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!)"
Yea, bay area. If you want oil, you move to houston. If you want tech money, you move to the bay area. You can stay here for a year or two to lock down that you command a bay area salary and then do like I did and fuck off to SE asia and work remote. "70k is doable, but to get that right out of school you will need experience at a real company.  The investment club sounds cool, but it doesn't carry as much weight.  Companies need to be able to call someone you worked for and verify that you are a worthy employee.  Also, your club won't count towards ""experience"" - which is required nowadays for an entry level position.  Get an internship, ASAP and put that ahead of everything including grades.      source: '15 grad" "Maybe. I've been applying to jobs that require things like SQL and high level excel. I have some experience with these but I kept getting passed over for ""more qualified candidates"" so I get the sense there is a surplus of overqualified candidates, not recent college graduates. Also Linkedin stats will sometimes show as high as 50% of applicants having graduate degrees. And again this is for entry level business/data analyst positions. IMO the job market feels absolutely saturated with qualified candidates. I am looking around the NYC area however so maybe that just comes with the territory." Non-target undergrad in the south, but I networked with right people. Through the finance clubs I got an equity research role for the school's investment fund and leveraged that for an interview at a home developer but the partners there ultimately went with someone else. They happened to be investors at the firm I currently work at and thought my background would make me a good fit. Once I started working there, I took on as many projects/responsibilities as I could. I'm actually in the process of partnering up with the trader to take on some outside investors and get his algos running. He's been trading for ~25 years and I couldn't believe what his returns were at first, so I'm fairly excited to work with him. If your goal is to work in the U.S. then it would make sense to attend a U.S. university. American companies are going to recruit on american campuses after all. Or you could stay in Europe and target a U.S. multinational after graduation. Fluent English and another European language would be a big plus. (it's not much of an 'international' business degree if it doesn't include a language) The key to getting a job in college and for the rest of your life is networking and knowing exactly where you want to work not a business card.  During a career fair, recruiters get flocked hundreds of students who don't know shit about the company or industry.  All you need to do is research the company and figure out what makes it better than it's competitors. Then when you talk to a recruiter at the fair, be sure to slip it into the conversation.  Recruiters are looking for people who fit the companies culture. Make sure you structure your elevator pitch in a way that aligns with it perfectly.  If you do these things, I guarantee you will get an interview assuming you have the minimum GPA "To receive unemployment benefits, you must be registered with an employment agency and be actively seeking work, and be willing to accept work should it be offered to you. As a full-time Cornell University student, as you describe yourself, this does not seem a likely scenario. Also, you need to have established a state of residence. It is not clear to me that you have done so, given your travel between the South Pacific, Ithaca, New York, North Carolina etc. You should check with your local state unemployment office in New York State, or perhaps North Carolina, although I don't know if you satisfy residency requirements in either state. They will be able to confirm however. Are your parents claiming you as a dependent on their federal income taxes? If so, I do not believe that you will be able to file for unemployment benefits, regardless of your student status at Cornell University.  One more issue to consider: Have you filed tax returns for the income you received from your television production work? I am uncertain of the amount, as you said that you worked for two 4-month intervals making $10,000. That implies $20,000 of earnings over two years. Yet your bullet point number 7 states that you made ""10 grand each of the four months"". If that means that you made $10,000 per month for four months, then you earned $40,000 per summer, for a total of $80,000 for two summer's worth of work. I don't think unemployment benefits are intended for individuals in your situation." 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? "To begin, I'm not sure you understand what COL refers to.  It's what you spend, not what you bring in.  Let's say Bob makes 60k in some midwest town, but spends 30k for living.  If his salary and his cost of living both increase at the same rate, let's say they both double, this means Bob now makes 120k but spends 60k.  He now saves double what he would have before.  That 30k extra saved is 30k extra saved.  His purchasing power has now gone greatly up, especially in respect to housing outside of an expensive area like the valley.  For one, let me clear this up - SF, the city itself, is expensive.  I'm talking more generally about the bay area, and silicon valley as a whole.  Most tech jobs from the big tech companies that we think of as ""the bay"" are not in SF.  they are in mountain view, Sunnyvale, and that area.  So this might explain some of our disagreements.  Most people who work for large tech companies understand they have a decision to make - live in the city proper, pay a lot more than the greater valley, use transit into work (all of the giants have regular shuttles in), but get to love a more ""hip"" life, or be more conservative in the valley, where rental prices are on par with NYC.  In talking to a lot of people who work for the big companies, they know this.  Younger folks who want to live the city life pay the premium, but by far and wide they live outside of it, where it is closer to work, and they take the rail up for weekends out with buddies.  I'm still not sure where you are getting a doubling of the COL in the valley versus outside.  Yes, housing as a single item is going to be a person's largest expense.  But all the rest of their expenses are not going to see a similar increase.  It's also important to remember that saving 10% of 60 v 10% of 120 is significantly different.  Lots of people take jobs in the valley, are able to save vastly larger amounts of cash, and then leave.    In my calculations I evaluated the COL markup to be ~30% for the valley for a 200k job.  That is, I spend maybe 50k of my earning on all living expenses in the Midwest (in a downtown, nice area), and would expect I'd pay about 70k for the same standard in the valley.  But I'd be saving a shitton more.  I've done the math, I'm not here to argue with someone who just googled SF cost of living searching for the answers I want.  I've talked to actual people out there.  I appreciate your passion for this, but your 100% increase in COL estimate is simply wrong.  But then again, it depends on how you live and where you live in your current situation.  I live in a large midwest city, actually in the city itself." "It sounds like you're massively under-selling yourself.  You presumably have a degree to get into the PhD program, and you now have work experience as well.  But you're applying for jobs in fast food restaurants. You may struggle to get a job because they will expect you to only be there a few weeks until you find a ""proper"" job." "Hey just letting you know that I've sort of felt the same as you before. I'm not 29 yet, only a few years younger, and I too am in Alberta. Knowing that many trades can be quite lucrative here I too dipped my hand in them, namely the HVAC and Plumbing trades, and after a bit I felt that they weren't for me. And this was after using a year looking for any ins during the recession since nobody was hiring helpers/first years. During that whole year in the times I wasn't looking for a job I was researching and looking up videos of the trades and was thinking how INow after some career counseling, soul searching, all that jazz, I'm about to head back to school next week. If things go well by the time I graduate I will almost be 30 with my first (and probably only) degree.    I wouldn't consider the years from the time I graduated high school to today, where I think I've figured out what I want to do, a waste, but instead I look at them as years where I grew as an adult and gaining real world experience in a few areas I've dabbled in. A future employer may look at them as wasted years, but it is up to me to spin them in a positive way as my ""story"". Just know that you aren't alone in this situation, and I'm sure there's plenty of people worldwide in their 20's and 30's who are still trying to figure out what they want to do. Keep your head up and good luck." I would probably try to find a job back home or around school in a company doing wealth management or something financial. After your second year, leverage your first summer and aim for smaller groups in big cities that might not recruit heavily and aren't bulge or a high name boutique but still do serious finance and learn a lot. Third year, shoot for the big names and talk about your experience, that will set you a part from everyone else who likely has little finance experience. Landed an internship in undergrad through a combination of networking and just sending out resumes to lots of places with decent IR departments. Then from there I had the experience that finding a job post-grad wasn't too hard.  It's a relatively small community and now that I've become basically specialized in telecom, media, and technology it's easy to know where to look. There are plenty of corporate PR firms too if that's more your angle.  I really recommend you join your local NIRI chapter. Best networking move you could make, and anyone interested in IR can join. It's a super rewarding career because I love finance but I still get a lot of interpersonal interaction and you're as close to the clients as possible, even at the most entry level. "UCLA is not a bad place to be school wise. You will be pretty much limited to applying to the LA and possibly SF offices of any BB bank or relevant boutiques/MMs. But for those LA positions in particular, you will get a fair look. So your institution is respected.  Your experience also seems to be decent, especially considering you spent time at a community college. It all matters how you market it. Be humble but don't sell yourself short. Don't claim you founded Yahoo, but also give an honest view of what you did. You can be proud of founding a distribution company and learning the business practices that go hand in hand with that. Both on your resume and in any interviews you may have, discuss how your experiences in that role will help you be a better intern and in the future a better analyst. Mostly intangibles, skills you learned, etc. The same goes for the other position, although the wealth management position probably has more applicable skills. So don't sell yourself too short in that department. Just lend an appropriate level of importance to the positions you've held; don't overstate your positions but also give yourself credit for what you've learned and what you've done.  As far as your performance at UCLA so far and GPA, that might be a concern, but I think you can overcome it with enough work on your part during recruiting. I assumed your story from high school through community college and to UCLA is a fairly challenging one. It likely involved some financial hardships and a good deal of adversity. Most importantly, it probably took a lot of perseverance and hard work on your part to get to where you are now. If you can amply convey that during interviews without sounding like a martyr, you can likely overcome any downside to not having a GPA. Clearly you were able to get to UCLA from a tough starting point, which demonstrates the combination of hard work and intelligence that a GPA is meant to convey and which banks look for in applicants. Additionally, interviews occur in January so you will have one semester's worth of work to show for it by then and when interviews come around you'll be able to conjoin the story of your journey to UCLA to your first semester GPA to lend some credibility to your historical successes.  Now, a lot of what I've said is contingent on you getting to an interview. Before that stage, it is hard to sell the merits of your alternative path to UCLA and to the interview on paper. You have the cover letter to make brief mention of those things, but the cover letter is far too short a medium through which to convey the entire story. So, getting yourself into the interview is the most important step you have to take at this point. Once you get your foot in the door and get a few first rounds, you'll be able to let your salesmanship shine and show them the merits of the path you've travelled.  An important step of getting the interview will be networking. Everyone on here says ""just go network"" which is really vague and doesn't help anyone, especially because it is the most heinous of all collegiate finance buzzwords. You should contact specifically two groups of people: alumni working in the banks you are interested in apply for AND the bank HR representatives for your school. You ought to talk to the UCLA career services people as soon as you can and get names of UCLA graduates who work at the banks you're interested in. Career services also ought to have the names of the relevant HR representatives. Both the employees at these banks and the HR recruiters will have an important voice in who gets interviews, so make sure you talk to both of them. You should be inquisitive and ask about the bank and the experiences those you talk to have had, but you can also try to creatively weave in details about your story. I.e., when talking to someone you could bring up concerns about getting looked at because of your background and then ask whoever you're speaking with WHAT YOU CAN DO TO OVERCOME THAT. It should always be phrased as a question, so as to avoid seeming as if you're trying to sell yourself or brag during any informational calls. The purpose of the calls should be to talk about the bank and the job, so try as best you can to work in limited mention of yourself unless specifically asked and focus the discussion on the employee/recruiter and not yourself.  You should also work to learn all the finance information you'll need for the job. Being that you have a nontraditional finance background and limited academic credentials, you will be asked extensive financial information questions if not during any informational calls definitely during first round interviews. Your knowledge of and commitment to a financial job is uncertain due to your academic background, so people will ask you basic to slightly more advanced financial analysis questions to see where your competency is at. Study up in the vault guide, with a particular focus on the fields you will be applying for. Understand DCF, LBO, M&amp;A accretion-dilution, and financial statement analysis primarily (for IB internships). Learn specifics for other roles (Equity research may require more equity specific stuff, cap markets will be similar to IB as listed above, S&amp;T will be less specific prep and more bainteasers/fast math). Prepare a stock pitch of some sort as well in case they ask you for one, and pick something obscure-ish so that it won't be too closely scrutinized. Stock pitch will come up randomly in interviews and specifically if you apply to equity research.  In that same vain of thought, you should also think a bit about what group you want to apply to at these banks. Its good you have an interest in finance and in banking, but there are a lot of facets to the banking industry which you could pursue (traditional investment banking, capital markets, sales and trading, equity research, asset management, to name a few). Some are easier to wedge you way into, others harder (I have them listed in rough order of difficulty from hardest to easiest above). You can usually apply to a couple of different groups at each bank, so take advantage of that and definitely apply to multiple groups, talk to multiple groups, network with multiple groups and try to spread yourself around and get as many interviews as possible.  TL;DR: you've got a decent product for sale here, but you'll need to polish up you pitch and learn financial skills to back up the story and prove you're competent and serious to an interviewers. While you do that, reach out to UCLA alumni in the banking industry and the HR recruiters for the banks to get your name in front of people and work toward securing a first round interview. Networking in this way is going to be the most important part of recruitment for you over the next 3-5 months." "Generally speaking I find that jumping jobs either in-company or outside it is sometimes required for even advancing in title.   When I was working at a F500 in the Portland Metro Area, people jumped around a lot. I'd say between a 1 1/2 years and 2 years was the average time someone stayed in a position before either moving around, moving out to another company, or maybe finally moving up.   Lets say you were a Financial Analyst and you wanted to be a Senior Financial Analyst. Generally speaking you would need 4-5 years  in to get there organically within the same org, if ever.   The reality is for every single one of those Senior Financial Analyst positions there is probably 100-200 applicants including inside and outside applicants. While being an employee there was definitely a good thing, it doesn't guarantee you jack or shit. You might have worked at for 3 years, but some guy coming from Silicon Valley who is moving up North to Oregon so he can afford a house is probably going to beat you in the interview process.   So that's when the other options come in. You can move around and get a new position, a new title, and the new experiences and connections that come with it. Or, you jump ship to a Senior Financial Analyst position somewhere else. The fact of the matter is applying for jobs is a giant crap shoot if you work in something that is unrelated to engineering, product creation, etc where your work can speak for you. If you have the word ""Analyst"" or ""Associate"" in your title, then career branding means more than anything else. Which job hopping gets you.  Companies already expect you to leave for better opportunities. All the reasons to be loyal are dead if you aren't waiting for stock options to vest. There are no more pensions, raises are minimal if you get them at all, and if you become a burden on the Wage Expense line of the P&amp;L they will drop you without a second thought and *maybe* a severance.  Get yours and remember that a job is a job and that no matter how much they tell you otherwise, you are replaceable and when your employer looks at you they don't see value, they see a business expense."