As it turns out, the government bails them out. I wonder how this guy is doing nowadays since the sub-prime lending bubble has burst.

1) mtg brokers hire when rates are going down and fire when rates are going up. He has a lot of risk involved. the number of people involved is roughly proportional to the mortgage origination index.

2) being a _good_ mortgage broker actually does save the client a _ton_ of money. it is actually a constrained but fuzzy optimization problem; an MIT grad may well be more creative and better able to solve this problem than someone else.

I’m not surprised that someone who spent years of hard work and probably lots of borrowed money getting a degree is in a big hurry to get a job that pays and stop living like a monk. The giddiness of spending all day getting paid to do work instead of paying to do work takes a while to wear off, and I imagine that the charms of women attracted to money takes a while too.
Anyway, how smart is it to enroll in an extremely expensive engineering school in the middle of a huge tech crash (enrolled in 2001 or 2002?) and a larger trend of high technology labor outsourcing? Some folks I know saw the grim tech labor market as a sign that it was a good time to go back to school, but not as a means to jump right back onto the same rollercoaster that just dumped them off and left them feeling sick. Maybe when the housing bubble bursts and the get-rich-quick job hoppers can’t find any more rubes, he’ll have to go get a real day job as a techie while telling everybody that he’s really an actor. That’s what folks do in Hollywood, right?

Philip,

I am happy that your contact in SoCal is doing great economically and socially. However, I have to question the purely mercenarial approach to life and career that he has taken. First, not all people are capable of commission-based selling. Of those that are, many would detest this occupation actively. I would speculate that among MIT tech graduates and tech geeks in general, where introverts probably predominate, these percentages are even lower. So: if your friend is an extrovert who is happy in his current line of business, I question the wisdom of his major/college choice. If he is a more “normal” introverted engineer/scientist type, he made the conscious choice of trading an occupation suitable to his personality type for high income and social opportunities. Nothing wrong with this choice…

David,

Many (degreed) engineers would define “culture” as “Reading Heinlein/Star Trek at a strip club,” and can’t afford opera tickets.

Personally, the ability take gorgeous starlets to highbrow cultural events is more attractive to me than discussing the conjugation of Klingon verbs with a pot-bellied programmer with crumbs in his beard and a moderate case of body odor. But whatever turns you on, I guess.

As someone with industrial engineering degree and a business masters on cis (from Cuny) who works in the entertainment industry (music royalties) I was rather surprised by his dream.

who makes $150,000 in the music industry??

Incase it’s directly proportional with salary, If I made what he was making then I’d be meeting frisky ladies in the amount of 10x/week… Not just young ones though. That’s poor taste.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the time value of money and career. Real Estate is “hot” right now; it seems as though many of the people who were shaken out of “tech” transitioned into that industry. I happen to think it is a bubble, and just like tech circa 1999, it won’t keep going “up” indefinitely. I remember a lot of people spitting HTML tags for lots of money who don’t really have much to go on nowadays.

So, it appears that the question about the MIT education depends on whether a person is looking at a 2 year time horizon or a 30 year one. Assume someone rides a bubble, is unemployed, and then jumps to the next bubble, over and over. The first question is what the chances are in the “get rich quick” industries that rise and fall. The second question is how much the downtime costs during the dry spells.

The high school graduate as a boss as well as high school graduate coworkers also intrigues me. There is more to an education than just dollar figures and I’m somewhat surprised that a person from MIT wouldn’t want the sort of colleagues that he had in university – perspective, ability to discuss issues, multi-disciplinary, and so on. Culture, to be blunt. I don’t think a university education is a prerequisite for this but, from experience, I think it is almost always the exception that a person with little formal education in a bandwagon industry might be interested in something like philosophy.

Maybe it’s a pipe dream but I wish I’d gone to MIT for the supercomputers, graduate students, conversations, ideas, and architecture. The ROI would have been at the back of my mind, and I’m sure I’d have done just fine.

“On the job part, I thought the most ironic part was that his boss had so much less formal education”

How ironic is this really? Does formal education only expand ones’ mind? Or does it allow like-minded people to closely interact, feed of each other, network together, and connect each other to excellent career opportunities? A college grad will have choices. Choices a non-gad may not have.

While you can discuss, at length, each stat, Age 23, and Income $150,000+ /yr. really stand out.

“2nd most ironic part is that his entire four-year investment in MIT has thus far proved to be of no career value, since his employer is perfectly happy to hire high school grads for the same job”

A similar parallel to the days when Starbucks used to insist on a college degree to steam milk and place a mug under a spout.

Phil: need I remind you that differential equations are ideal for modelling heat and liquid transfer dynamics? Not to speak of rigid body motion…

Regarding career choice, engineering is one of the most boring things possible. You know it, and they know it – I can’t count the times I mumbled something instead of saying I’m doing a PhD in comp sci because otherwise bye bye girl.

For me, computer science has been nice until now, it IS boring but otoh so easy so you can do it and keep on with your social life. Now things are getting more complex, the prospect of a job in IT is so terrifying that even though I am a very lazy person AND i have a phd in the area i’m looking at something – anything – else to do. Yes, media is nice. Yes, if I where to choose a career now, I would definitely do something in that direction.

Tech is not dead. It is going back to the people it rightfully belongs to – the ones who can spend months on designing a better bolt. The brilliant people are over it, and on to other things.