The Underpants gnomes famously said:

1. Collect underpants
2. ???
3. Profit

Arguably, many of you are faced with a slightly different version of the same:

1. Study Economics
2. ???
3. Profit

This article is meant to provide current Wesleyan undergraduates with some practical advice surrounding the all-important step two.

To start with, I want to make a few rather unpleasant observations:

1. The market for professional academics is over-saturated. Unless you can get into a top tier institution (think Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, etc.) there is a very real risk that you are going to end up an adjunct professors, drowning in debt.
2. Law school is an even worse bet.
3. Massive cuts in government spending are making it increasingly difficult to land a good civil service job.
4. If you don’t already have a good lead on a position at a think tank, it’s going to be a difficult fight for a position.
5. Wesleyan isn’t a feeder school for the big consultancies.

With this said and done, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel… In my experience, there is a very strong overlap between the skills required to succeed in academic economics and those that are vitally necessary to excel in high tech. Queuing theory is queuing theory. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at an inventory control model or packets through a router. It’s the same basic math. If you are able to do a good job honing your intuition in the economics department, this may very well translate into a very enjoyable job working at Akamai or Google or Microsoft.

With this said and done, here’s some practical advice for sophomores, juniors, and the like.

1. Applied math skills are golden, particular linear algebra, differential equations, and statistics. “Economics” proper is window dressing. Economics is how you make practical use of your math skills and it provides you with lots of opportunity to translate math into stories that executive actually care about. However, you need to have the basic math foundations to deliver value to a hiring manager.

2. When you apply to a tech company, you’ll either be going the “programmer route” or the “data analyst” route. If you are selling yourself as a programmer you’re going to want to have strong skills in C, C++, python, maybe even haskell. If you’re selling yourself as a data analyst, you require python, R (or matlab), and SQL. Having sample code you can point is going to make your life a lot easier.

3. Learn TCP/IP networking, both in theory and in practice. I doubt that the Math department has a decent undergraduate class on the TCP/IP protocol suite, however, you can learn what you need to know from a good book like TCP/IP Illustrated. On the practical side, make sure that you’re comfortable configuring a Linux box and that you can use wireshark or some other packet sniffer.

In a perfect world, Wesleyan would have something equivalent the College of Social Studies that focuses on the combination of System Design, Applied Math, and Computer Science. I make the argument that the Math / Econ major comes pretty damn close. Invest some time and effort in addressing the gaps and you should be eminently hire able as you exit Wesleyan. Carpe Diem!