patrick.net

@SFGuy,
Thanks for clarifying. Re-stated: "The FBs try to flip many POS's."

SFGuy,

Okay, point taken. I will try to avoid ordering fictitious intelligent dog-poop colored creatures in the future.

Well, cannibalism is technically illegal...and in bad taste.

BA company importing consumer products from Asia. ... I’d bet they relocate to Charleston SC - good port, low wages, interesting city, inexpensive housing compared to BA.

Uh, they must be flying the goods in by plane, then? If it's water-based shipping, then I would suspect some Oregon port as a more likely target.

Anyway dryfly, I guess our anecdotes are different. My BA perceptions are admittedly skewed because I know only Californians from my own firm and from our customers. All are doing hardware engineering; most are Fortune 500's. I would point out again that 60-65K in the continental U.S. is equivalent to 70-80K in Silicon Valley, just based on cost of living.

It is actually difficult for salaries to drop at large, existing firms. Once they gain some experience, the new hires start comparing themselves to their peers, and realize that they are making a lot less for comparable work. If you were to tell them that they would never catch up, based solely on their hiring date, you would run the risk of losing young talent. That is particularly dangerous for any firm.

Randy, after reading the description of Financial Engineering, I conclude that it is option #1 on my list. A big money major targeted towards CFO and other elite financial positions.

People, please…. education is key. These are real life figures. But, I don’t know.. i’m just a realtor

Hey Confused,

Aren't you just pining away, hoping for one of these MBA grads to knock on your door and hire you as a RE agent? Maybe if you try harder to troll around this and other boards, our vast influence on the impending real estate crash will end, and you will get your customers.

Good luck, and go and enjoy the weather, and/or watch some football!

"At current housing costs, 60-65K in the continental US is more like 150K in SV!!"

Depends on whether you're renting or buying at current prices. BA rent is relatively high but quite bearable. Buying - I'd say it's even worse than that...$250K in the continental US (not touching salty water) will buy as much or more than $1M in the BA.

Brand,

MFE is not really targeted at CFO or other operational finance type of positions. Those are really more fed from accounting professions with the "Big 8/6/5/4" being the historical feeders. Those folks get MBAs not MFEs.

MFEs are more your uber quant types who end up at hedge funds, investment firms, and certain large transnational corporations.

dryfly,

I'm too ignorant to comment on anything else you've said, but I don't think Bio Med Engineering would be considered engineering by most engineers. That field sounds suspiciously similar to bio chem to my non-engineering ears.

dryfly,
Cornell, and maybe Columbia are the only Ivies that offer anything close to a nationally-ranked engineering program. Am I warm?

dryfly,

Your numbers must be for MBAs. MBAs do MUCH better but not many 22y/o coming out have MBAs - yes/no?

You are correct. The average age is still around 28 for full-time top-ranked MBA grads. It is falling, which is cause for some recent concern amongst those who worry about such things.

The usual suspect is the BS/BA grad who went straight into a tracked ladder, like the investment banks, many large corps with management training programs, or public accounting. A much smaller number of FT MBAs are engineers, comp sci, etc. who go for management credentials ... they usually are older and go into part-time programs.

The numbers I posted were for *global* rankings of *full-time* programs. There is a separate report done for executive programs. EMBAs tend to be young 30s and have *much* higher average salaries due to the fact they've been in the work force for many years already. Also, top EMBA programs are over $100K in tuition, so few low-earners go into these programs. Last time I looked a lot of the EMBA salaries for the top 5 schools were over $200K. My personal theory about the reason EMBA salaries don't increase as much as FT-MBA salaries is that many EMBA grads switch functional roles, industries, or both. They usually incur at least a temporary salary setback doing that. EMBAs are also popular for unique-situation folks who want the degree to build a rolodex and have creds to re-enter the workforce after a hiatus. Career women who take time out after having children, people who just take personal sabbaticals, successful entrepreneur types who have patchwork career histories but nonetheless made respectable money.

What sort of realtor trolls on online blogs Saturdays and Sundays? Even a bad one should be hitting open houses to hunt for work.

I'm beginning to think CR is lower than a realtor...maybe he or she is a realtor's assistant.

What sort of realtor trolls on online blogs Saturdays and Sundays? Even a bad one should be hitting open houses to hunt for work.

I’m beginning to think CR is lower than a realtor…maybe he or she is a realtor’s assistant.

Actually, he could just be a *really* bad realtor without any real clients.

ConfusedRenter Says:

"...Time to enjoy the sun guys!"
_____

Have fun!

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Ta, ta!

Allah
Do make sure you cook the scraped up roadkill before you eat it.

was this an attempt to offend me?

Huh?

SFWoman2

If you include more than 1 link, the post automatically gets sent to the moderation queue. Most spam-bots are posts with multiple links.

The moderation queue is overloaded, and we admins can't really read through it anymore. Everytime I look there are over 500 posts in there, 99.9% spam.

RPI is "low level" ivy?

That's stretching it quite a bit, isn't it? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a good school in its field, but it's a looooong way from MIT/CalTech. I originally had guessed that your daughter went to UVA or GeorgiaTech, then UPenn or Cornell, but RPI didn't really enter my mind.

Before I get accused of overwhelming snobbishness, I do want to emphasize that of my friends from HS, the ones who went to University of Maryland undergrad did about as well as the ones who went to MIT/real Ivies - maybe better, they seem to be better adjusted as a group.

it’s a simple question. This forum sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between a simple joke and an attempt to rudely offend. So when in doubt, I ask. If you meant to offend, I wouldn’t want my low IQ to get in the way of knowing it.

Of course I wasn't trying to offend you. I don't even know anything about you, that should have been a clue. I guess not everybody appreciates my jokes.

There's nothing wrong with eating fresh roadkill, provided that some precaution is taken. In fact, eating roadkill is quite commendable; doing so clears up the road, gets rid of a possible disease vector, conserve food resources and adds extra interest to one's diet.

I don't want to hear anyone here badmouth scavengers or their vital role in natural ecology. :)

...vital role in natural ecology.

I tend to believe the 'chef de cuisine' at our college cafeteria studied at the Lagos Culinary institute. Just shows the utility of the expression 'casserole'.

I’m sorry. I was not trying to be abrasive, just trying to be clear. It’s not your fault I didn’t get the joke. It’s the nature of the forum.

No problem here.

I'm uncertain of Patrick.net etiquette regarding proposing topics, but am interested to know if any of the posters here are considering building a home as opposed to purchasing an existing one and remodelling.

Since builders are caught up in the forces we're discussing here, is there an ideal point in the proceedings when the circumstances are better or worse for pursuing new construction of an architect-designed home?

ConfusedRenter Says:

> I don’t know a single person over 28 years old
> making under $200,000. Most make around $300-350K.

First we get homes in the Marina selling for $250K over list, then we have condos going up in value by almost 20%, now this...

Why has CR not been banned from the BLOG?

dryfly,

Thanks for answering my questions. That sounds like an interesting specialty. I am a "she" though that's a shrewd guess. "astrid" is the name of a defunct boy band. I'm also a pretty useless liberal arts grad, so my knowledge of such things tend to be gossip at drunken Christmas parties and such.

MIT and CalTech are fundamentally different schools. I'd agree that that MIT probably has a weaker average student - those biology majors who went because they got in, but from what I hear, I'd hardly call MIT's curriculum a cakewalk and the top students there are plenty sharp.

You originally didn't mention your daughter's field, you just said east coast engineering school. Based on what I know, Georgia Tech and UVA have good engineering departments and excellent overall reputations. Once again, I apologize for sounding so snobby, but a heck of a lot more people know Georgia Tech and UVA than RPI.

I'll put up a thread re building from scratch, give me 10 minutes.

dryfly,

Whatever RPI alumni and administration wish for, RPI's national reputation is a heck of a long way from "lowly" MIT, Georgia Tech and UVA. And the "new Ivy" media hype completely passed my radar.

That is all. New topic is up.

astrid Says:

"Before I get accused of overwhelming snobbishness, I do want to emphasize that of my friends from HS, the ones who went to University of Maryland undergrad did about as well as the ones who went to MIT/real Ivies - maybe better, they seem to be better adjusted as a group."
_____

Good point. I know in business, that if you look at a lot of CEO's resumes, they've got no more than a State school BA or BS degree. Harvard, Stanford and Columbia aren't prerequisites for success in business, much less an MBA.

Probably many, if not most, entrepreneurs don't even have a college degree.

Here's a link to a cool/trippy Biosphere tune. It really gets going after about three and a half minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIwqbktfO_k

Enjoy!

CEOs' or CEO's?

I vote to ban CR. He or she is getting abusive of individual bloggers here.

Good point. I know in business, that if you look at a lot of CEO’s resumes, they’ve got no more than a State school BA or BS degree. Harvard, Stanford and Columbia aren’t prerequisites for success in business, much less an MBA.

Probably many, if not most, entrepreneurs don’t even have a college degree.

I've noticed that too. A lot of high-flying member of boards etc have a single B.Com. or B.Ec. type degree, seemed to be just a stepping stone to fill three years, they didn't go on to get Masters and PhDs etc... As for the Packer and Murdoch kiddies, I don't think they've ever set foot inside a university -- except to buy one...

Is Bio Med Engineering more like bionic arms and replacement heart valves and hips and screws and brackets and so forth? Or design and maintenance of medical equipment perhaps?

My daddy was the CEO of a large cap mining company, so I am fine

And you mommy was a cum gobbling whore, so what?

oh, dryfly already answered... my guess was remarkably close!

wow, SFWoman2! this is like DC or Marvel Comics where an alternative spiderman or superman suddenly appears...

I believe the proper grammar and punctuation you seek is to add an apostrophe when pluralizing an acronym term ending in S.

not sure. i don't think you are meant to use ' to signify a plural with any acronym or abbrev. (did you notice how i abbreved abbrev? self-referential) the use of ' (apostrophe) is only for possessive case or in place of a letter, e.g. the dog's dish, it's a nice day, i won't blog today. notice the common confusion with its and it's, it's is not correct for possessive case, otherwise you would say hi's and her's also -- 'where is its leash?' is correct, 'where is it's leash?' is not. or isn't. but people have a tendency to use it's as a possessive, myself included. and definitely realtors. 'lovely dinning room, seperate from kitchen, with it's own entranceway from the mane coridor' a.k.a. the grocer's apostrophe... (cabbage's 50c)

DS,

Thanks for 'dinning room'. It's one of my favo(u)rites!

I actually saw 'dinning room' recently in an ad, it's not even fabricated... and 'seperate' too, i think...

however, the general rule i found in engineering was the worse the spelling, the greater the engineering genius... the very best engineers could neither talk nor write, heh...

It is an exercise worth doing - especially before you head off to college. Anyway I sent the analysis into an econ prof who moderated the blog & it got pretty heated.

That's very true. It's not quite as bad here where 3/4 of the cost of tuition is borne by the taxpayer, although it goes around again later when you're earning and paying tax. Still, plenty of people who do a general business or arts degree end up working the same job as if they'd never bothered, e.g. customer service. However, it pays off for most of the professions, altho law is a wild card like you say. Possessing the basic piece of paper will open doors tho.

The academics end up acting like salesmen for tertiary education, they aren't impartial or 'seeking truth and knowledge' about it at all, nor really trying to articulate supply and demand for employment with the real world - I imagine the American system is even more prone to hucksterism from what I've seen because of the cost factor disincentive. When I queried the merits of doing a 6-year psychology stream with the psych faculty just to get registration, they got very defensive, and fabricate outcomes for their students without any backup stats as almost standard fallback lines ('all our students get jobs', etc.)

And we dress pretty natty too.

hmm, I forgot that part -- flannelette shirts ring a bell... I was in a scavenger hunt group when I was 18 called 'engineers who don't own flannelette shirts' or something like that... I remember bringing in an obscure vinyl LP and a complete (new) toilet, but couldn't manage the human brain for extra points. I'm ethically horrified now, things have changed fortunately.

Much of the US education is borne by endownments or the government. When I was going to a pricy private first tier college while my parents were making a slightly above avg income ($70-80K/yr) my college bore about 60% of the retail cost, I took on $2,500/yr in subsidized loans and my parents paid the rest out of their income. They didn't have much asset outside of retirement funds at the time though.

My big plan for dealing with kids' (if any) education is as follows, in order of preference:

clumping kids together

go in-state tuition shopping - Georgia and CA seems to offer the best deals for one's tuition dollars

transfer assets to parents as gifts (up to $40K yr tax free), expect to get money back as estate asset -- this one is actually pretty awesome since it also can also get rid of a lot of capital gain, but only works if one has frugal and trustworthy parents with relatively low networth, and it really helps if you have no siblings. Also have to buy parents long term care insurance so long illnesses does not waste the asset.