<p>Not science.</p>
<p>Nursing has a high starting salary and jobs are plentiful. Hospitals will pay for further specialized schooling.</p>
<p>Dental hygienists. Only needs an associate degree and average salary is $70,000.</p>
<p>Police Officer. Bay area average starting salary is $60,000 and more with overtime. Perks are great. Lifetime medical benefits and pension 95% of your highest salary after 25 years.</p>
<p>I second nursing! A ton of room for job growth, and there is a huge shortage so you can start out at fairly specialized jobs (ICU, NICU, Emergency, Cancer care) depending on the hospital.</p>
<p>Heart surgeon is definitely not a good field these days since the interventional cardiologists are doing amazing things with stents,angioplasty,etc. The development of better heart drugs has also changed pts to medical management of their heart disease away from surgical management. Not to mention that it takes at least 7 years to complete a general surgery residency after 4 yrs of college, 4 yrs of medical school and 2-4 years of cardiothoracic surgery fellowship. If you do the math, you are 35-38 yrs old before you are done with school. Many private practice heart surgeons are still doing general surgery cases to pay their overhead and put a roof over their head.
Go into interventional radiology or cardiology instead!</p>
<p>For some good paying options, check out this article</p>
<p>Big</a> Bucks Without Big Debt</p>
<p>As for Wall Street, I don't pretend to have all the answers on how to correct the awful business practices that developed there over the past decade. But it's clear that the system that Wall Street built for itself was self-perpetuating, lacked reflection and outside perspective, was hardly self-policing, and functioned almost entirely on greed. </p>
<p>To a lot folks (including me), it appeared that many on Wall Street saw themselves as more enlightened than the rest of us, perhaps partly because they attended these elite colleges, and were deserving of such huge pay premiums vs the rest of the USA because they worked longer hours and their work was, in their opinion, more important than other industries. And yet when things began to unravel, they were completely clueless on how to address the problems. Instead, the response was to hell with the American investor, "every firm for itself," and a full-court press for a government bailout from their buddy HP and the other politicos that they had bought and paid for because…because… because… well, Wall Street is just so much more important than the tech industry or the energy industry or….</p>
<p>While it is always easy to look back and say should-have, could-have, the business models of Wall Street with their high leverage levels were clearly far too risky. But it's not like there wasn't plenty of advance warning, most prominently the relatively recent LTCM near-disaster, to highlight this. Yet, the intellectual conceit of those running the various divisions of the Wall Street firms, reinforced by their affiliations with the gold-plated and "cerebrally superior" ABC Elite Colleges, led them to believe their own press and pay packages, ignore the lessons of LTCM and continue with their flawed business models and ridiculously greedy pay practices. To further protect Wall Street, they used their PAC donations to buy off Washington so that pesky regulators wouldn't monitor or ask tough questions about silly things like leverage ratios. And so 30-1 leverage ratios became commonplace and when the music stopped, the scramble for chairs began with true fear of a worldwide financial collapse as its price. Through their greed and arrogance, Wall Street put the private savings of most of the USA and the world at risk. </p>
<p>IMO, Wall Street is badly in need of some new intellectual blood from outside the in-bred world of the Northeast and its academic acolytes in the elite college network. There are plenty of smart folks around America who could help Wall Street rebuild and I would guess that they would deliver a more fundamentally sound business judgment in running these businesses. While they may not have the prestige of the Ivy world, colleges like Indiana U, Villanova, Wake Forest, Texas A&M, BYU, U Richmond, U Wisconsin, SMU, U Washington, Notre Dame, etc. consistently graduate talent that is equal to the Ivies, but without much of the attendant entitlement baggage. An interesting question now is whether Wall Street will learn and ultimately reconstitute its workforce with a more grounded, geographically-diverse group or will Wall Street go back to the same well again and rebuild a world of insulated, entitled thinking that is often disconnected from what is happening in the greater business world of the USA.</p>
<p>lol well there's always what I'm doing - commissioning as an officer in the US Army (or, for others, Navy / Coast Guard / Marine Corps / Air Force) - $3,000/mo and change and an allowance for housing, uniforms, and food.</p>
<p>But most people aren't interested in military careers so, some others (requiring only a Bachelor's degree) are:</p>
<p>Engineers - Computer, Civil, Marine, and Mechanical - provided they have a little experience (ie, internships / co-ops)
Nurses (RNs) - you may be working crazy shifts though
Air Traffic Controllers - again some experience is preferred and there's a 12-week training session before you can start at the FTC, but these guys start out at roughly $70k/year. It's crazy.</p>
<p>As far as becoming a police officer goes, keep in mind that there's a LOT of competition for those jobs, and a lot of ex-military flooding them, so you may be waiting to head to the Police Academy for 4 to 6 months, sometimes more.</p>
<p>pa (physician assistant) i think they make around 70,000
and its what i will be in 4 years!!!!!</p>
<p>Anything engineering. Considering we have 1.5 million engineers in the U.S. and over 900,000 of those will be retiring in the next 10 years, the demand will be insane. 65 percent of the American engineering force is over the age of 45. Major in engineering. Keep the American engineer from being an extinct species.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Tens of thousands of financial analysts have lost their jobs. Those still lucky to have a job won't see a bonus for a long time.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>By Christine Harper
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. invited 94
employees to become partners, a designation that gives them a
bigger share of the firm's bonuses, which are likely to drop this
year amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The number is down from 2006, when New York-based Goldman
elected 115 new people to the partnership pool. Partners are
named every two years. The appointments take effect at the end of
the firm's fiscal year next month. The list was published in an
internal memo and the contents confirmed by Andrea Rachman, a
company spokeswoman.
The title is a vestige of Goldman's days as Wall Street's
last remaining partnership, before the firm went public in 1999
after 130 years of private ownership. Rewards are likely to fall
this year after Goldman transformed itself into a bank holding
company, raised more than $10 billion in new equity from private
investors and took $10 billion from the U.S. government. The
company's shares have fallen 56 percent this year.
<code>Is the prospect of being a Goldman partner as bright as it
used to be? The answer is definitely no,'' said Henry Higdon,
managing partner of Higdon Partners LLC, a New York-based search
firm specializing in financial services.</code>The days are gone when
these people were earning over $20 million.''
Partners share in a special bonus at the end of every year.
Goldman's profit through the first nine months of its fiscal year
was $4.44 billion, down 47 percent from last year's record. The
company has set aside $11.4 billion for compensation and benefits
this year, down 32 percent from the same time last year.
New partners this year include Jan Hatzius, Goldman's chief
U.S. economist, and L. Brooks Entwistle, who runs the company's
banking operations in India.</p>
<p>I have read similar articles about Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch too. Bonuses down 32% is a lot different than no one will see a bonus for a long time. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Wall Street is turning into a ghost town. Restaurants and other businesses that catered to the financial industry are closing in droves.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Where do you work? I have seen little evidence of this.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Whatever reemerges from the ashes will be a very different industry. Glass-Steagall or similar regulation will certainly be reinstated. This will mean much less room for speculation and hence less need for highly paid traders and financial analysts of all sorts. Banking will change for ever.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>People flocked to investment banks and they were highly profitable before the repeal of Glass-Steagall too. There will certainly be changes, but to imply that Wall Street is a ghost town or that successful careers cannot be launched there seems overstated and inaccurate to me.</p>
<p>Please refrain from this type of hyperbole. People come here to be informed; not misinformed. We already have the media to over-dramatize everything.</p>
<p>For people who can handle it, engineering is the probably the best choice. The level of employment in finance is going to reduced while the amount of excess talent is increasing due to layoffs. A perfect recipe for reduced wages. Engineering on the other hand is hitting a demographic wall and there will need to be some increase in pay. Petroleum Engineering was supremely adversely affected due to the nature of the industry in the late 80's & early 90's. The people coming in now are benefitting from that. Even with the current drop in oil, I don't think massive layoffs will be happening at any of the majors.</p>
<p>Pharmacist, Pharm- Doc to be exact it takes traditional 6 years but can be accelarated as a 5-year course. Starting right out of school with license is about $120K on California.</p>
<p>Psychiatry if you count med school as college</p>
<p>Just get drafted to the NHL</p>
<p>I read that Fidelity is planning on 4,000 layoffs in the next five months. They're one of the largest employers (if not the larges) in our state and in my town. That said, my wife has a friend that has done very well financially the last 20 years in banking in Asia and she doesn't have a degree. I believe that she is going for a masters degree now (I think without a bachelors). She owns several producing properties now and could retire if she wanted to (she's around 50).</p>
<p>The number of CS majors enrolling went into the toilet after the tech crash. It's still hard to find good grads and I keep seeing companies looking for software engineers in emails.</p>
<p>But do what you like doing. It's no fun working in something you don't like for 30 years. Even if the money is good.</p>
<p>Wall Street has been hit hard many times since World War II. It doesn't die. It never will. It simply evolves. Why? Because the people who make it big on Wall Street are driven, gutsy, intelligent people. They aren't about to just lay down and die because the future looks bleak or Nancy Pelosi thinks their cars are too nice. They have constantly adapted to new regulations and marked conditions. Do you really think this is the first time Wall Street has taken a hit in the past few decades? Remember that all this alleged "excess" and "greed" transpired less than a decade after the massive NASDAQ crash.</p>
<p>The upper echelons of Wall Street are dominated by people who went to good but lesser known colleges, people who started with nothing and laid it all on the line to get where they have gotten. The HYP graduates often times work for people who graduated from state schools, etc. making salaries much higher than the national average but less than their boss from a "lesser" college (see post above mine, to make it the point real). </p>
<p>The originator of the now infamous mortgage backed security, for example, didn't even go to college. He worked his way up from the mailroom all the way to the penthouse with nothing but his brain and his ball$. While the days of high school graduates making it that big are gone, that same spirit's still around. That's what Wall Street runs on. Ambition. Drive. Determination. Before you criticize Wall Street's "greed", remember that many of these "corporate fatcats" came from surprisingly humble origins and subject themselves to levels of stress and hours of work that would send most people to neurosis and dysfunctionality. </p>
<p>There's a reason so many bright minds have flocked to Wall Street. If they are in the right place at the right time, they could make more money in a year than they could in decades if they practiced engineering like their major said they would (nothing personal against engineers, BTW, it's just a good example). Yes, some people took the speculation too far and new regulations should be enacted. But ambition and the American Dream will never die, and neither will Wall Street, IMO.</p>
<p>HAHA psychiatry doesn't count. med school is NOT college, you need 4 years undergrad, 4 years medical school, then a 4 year residency in psychiatry. Psychiatry is also one of the lower paying specialties in medicine.</p>
<p>many profitable careers out of college are in health care. nursing, respiratory therapy, physician assistant (a masters is becoming the norm to become a PA but there are still some BS programs and most states allow BS degree PAs to practice) are all great options. Obviously you need to be able to handle rigorous science courses (esp. PA school, which is modeled after med school as PAs diagnose, treat, prescribe, etc.), and deal with not-always-nice patients, but if you're interested in health care, and don't want to spend many years in school (and if you're specifically interested in the nursing approach or the specialization that is respiratory care), these options all are great, and right out of undergrad.</p>
<p>"Wall Street has been hit hard many times since World War II"</p>
<p>Interesting time-frame that you picked there.</p>
<p>Much of the rest of the world lost their productive capacity but spent a lot of time building it back up so there are a lot of other countries that have some big advantages compared to the US where we were once dominant. So we've resorted to financial engineering to prolong our prosperity, even with a hollowed out manufacturing base.</p>
<p>Things do keep working. Until they don't.</p>
<p>There are those that strike it rich in engineering too. At one point, ten percent of Microsoft employees were millionaires and that was back when a million was a lot. Perhaps there is a bigger percentage of Google millionaires too. Some people were just in the right place at the right time.</p>
<p>Some people also like the idea of providing a quantifiable value for their compensation. Of course there are many that just want the money and don't care how it is obtained.</p>
<p>Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sach, has a networth less than $1 billion. While the Google founders have about 30/40 billions and they are still young yet. So I guess the old cliche, do what you love and you will be very rewarded.</p>
<p>All of the engineering programs that I've seen have an ethics requirement where they tell you that your responsibilities are to your shareholders and society. You have to worry about civil and criminal penalties for negligence.</p>
<p>Anyone here think that Dick Fuld took care of his responsibilities to shareholders and society after getting paid whopping amounts of money? Do IBankers have to take any classes in ethics?</p>
<p>I'm going through course lectures in engineering ethics from MIT just for fun. I've been in a few of those sticky situations a few times long ago where there was a lot of pressure to not do the right thing.</p>
<p>Job prospects in the hedge fund industry according to George Soros:</p>
<p>Soros</a> Say Two-Thirds Of Hedge Funds Will Sink | FINalternatives</p>
<p>And some thoughts in the article below about investment banking bonuses. IMO, given the damage that Wall Street has done to the financial security of many Americans and given the fact that Americans are footing the bill for the Wall Street bailout, it would seem appropriate that Wall Street share in the pain and sacrifice and forego bonuses entirely in 2008. </p>
<p>Congress</a> Wants Details On Bailout Firms' Bonus Plans: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance</p>