Question about Econ with Specialization in Data Sci Degree

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
21

Could be wrong but isn’t a good chunk of that 23% actually K-12 teaching jobs or similar? UChicago has a “Careers in Education” professional development option (just like its Trott Business Program or Careers in Med. or Law, etc.) and UChicago also touts its Metcalf and full-time positions with Teach for America, among others.

The UChicago 2017 Outcomes report includes about 16% in “Education”. Academia is probably more like 7%, although not sure what “academia” actually means. Probably not professional school, though.

22

Wow, that “Outcomes Report” is pitiful – a great deal of fluff, and practically nothing on actual outcomes. If you want to see what a good outcomes report looks like, look at what Penn puts out.

I agree that “Education” in the Industry infographic probably mean working in education, not going to graduate or professional school. Both of my kids had their first post-Chicago jobs in education: one with Teach For America, the other as an academic advisor at a small urban university.

I notice that neither UChicago itself nor NORC (a nonprofit social science research institute affiliated with the university) appears on the list of top employers. I wonder whether they really employ fewer recent graduates than Morningstar; if so, that would surprise me a lot.

23

@JHS - what jobs would newly-minted BA/BS grads get at NORC? Research or admin or other?

24

The “Outcomes Report” is a joke. There’s no substance in it, and the data actually looks faulty. The University itself - like almost any U. out there - has to be a big employer of its own graduates. Between the medical plant and labs, the various research centers and institutes, the admissions office, the various schools/departments, etc. etc. - there are tons of opportunities that Chicago grads most likely take.

Also, re @HydeSnark very good post upthread - I am puzzled by his contention that, if you’re a quant-focused Chicago grad, you’ll “have to do the hard work of convincing them [Silicon Valley employers] to take you seriously.”

At least when I was at Chicago in the dark, austere days of the mid-90s, if you were very good at math, and wanted to do math-y type jobs, you didn’t have to convince anyone of anything. You’d pretty much have a flood of job opportunities. As I recall, my math-y job-seeking friends had their pick of the litter for quant-based banking jobs, tech jobs, even b-school options (because they all did so darned well on the GMAT). Popular tech jobs included work at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, etc. Soon after I graduated, I heard of friends taking a risk and going to a then-unknown start-up in Seattle: Amazon. (Those friends, btw, are all doing very well for themselves now - a few actually retired years ago.)

I found Chicago grads had to do more “convincing” for anything that was more sales-y/people-facing (some types of banking jobs, consulting jobs), and or required high GPAs (e.g., law school or med admissions).

If you love math, do well at Chicago in math, and then want a job, I didn’t think finding an employer (be it in tech or otherwise), was difficult. Put another way, I thought Chicago’s “brand” for math-y areas was pretty much sterling - and not really any different than Harvard, Yale, etc. (and, really, close to MIT or CalTech).

@HydeSnark - is that different than your take?

25

@JBStillFlying – I don’t really know. NORC is something of a black box to me. I know or have met people who work there, but I have only a limited idea of what they actually do. That said, I know at least a couple of my kids’ friends got jobs there straight out of the college. I think NORC hires a lot more people with masters degrees, but my sense is that if a bachelors degree person has the right mix of skills (and recommendations), the BA is enough.

26

I don’t know if Eaton Vance meets your employment criteria. I have heard many times over that the financial world is stuck on the Ivies. I find it hard to believe they would pass on Chicago!

Decades ago I was looking at graduate schools after having worked for two years on a long term transportation planning program involving housing, business, residential/business real estate, air and noise pollution as well as social and environmental impact for The Federal Highway Administration. Interdisciplinary thinking was required at every turn. My background was in engineering, economics and mathematical modeling. The only University that really had a graduate program at that time (MS level) was U of Chicago. They seemed to have it all, but finances and family took me other directions. Reading your interests in Chicago really caught my attention.

Techniques have greatly improved interdisciplinary thinking and is almost in vogue. From what I am reading, rapid development in interdisciplinary thinking is still somewhat slowed by traditional disciplinary boundaries. Many employers are aware of the need, but don’t really know where to find it these new technologists in this rapidly evolving educational process.

An early pioneer in the development of tools to address this problem (system dynamics) set was developed by Prof. Jay Wright Forrester of MIT. This tradition has carried on and continues to develop at WPI.

For Economic Science see https://www.wpi.edu/academics/study/economic-science-bs

For Social Science and Policy Studies see https://www.wpi.edu/academics/departments/social-science-policy-studies/faculty-staff

The following three faculty are focused on system dynamics. Read about them at:
For Oleg V Pavlov see https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/opavlov
For Michael J. Radzicki see https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/mjradz
For Khalid Saeed see https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/saeed

Are there any results at the undergraduate level? They had only three BS graduates in 2017. All three were hired. Eaton Vance and M&T, two large banks and the third by a large Japanese engineering company as he had double majored in ME. The same modeling techniques can be applied in many disciplines. To protect confidentiality, salaries are never published in these graduate reports when the sample size is so small, but it was enough to keep them from looking for graduate school!

You may have to hunt around Chicago, Check out Sloan School at MIT.

27

Almost forgot, WPI also has a highly developed interdisciplinary Big Data program. See https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/rundenst and https://www.wpi.edu/academics/departments/data-science

28

@Cue7 It’s complicated.

High wages and easy-apply electronic application systems has lead to everyone and their mother trying to apply. It isn’t uncommon to apply to literally over a hundred jobs and hear back from a handful of them. Filtering the signal from the noise, for the employers, is very difficult - and they have resorted to various tricks, mostly involving using your academic pedigree and personal connections (cf: the infamous referral system), to decide who to interview.

Furthermore, many of these jobs don’t particularly care about your math skills, they are looking for people to produce with tight deadlines. Most software jobs these days are to build and deploy a system that isn’t going to be all that different from hundreds of other systems implemented by other companies. And then there’s front end development, which is practically electronic Legos. The ideal worker isn’t necessarily someone smart enough to re-invent the wheel, it’s someone that knows how to build a wheel and can do it quickly. The onus is on UChicago kids to show that they can do this with our school’s heavy emphasis on theory, and not so much on producing acceptable results quickly.

This is obviously not true in jobs that rely on complex algorithmic development and deployment of models. Plenty of UChicago kids do get jobs in this capacity at tech firms big enough to employ people to do this, in data science, and in quant finance for exactly the reasons you mention. But the vast majority of tech jobs are not like that: and the fact is this is a much more difficult path to Silicon Valley than a standard engineering job, and not a lot of people from UChicago (I only know a handful, personally), get these sorts of standard engineering jobs. Heck, software companies in Chicago that aren’t large enough to do any complex R&D are much more likely to send their recruiters to Northwestern and UIUC than UChicago, and we’re right here.

I wasn’t saying that UChicago kids aren’t employable, or that people can’t find jobs in Silicon Valley (in fact, I said the opposite!) - and it’s still largely true that people with strong math backgrounds are not lacking jobs. But if your literal only goal is to get a cushy job in Silicon Valley you’re better off going to a school that excels on preparing people for engineering jobs and has a reputation of churning out legions of productive software engineers. The path to Silicon Valley here requires a lot more effort and mathematical aptitude, and our name recognition in Silicon Valley is very narrow.

29

@HydeSnark there are very few cushy jobs for entry level positions, especially in Silicon Valley. Some may be high paying (>$150K) but the vast majority are not. My DD just left SV after a couple of years (due to high COL/high density living) and she was highly recruited as a female chemical engineer from a T20 program. Most just romanticize SV jobs while ignoring better opportunities elsewhere.

30

Er…I guess. Yeah, if you want a house you’re not going to afford it on an entry level engineer salary in most tech hubs, but software engineer jobs in silicon valley have the highest entry level pay in the country, even adjusting for cost of living (5-10% higher than New York or Seattle). Plenty of new grads don’t mind or actively want to live in an apartment.

Not to mention that the biggest and most famous companies are paying 10-15% better than everyone else in the area across all software positions to attract talent (not only in the most technically difficult jobs) despite the cost of living, plus can offer very lucrative stock options. That’s what most people are thinking of when they are trying to find a cushy silicon valley job.

31

@HydeSnark - is a lot of Chicago’s “narrow” rep in silicon valley a function of not having an engineering school?

Also, i think we can safely say, if you see college purely as a pathway to getting ANY lucrative first job (in any industry, let alone tech), you’re better off going to a peer school that offers more in the way of direct preparation than chicago, no?

As a related aside, while we sometimes glibly say a student should go to a peer instead of chicago, in reality, i suspect that’s actually an option for fewer and fewer students. The days where a really good applicant could decide between chicago and Columbia and duke are long gone. Nowadays, you get one bite of the apple (in the early round), and even then, hooks probably carry the day.

If you apply early to chicago and get in, you probably couldn’t have gotten into Stanford, or didn’t have the requisite hooks at Columbia duke etc. So, a more realistic question for @HydeSnark and others to answer isn’t if the OP is better off going to Stanford than chicago for a cushy silicon valley job. Rather, it’s if the OP is better going to Wash U or Emory over Chicago for that silicon valley job. That question, i think, is harder to answer.

(Put another way, i think the universe of cross admits between chicago and Stanford or even chicago and duke or chicago and brown is very, very small.)

32

Dude, you only need to tag me once.

And yes, I do think it’s worth it to go to a school with historical strengths in engineering over UChicago if that’s what you want to do, even if it’s not a “peer school”. It’s not just Stanford, you’d be better positioned for most jobs in Silicon Valley at most schools with well regarded engineering departments, even if the school itself isn’t “elite.”

Also it’s not an unreasonable thing to weight the pros and cons between two schools, even if you probably won’t get into both, because one of the reasons you probably won’t get into multiple “elite” schools is that your chances of getting in diminishes dramatically if you don’t apply early. Since you can only apply early to one (with a few exceptions), applicants are forced to consider their pros and cons directly against each other. I always assume threads like this are by students considering applying ED to UChicago instead of applying early elsewhere, and I try to answer to give them my opinion on where they should be playing their cards.

33

I don’t wanna sound like a snob here, but I refuse to pay full price unless it’s HYPSM + Wharton (and maybe Columbia or UChicago) given the quality of my state’s flaghip public unis.

Not gonna disclose my family’s finances here, but I highly doubt we will get any financial aid.

I just like UChicago since I really like the school’s no nonsense approach to academics and its location in a big city. I’m the type of kid who hated the one idiot in class who held everybody up.

34

@HydeSnark yes you are correct, but there is hope. My cousin who graduated from Dartmouth in English eventually became a senior VP at Oracle.

35

@ResidentEvilPS bad news: half the time at UChicago that kid will be you. And that’s not a bad thing! You learn best when you aren’t the smartest person in the class.

I gotta say, of all the words I’ve used or head anyone else use to describe UChicago “no nonsense” isn’t one them. You seem to be using it in the sense of like, idk, some kind of bootcamp where you listen to your instructor and do what you’re told. That isn’t what UChicago is like at all. It’s hard and intense, but it’s not really about marching you through the motions. It’s not the kind of place that doesn’t allow for questioning and taking the time to really understand things. If anything, classes here encourage that.

36

@HydeSnark now that was funny and appropriate…

37

@HydeSnark - sorry i didn’t mean to bother you re the multiple tags.

Also, yes, it’s good to weigh the pros and cons of two schools, even if you probably won’t get into both. I wonder to an extent, though, whether beyond pros and cons, savvy applicants apply early to whatever top school they have hooks with… or perhaps apply early to chicago knowing that hooks matter the least there…

(And back to OP’s question, if you enjoy the Chicago approach and major in econ with data sci, you will most likely have good job prospects.)

38

I interpret “no nonsense” literally. There’s a lot of silly stuff going on in college - including silly courses and majors. UChicago is still one place where a lot of that is simply not allowed to seep in.

39

If I remember right, most NORC jobs are in some other Midwest state like Indiana or Kansas. The thinktanky stuff that needs acedemics and PhDs are at UChicago but the execution/operation is somewhere else.

Surprisingly there are a lot of Tech-Education startups in Chicago, many were started by UChicago grads.

40

Re the “no nonsense” post - maybe this has changed, but i remember putting up with a lot of nonsense in my classes - especially the core classes.

Does “that guy” (or girl) not exist any more at chicago? As i recall, that guy was the person who wouldn’t stop opining about something, or thought they were the smartest person in the room, and wouldn’t know when to stop talking, in class. Often this person would spout nonsense or try and appear knowledgeable about a certain topic, and not realize that the professor or other students were best positioned to adress the topic.

I think that probably still happens at a place like chicago, where the culture is based on being engaged (sometimes on being or appearing smart) and not checking out of one’s studies.

At the time, it was often annoying in class. I still remember (and roll my eyes at it) today!