My personal interpretation of economics is that economics studies the scarcity of the resources and achieve the the maximum social welfare - it is extremely abstract, yet economists are trained by a very complete and comprehensive set of rules.
An article by Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan on NYTimes recently caught my attention. In this Upshot article, Professor confessed his bittersweet feels when he knew some talented economics students started working in finance and investment banks, as he puts it "the young minds are too easy to be taken advantage of by the financial industry". However one would deem the feel, I definitely put it in a very compounded way.
I recently graduated from an Economics program, and started working at a technology company. Despite the good offer and the golden H1-B visa sponsorship, I will be trained to become a BI developer. The job is oriented for solving F-500 company data base problems and learn to manage data sets and data warehouse. I assumed I'd learn economics-relevant programming skills, but the company structural as a for-profit organization is bit annoyingly troublesome. Well, I guess I just gotta get on the ball and wait to see what will happen.
In this job year break between graduate school and the PhD program, my ideal type of job is to work in a research institute as a research assistant. I got a research data set test from several places as part of the application for RA. I did my best and enjoyed so much about the process, and I hoped that I could just get into one as I know the selection process is always tough. Some professor in the economics department (A very famous one in his field, not mentioning his name here) is not cooperative in helping me getting into one position. As someone who has no connections and no relative in the U.S., the international student like me who wants to survive and live in the U.S. is extremely difficult. It is not fair for the professors who could help some but refuse to lend a hand; but rather sit on their ass and think that sorry I couldn't help and such, which makes me feel kind of bad. But on the other side of the equation, it makes a lot of sense to see that actually if people believe in a good candidate, the good candidate's work should speak for itself. In consideration of this, it is probably fair to report.
