<p>Some people have been telling me that if I pursue a degree in economics I'm going to spend the rest of my working career pulling 60 hour weeks. Anyone here have any input?</p>
<p>I’m not saying its something hard, its just that I don’t know I want to be working 10-12 hours a day when I’m in my upper 30s/40s while I’m trying to raise a family. My dad works probably over 12 hours a day and even though he provides for me we don’t have a great relationship and I want to be the best dad I can be when I have kids. It sounds cliche or whatever but i have firsthand experience and I don’t want to make the same mistake my dad made.</p>
<p>I don’t know a single company that wont make concessions for family life. I know plenty of people that leave the office and go have dinner and visit with their kids and then work when they go to bed. </p>
<p>If you have a 10 hour day arrive at 6 and leave at 4. I dont mean to be a counselor but honestly I don’t believe your dad working is the only reason you have a bad relationship. What about weekends? The point is, it’s about the effort YOU take to be successful as well as maintain a good work-life balance.</p>
<p>Few professional jobs these days are 40 hours. Even while working on-site at a manufacturer, people worked 50-60 hours per week with spurts as high as 100 hours per week when you-know-what hit the fan. The places where people work 40 hours per week are usually hourly positions (i.e. non-professional positions).</p>
<p>If you want more family time, seek a career where you can work from home on Fridays (some consulting firms do this), where you work 9-8-0’s (every other Friday off - common in engineering settings), or where you have tons of vacation (most consulting firms give 6 or more weeks of vacation per year to start). When it comes to quality time with the family, having a day where you can plan an event or spend time with the kids is more important than an hour or two in the evening (when they’re often doing homework, watching TV, etc. anyway).</p>
<p>Yea I suppose you’re all right. It’s not like I should think I’m gonna get paid big bucks if don’t work that much. Thanks for all the help. And even in high school I ‘work’ from 7am to 3pm and 7pm to usually 1am or so with all the extracurriculars and ap’s that I do. College will probably be equally as much (maybe a little less) depending on what other stuff I do so working 10 or 12 hours isn’t all that bad. So I guess even with me pulling 12-14 hour days now I can balance school-girls-family-social life decently well (even though my sleep suffers on weekdays lol).</p>
<p>Math, don’t fall for the fallacy that a significant number of Duke students fall into, which is “Duke is an Ivy-level institution.” People will simply laugh at you if you pull the “I know everything because I’m a student at Duke.”</p>
<p>Anyways, call me naive, but I would be pretty ****ed if my work week averaged out at 60+ hours. Businessweek has a statistic for “average amount of hours work per week” in its article, “The Best Places to Launch a Career,” and the figure for Big 4 ranges from 45-50ish hours.</p>
<p>You can find a lot of jobs that are flat 40. Find something unionize or government. If you want a high paying job you will be working more than 40.</p>
<p>working at big 4 averages 40-50 hours?
Even during tax season? </p>
<p>@rcs how old are you?
I think you’re planning for the future way too far in advance… adaptability is a skill and i’m sure that will come in handy when you do have a kid on the way and what not.</p>
<p>Plus, how often are you gonan watch over your infant / newborn who’s going to be asleep half the time. When he’s at school how often are you gonna be with him at school? Think about it, there will be downtime for you to allocate to what you want to pursue. </p>
<p>My cousin once put it in good perspective:
I’m an investment banker and I make 6 figures because I work twice as long as your brother in law because he’s an engineer. If your brother in law worked twice as long, we’d be making the same. </p>
<p>My cousin enjoys his healthy 6 figure payouts and wall st. bonuses whereas my brother in law enjoys his 8-4/5 pm job and enough time to spend with my nephew. In the end its all up to you to decide where you want to dedicate your time and efforts.</p>
<p>rcs1113,“Some people have been telling me that if I pursue a degree in economics I’m going to spend the rest of my working career pulling 60 hour weeks. Anyone here have any input?”</p>
<p>You can get a PhD in economics and become a college professor. You will have a decent pay, which is 100K+, and certainly have a work-life balance.</p>
<p>College professors do not have the work-life balance that you assume (easily more than 60 hours per week), especially before tenure. Also, an academic appointment at a good school (one paying a decent wage) is extremely competitive in Economics. So there’s a very good chance (above 50%) that you’ll spend 5 years in a PhD program then graduate to a situation where you have to choose between a $60,000 / year lecturer position as Southwest Wyoming Technical State College or that same 60 hour / week consulting job you could have had out of undergrad.</p>
<p>One can be a contractor for the Feds and bill them at $85 to $120 per hour as a “S Corp”. The Feds try everything in their power to have you not work more than 40 hours a week. Depending on how the contract/program is written, you can work a 9/80 shift and have every other Friday off.</p>
<p>Now $177,000 to $250,000 per year might be sunflower seeds to some folks but still not bad for a measly 40 hours a week.</p>
<p>Thanks for the discussion everyone. And I’m only going to be a senior in high school, I just want to get a good feel as to what job life is like and I’m glad to know that there’s tons of opportunities in economics depending on if I want to work less that average or much more than average. But you all bring up good points, it’s not like i’m going to be with my kids at every point of there lives and certainly exceptions can be made.
I talked to my dad about it and when he was starting his architecture firm he was working an average of 16 to 18 hours a day and was still able to see the family at least a few hours during the day.
And a teaching position would not be for me, one thing I really feel strong about right now is that I don’t want to get stuck in academia. But like you all said, who knows what will happen in the years to come.</p>