of marketable skills might one have, as an undergraduate student without previous work experience, that I should be trying to think of?
That seems to be a problem. I think you should fix it.
If you can’t come up with a convincing answer as to why an employer should hire you, chances are the employer won’t bother to think one up for you.
That’s basically the question of which job should you get post-college :-) There is a large variety of possible skills—from accounting to website creation.
This graduate scheme at Aldi, which I would be way out of my depth with and I mostly remember because it’s absurdly well-paid for an entry level graduate position, $62,000 in ’murican-money, doesn’t ask for anything that I would actually think of as a skill that you could be paid money to do. You need a 2:1 degree, a driver’s license, and a certain package of personal virtues and personality traits. There are a lot of things like that for graduates, and it’s mostly those things that I’m looking at, with the issue being a lot of choice and difficulty identifying which ones are better than others.
Managing people and logistics is a very desirable and highly-paid skill.
That’s a skill you learn while you’re on the scheme, the applicants don’t need to have the skill already, they need to have the personality traits and qualities that would enable them to quickly learn how to be managers. A qualified, experienced manager, someone who could list “managing people and logistics” among the things they can do that people might pay them to do, would not be an appropriate applicant for the scheme and could probably find better management positions that weren’t entry-level.
I’m saving to take the national examination to become a certified translator.
If you’re looking for a useful major, Computer science is the obvious choice. I also think statistics majors are undersupplied, though only anecdotal data there. I know a few stats majors (none overly clever) that have done far more with the degree than I would have guessed as an undergraduate. But this could have changed since, markets being anti-inductive. If your goal is effective egotism, you’re probably not in the best major. Probably the best way to go about your goal is to follow the advice of effective altruists and then donate all the money to your future self, via a Vanguard fund. If this sounds too evil, paying a small tithe, 1%, would more than make up for this at a managable cost.
I’m not really considering a change in major as on the table, for various reasons, mostly personal. I’m more thinking of what career to try for given the degree I’m on track for and that I’ve rejected the obvious choices for that degree.
The difference with the “effective egoist” approach is the diminishing returns value of money—altruists want to earn as much as they can over the course of their lives, I want to earn a set amount in as little time as possible, and might want to earn more if I’m making lots of money quickly or without stress. That’s the main reason the “get PhD, become quant” track is ruled out—the “teaching sounds horrible” aside was referring to actually becoming a teacher, which is a common suggestion for what to do with a physics degree when ruling out science, I wasn’t actually considering how bad teaching undergrads would be.
And there’s not really a “too evil” for me, my response to the ethical obligation to donate to efficient charity is to notice the that I don’t feel guilty even though the logic seems perfectly sound and say “well I guess I’m already an unrepentant murderer, and therefore evil” and then functionally be an egoist while still using utilitarianism for actual moral questions.
If they want to live forever the effective egoist still has linear utility WRT money until radical life extension and friendly AI research runs out of room for more funding.
If radical life extension eliminates biological ageing and thereby increases life expectancies by 1,000 years, scrounging together enough money to increase the chance it’s accomplished in my lifetime by 0.1% is worth 1 year of life to me. That would take a phenomenal amount of money, and if I have to spend even two years working to get that money when I could otherwise support myself on passive income, I’ve taken a loss.
The point is to live until the functional immortality date.
Well, yes, that’s why I didn’t compare it to other interventions I could make and say they’re much better investments, because the obvious response would be to do both, and why I described the amount of life extension funding in terms that still make sense with reaching the immortality deadline in mind. Increasing the chance you live forever with personal donations to the relevant research groups has a very low expected value per amount of money spent.
Hey, Math PhD candidate here (graduating this May).
These are my goals, as well.
It is pretty horrible. My university has a relatively teaching-heavy TA assignment, and it was kind of soul-crushing.
Graduate school could serve the role of a holding pattern for you to figure out what it is you actually want to do. I think it’s possible to become a quant or an actuary with a MSF or other master’s degree. However, I don’t recommend going into debt for graduate school, and as far as I know most graduate schools don’t fund master’s students.
There’s a somewhat sneaky trick: One can apply for a PhD program, obtain a TA or RA, and then after the requirements of the Master’s program you actually want are done, transfer to the Master’s program and graduate out.
Of course that all requires some degree of teaching, probably, and afterwards you need to find a job making enough to balance out the cost of making a TA’s salary for ~2 years.
The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest do white-collar jobs in manufacturing or energy at very large corporations.
The people I know who do the least stressful jobs work either part-time in retail or have tenure of one kind or another. One is an epic-level computer programmer who gets so many job offers that he’s able to choose the least restrictive.
Me, personally? After I defend I’m going to work for a small research lab.
Cops.
So, this looks to be a common aspiration, but it strikes me as woefully underspecified :-) A lot of retired people spend their day extending minor tasks to take a lot of time and spend the rest of it staring into the idiot box.
Are all y’all quite sure you have enough internal motivation to do interesting, challenging things without any external stimuli? What will prevent you from vegging out and being utterly bored for the rest of your life?
Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?
A life of just everyday minor tasks plus internet/videogames seems perfectly adequate and I don’t understand why the emotional response would be “boredom” rather than “content”, except for the fact that television is vastly inferior to an internet-connected gaming PC.
I’d probably prefer to do “interesting, challenging things” than just veg out the time (which surely should be enough motivation in itself, unless you’re specifically talking about work-like projects and assuming those are necessary to happiness), but if I have a motivation failure and spend all my time doing inconsequential things at home, that’s hardly going to be such a bad outcome that it would be preferable to have to go to work.
Ah. OK, then.
Also military. Defined pension benefits and health care (such as it is) for the rest of your life. Of course, you must be in the military for 20+ years, which I’m guessing is not what the OP is looking for based on his/her other comments. :-)
I experienced this to some extent (a long story I won’t go into here). For a while, we paid for a high-deductible plan on the state exchange since we were both relatively healthy and mainly looking to not be bankrupted should we experience a medical emergency or suddenly fall ill. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), our other income was just high enough that we didn’t qualify for federal subsidies so we were paying over $400 per month for a bare-bones plan for my husband and me. Doable, but not ideal....definitely something people need to plan and budget for when considering early retirement.
Will they for a Masters in mathematics? Nearly everyone knows that a Masters in math means “I quit or failed out of my PhD program”. This generally doesn’t reflect well on you.
Short answer: business
Long answer: The high-paying in-demand jobs mostly fall into four categories right now: business, technology, engineering, and health care. Health care would be the toughest switch for you from where you are right now as you’d nearly have to get a 2nd major to get into a grad program there. Engineering would probably require graduate school since your degree isn’t in engineering, and I’m not sure how easy it is for a non-engineering major to go that route. That leaves business and technology, and just a rough guess from your description is that you would prefer business to technology. You would most likely either be working in finance, accounting, or data analysis. A lot of this is just doing basic work with excel spreadsheets all day long. Those are the types of jobs I would recommend looking into.
Hey Rowan,
The way to figure this out is to work backwards. Find people who have the ideal day you want, with your strengths and skills, then work backwards to deconstruct their careers.
Use that to come up with a list of potential careers, then talk to people in that career (find them using LinkedIn) to answer a few questions:
Is the demand for this career going up or down?
What are the biggest surprises I should watch out for?
What does a typical day look like? Would I enjoy it?
What would be my biggest wins in college be in terms of skills, network, credibility , and projects that would allow me to quickly land a job when I get out?
I put up a video on this process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6sXNR7kL-c&list=UUCi-drAVuy8g4N8TfODHgUQ
I’d also be happy to chat with you about any further questions you may have: http://selfmaderenegade.net/lets-chat/