Relocating for first real job out of college?
Source: I'm recently (2 years) out of college (Info Sciences + Technology degree) Disclaimer: Speaking from limited personal experience (see above) A lot of corporate recruiters like the prospect of hiring recent college grads of because of the location flexibility they have (typically own no real estate, are not married, and have no children). If you get a job with Amazon and relocate, take a year to settle your finances, then determine if purchasing a house is something you can manage. If you don't have a savings set aside for a reasonable down payment on a house, you'll get hit with a mortgage insurance payment each month =\, and that's not fun. Don't try to do too much at once, and make sure you have a full assessment of your finances before making any major purchases. I follow this general rule: Every few months, I fully re-assess our expenditures, and see what we can cut out or cut back on, put a bit into savings, and put the rest against outstanding student loans. "If the job looks good, I wouldn't let having to relocate stop you. Some companies will help you with relocation expenses, like paying travel expenses, the movers, the security deposit on an apartment, etc. It doesn't hurt to ask if they ""help with moving expenses"". If they say no, fine. I wouldn't expect a company to decide not to hire you  for asking such a question. I would certainly not buy immediately upon moving. Buying a house is a serious long-term commitment. What if after a few months you discover that this job is not what you thought it was? What if you discover that you hate the area for whatever reason? Etc. Or even if you are absolutely sure that won't happen, it's very hard to buy a house long distance. How many trips can you make to look at different houses, learn about neighborhoods, get a feel for market prices, etc? A few years ago I moved just a couple of hundred miles to a neighboring state, and I rented an apartment for about 2 years before buying a house, for all these reasons. Assuming the company won't help with moving expenses, do you have the cash to make the move? If you're tight, it doesn't have to be all that expensive. If you're six months out of college you probably don't have a lot of stuff. (When I got my first job out of college, I fit everything I owned in the back seat of my Pinto, and tied my one piece of furniture to the roof. :-) If you can't fit all your stuff in your car, rent a truck and a tow bar to pull your car behind. Get a cheap apartment. You'll probably have to pay the first month's rent plus a security deposit. You can usually furnish your first apartment from garage sales and the like very cheaply. If you don't have the cash, do you have credit cards, or can your parents loan you some money? (They might be willing to loan you money to get you out of their house!)"
Major in whatever you find interesting. Don't look at college as a pathway to a job, but the time where you learn how to learn. Your undergraduate major has very little to do with what jobs you're able to do unless you limit yourself (all you).  I'm a software engineer that ended up in this industry after having worked in:  Video Games (Midway primarily, contract for others)  Military Intelligence (former CTM, US Navy)  Network Video  and now algo/quant.  No college degree.   My wife has a degree in anthropology and prior to raising our kids she was a particle accelerator operator/technician. She studied what physics she had to in her off time and landed the job.  Honestly just focus on increasing your capacity to learn, especially stuff that's hard and doesn't come naturally. That'll help you get pretty much any job once you're out. 1) Financial Analyst in a way is a big title but that is the way it is with anything to do with Finance like almost everyone is a Vice President in an investment bank. Take it slow. Consider and know that you got to swim thru the ocean and learn with every stroke and you may be coming out better than many.  2) First job is always very critical. We all have an image of that real life before starting it. It happens many times that what we imagined was very different than the realities and those cracks in the illusions may make us think that this is just the first step and the first block to give a shape to the resume to get the next better job. That is something which may prove to be suicidal at times because then we just try to learn the macros and not the micros as our objective is not to sail thru it but to use it as a sail to move to the next boat. I always feel that take the job as you are going to retire with it and learn all the details, the micros.... that really adds better value to the resume and yourself. "&gt; Is legacy software pretty standard across the board for trading firms and bulge bracket banks?  My first job out of college, we were still using *mainframe.* As in ""type a four character code to get to the screen you want, we look like 1980s radar screens with green text on black background"" mainframe." The drive is on to make the minimum wage $15/hr.  I am concerned that we shouldn't set our standards so low and allow company's like Walmart to normalize low wages. In 1981 when I got out of high school, my first real job before college paid me $8.00/hr which is inflation adjusted to $21.44/hr today. Housing prices are inseparable from the job market of an area. The 40k you want to use as a down payment will buy an entire house outright in many places of the country that have no jobs. If your job is mobile why not follow cheap housing, even if it is just to rent? I’m working on trying to find an internship right now! Hopefully I find one in due time. DePaul has a great school for networking, so that’s something!   Okay, I’m going to do more research on IB. If IB isn’t for me I decide, what other career should I be looking at that has high income?   I’ll definitely get started on everything else you said. My future thanks you. (Also posted in r/FinancialCareers)  Hello all,  For the past few months I've been deciding on what I want to do with my career and how to progress in my chosen field. After a lot of thought, I want to get into Finance, most likely corporate finance with the end goal of Controller or CFO. Right now, I am an accounting analyst at a small company just a few years out of a B1G school with a BS in Economics. I feel that my work experience is relevant enough to land an entry level or lower level job as an analyst somewhere. My other option is to go back to school and get a MFin. I'm leaning towards focusing most of my effort on the job search option. So, I have a couple of questions:   1. Does it make sense to focus on the job search or should I add skills via grad school?   2. If you feel searching for jobs is the best route, how do I best position myself as a non business graduate to get a new role?  3. Any other advice is appreciated.  Thanks! "I used to run a telecommunications construction company and left to go back to school so that I could find a job in a ""white collar"" industry. Trade work is great when the money flows, but it's so cyclical that the downturns can rip your company/bank account apart.   My sister that stayed in it is making 85k a year and I'm about to start a 45k a year job out of college. I guess I'll know in 5 years if I made the right choice, but I at least have a lot more job mobility than she does."