Sorry, I don’t know many graduate students, unfortunately.
Of the ones I know - the previously mentioned German guy hasn’t got his degree yet, he’s looking into maybe doing some teaching afterwards, which won’t be very well paid. A friend of mine who has a master’s in physics is unemployed in London, last I heard. His girlfriend with a doctorate in chemistry works with nuclear power plant safety at fairly near minimum wage, IIRC. A few people I know are trying to get into the Foreign Office, but don’t expect to succeed.
Basically, most graduate students I know are trying to get jobs as civil servants, continue studying until a good job offer comes their way, or are pretty damn worried about their job prospects once they get their degree. I can’t think of anyone I know who expects (or even seriously hopes) to make $100K right after they graduate.
Well at least a few have applied to consultancies, such as BCG and McKinsey. No idea how many others were successful. Most others aren’t pursuing the big money route, but instead are looking at NGOs, government/Foreign Service positions, journalism, or continuing academic careers. Nearly all the applicants for these McKinsey posts are newly-minted MBAs, so they are keen to pick up some very sharp non-business types (like International Relations majors) to lend a broader perspective to their brain trust.
missbunny, yeah, times have been tough all over. McKinsey had to ask the Partners all around the world to return money so they could survive. They have 25 more offices that they opened in the boom, and probably will shut a few due to the gloom.
Sorry, the last I read she was still contemplating the London office, I didn’t read the link here, I just assumed it was the same one. My bad.
I think we are on the same page about her though. Can you think of the average analyst taking any shit from Chelsea? I think she is going to have a harder time than most because people will assume she’s there because of her name, not her ability.
And for those who don’t know much about McKinsey or what a newbie will do…it’s a bitch. My brother-in-law worked 80+ hours a week for over a year. MS Access training in Amsterdam on Monday, Dept. Meeting with the client in Dresden on Tuesday, gathering of info from them during the afternoon and processing it until 2am, Wednesday a quick flight and 14 hours in the Prague office, Thursday back at the client’s working with a team until midnight, Friday the same, Saturday in the Prague office and Sunday working at home for a few hours. It’s a bitch.
They don’t only hire Grads, they hire people with less schooling and then will put them through Kellogg or Harvard. McKinsey picks up the tab and you promise to continue working with them for 2 years afterward or else you (or your next employer) has to pay them back. These fresh out of college types make $35k a year to start, then quickly race up in salary after 3 months. After they get their MBA, they make what Chelsea is.
And if you think that is exorbitant, wait til you here what Partners make! missbunny will probably know better, but the head partner here in Prague is making over $1m a year.
I know a lawyer, my age, who just got a SWEET associate’s job at the firm in DC where my mom was a legal secretary. Straight out of law school. Starting salary for her is something like $120,000.
Yeah, I feel like a total underachiever next to her. Hell, I’m nearly 27 and still in school!
RickJay, you must not understand how McKinsey works. First of all, it’s not like she’s going into some big company on her own, alone, with no support from anyone else at McKinsey. She will be part of a team that consists of numerous people, including at least 1-2 Directors or partners, 1-2 senior managers (5-7 years McK experience, besides whatever other experience and education they have), 2-3 mid-level managers (3-4 years experience) and several other consultants with 0-2 years experience, and a couple of business analysts. Plus the vast network of McKinsey practice and industry knowledge, renowned the world over (look it up if you don’t believe me), plus the vast network of alumni they can call on at any time for advice (practically every Fortune 500 company has a CEO or president who used to work at McKinsey, not to mention their direct access to any number of senators, Congress, Cabinet members, foreign heads-of-state, industry giants, etc.). The majority of those people have an MBA from a top school, plus work experience outside McK, plus the experience of working on many dozens of studies. Do you honestly think Chelsea Clinton, or any other brand-new consultant, is sent alone, with no training whatsoever, into a company to spout off to a CEO how he shoud change things? Do you think McKinsey could have lasted for 75 years as the top management consulting company in the world if their formula didn’t work? No, important clients DON’T fire McKinsey for sending 23-year-old consultants in. Actually, they pay approximately $250,000 or more per month to get that person’s expertise, along with the rest of the team’s. Companies hire firms like McKinsey not because they don’t have very smart and business-wise people working for themselves, but because it’s often hard to mark the hard decisions and to see the hard facts about your own company when you have an emotional and financial vested interest in it. It’s a lot easier for an outside company to make the business decision to dissolve a division when they don’t have a personal relationship with employees who are going to lose their jobs. Nobody, least of all McKinsey, believes that they are somehow smarter than all those CEOs they are advising. They merely have the distance to make decisions that can be very difficult for a CEO to make on his own.
Tomcat, just to clarify, they only pay for a very small percentage of people to get their MBA. What happens is someone is hired with a BA/BS is hired as a business analyst (the lowest person on the totem pole), they work for McK for 2-3 years, and if they are REALLY good, they are made an offer to get their MBA in return for working for McK for several years afterward. Perhaps 5% of all analysts are made this offer. In my office, out of maybe 100 analysts, 3 were asked to return after grad school. And they do make a bit more to start, in the U.S. anyway - it was $45K when I left several years ago.
And you are right, she’s going to earn every single cent of that $100K. If anyone thinks it’s fun to work until 10 or 11 every night (I used to think 9:00 PM - that’s only a 12-hour-day after all! - was an “early night”), many nights until 6:00 AM and be back at work by 10 or so, to do so much traveling that you forget what country you are in, to work in tiny little offices with no ventilation with 4 or 5 other people for months on end, eating whatever you can grab in 10 minutes, to wake up in a sweat every night because you are dreaming of some fuck-up you might have caused at the client site, to not see your family or boyfriend or children for weeks at a time, and all the while to constantly be monitored to make sure you a good little revenue producer, I applaud you. If she doesn’t get asked to leave after a year or two (which often happens), she will be so burned out that she’ll probably check into a hospital.
Getting hired before graduation is very common in some professions. I bet Chelsea find a job before graduation and you not finding a job has to do more with your professions then your last names.
80% of the people who completed the graduate program with me had jobs before graduation. Of a class of 63 people 21 had jobs six months before graduation.
I only remember these stats because the school is so proud of them. They send out the stats for the new graduating class ever year in the newsletter. There was a real push to find everyone a job who wanted one before graduation.
Thanks missbunny! I think the % is higher here for the grad school thing, my brother-in-law did it and so did most of his workmates. BUT, that could be explained by the fact that they have a shortage of Czech speakers, so they might have bumped these guys up just to keep them. Well, except for my brother-in-law, he’s on the fast track, they sent him to Kellogg after 14 months. He started a business here with his dad when he was 16 and worked at it full-time until he graduated college, so he had 8 years experience by the time he walked into McKinsey. I bet he is the exception, not the rule. I didn’t know that the % of analysts going to university was so low elsewhere…And the salary is a bit lower here to start…Sheez! 1,350,000 Czech Koruna a year ($45k)!!! You’d have a hard time spending that! You can buy lunch for 60 Koruna!
I just think it’s kinda heinous that she can get payed $100K/year to do … what does she do again? Sounds like she’s a highly paid gopher for the time being. Meanwhile hardworking engineers like myself make the world go 'round yet we get a pittance in comparison. Just for referance, I have a master’s and when I started working just 3 years ago I started out at 40K! Less than half Ms. Clinton's starting salary! A typical engineer can work 10 years or more making the world a better place to live before they see the kind of this girl is making right out of college being a gopher and info gatherer. :mad: Don’t even get me started on the sports world and the disparities there. Bah!
Um, doesn’t this exactly match what I said … that she’ll start as a taskworker for other consultants? Senior consultants? No client will be listening to Ms. Clinton’s opinions anytime soon, although according to your first post, “Fortune 100 companies” pay big bucks for 23-year-olds out of college to blab at them. However, you now appear to be admitting that’s not the case - she’ll be doing researching and information gathering for the big boys and girls.
Yes, they do pay big bucks for 23-year-olds to consult to them as part of a team. I never said she would “blab” at them - which implies that I agree she has mostly worthless things to share; it is incorrect and changes entirely the tone of my statements. No, I am not admitting that all she’ll be doing is research and information-gathering. If she were an analyst, yes, but she’s not. McKinsey has plenty of people to do research and they aren’t stupid enough to pay someone $100K a year just to gather information. That’s what R&I and analysts and assistants are for.
Yes, the client will be listening to at least part of what she has to say. No, she probably won’t be talking to the CEO directly since CEOs rarely have time to engage in the day-to-day machinations of a typical McKinsey study. But at some point the team will present their findings to the CEO or some similar senior person, and she will likely be in the room and contribute some thoughts. If she does at some point talk to the CEO directly, she will be presenting McKinsey’s strategy and acumen - not her own. That is what you don’t seem to understand.
All’s I can say is since I worked for them for 4 long years and you didn’t, I think I might have just a tiny bit more understanding of the process than you do. You may have been a consultant but it doesn’t appear you worked for McKinsey.