It was an engine failure on takeoff due to debris, but why memorialize 109 dead people with actual #facts? AF didn’t retire it for almost 3 more years.
Really? I remember the crash, but thought AF retired it after the crash.
The first return to flight after the 2000 crash happened to land in NY on 9/11/2001….
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Full-time 4-year university student, studying Environmental Business hoping to get into the field of EV’s. Have been doing strong EV advocacy for a number for years and decided to finally put money where my mouth is ; )
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Hey Hackrs,
After spending a good amount of time on the forum in the past few months, I can’t help but feel there are a lot of very smart, successful people here. I don’t post frequently, but when I do the advice I get is usually really helpful. So, is anyone willing to offer some career advice? I’m sure there are others on the forum who, like me, see the EQS thread, or Etron lease deals, or the general clamor for 911 allocations, and are wondering to themselves “what do these Hackrs do for a living?”
While I’m going to continue exploring options through my network and MBA program (I graduate in May), I’d love to hear your thoughts on where the value is in the career market right now (this will mean different things to different people, more about me below). If you were about to graduate from business school or if you were looking for a change, what industry/sector/function would you be trying to get into?
My thought was that y’all could offer generic advice/thoughts for the community at-large, and if anyone has specific advice for me and my situation I’d also welcome that.
A little about me:
I’m in my early 30s, married with two young kids. I went to business school to help me transition out of the military, where I was an Army officer for 8 years. I currently live in the Austin-area and go to school and take care of my two kids full-time. My wife is an active duty Army officer who lives in a different city (she’s in school to become a Physicians Assistant).
Originally I planned on going into consulting, and had full-time offers to do that after graduation. But, I did a consulting internship last summer and hated it, so I turned down the offers I had. I didn’t like the work, or the hours (60-70 per week plus travel). The money was pretty good on paper, but I saw what my life was going to look like and decided I want something different.
I am passionate about the Space industry, but it’s proven to be really difficult to get into. Some of the other industries I’m looking into are tech and private equity. I’m open to other suggestions. In terms of function, people close to me have suggested I go into program management, business development, “strategy” or policy.
What suggestions do you have? I can go deeper into my motivations and values if that’s helpful- but, this post seemed to be long enough already.
Thanks for any input!
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If you didn’t like the consulting hours, this is likely more of the same. Also will be very hard to break into, given that most post-MBA PE recruiting takes people who have previously done an ib or consulting program.
I made the mistake of going to business school, albeit undergrad, because I thought that being a banker would be the greatest thing ever. I was pretty much cooked after a couple of months on an M&A desk. It took a long time to be able to figure out what a) I was good at, and b) that i couldn’t work for anyone but myself.
My advice is to figure out exactly what you want to do right now. You never want to say something is “final”, but given your life situation, it might be.
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Many types of consulting out there but you’re right to discern that typical management consulting is far from what it’s cracked up to be.
Supply chain, either in the industry or a consulting role that isn’t weekly M-Th travel, could be a much better fit for former military due to strong existing networks and a tailor made elevator pitch, and possibly a much better route to the space industry. Most folks don’t realize how many senior managers at some of the world’s biggest brands cut their teeth in supply chain.
Any kind of pedigree PE firm just isn’t going to happen without being at one of the handful of elite campuses where PE recruiting takes place on site. Being at the bottom of the totem pole, feeding off the scraps that the bigger names passed on, neither sounds appealing nor any kind of route to a future in the space industry.
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If you’re smart, educated with an advanced degree, and have have mil leadership experience you should find almost endless open doors. Think about how you are telling your personal narrative. You have a great story, but you need to tell it well.
My only other note would be to move to a coast unless you can land in the space industry. The other things you want aren’t in TX.
And thank you for your service.
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Optimize for a balance between income, quality of life/family time and work you enjoy. People who over index one of those areas can regret what it does to the other. It’s not always inverse correlation but it often is.
You will have advantages with that pedigree so I’d explore as much as you can. Talk to all of those companies that recruit at your school and know that you have plenty of time to pivot if it’s not working.
If space is where you want to go there are defense contractors/aviation that always seem to be hiring, not that it’s an ideal gig but it could be tangential to getting into your ideal company if you crush it there.
Tech is a pretty big umbrella so I’d say be careful about the culture you join and if you’re building software, it helps to feel good about the mission behind what your software does.
PE… I mean they don’t deserve the demonizing they get sometimes but it’s a well-paying but often thankless gig like consulting unless you find a firm that has a unique culture.
Good luck and this is a good hive mind to ask.
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This was me back in 2014. I’m a degree’d Aerospace engineer that focused in design of rocket propulsion systems. That’s a very narrow, hard to enter field today and was even more narrow back then. It was basically working at Boeing, SpaceX, Rocketdyne or Orbital Sciences/ATK. I tried all throughout college to get something in that area, but never could.
I landed an internship in the industrial gas turbine industry and have been there ever since. I get to use the same propulsion design principals that interested me for rockets, but in a much more stable and profitable industry. Oil, Gas and Power Generation are something you should look into. Pay is good and its a casual 40 hr/wk job with flexible WFH/In-office.
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I’ve thought a lot about going to entrepreneur route, but think I’m lacking practical professional business experience. My only professional experience thus far has been my time in the military. While some experience transfer well, others don’t. And I feel like I still need to see how things are done in the private sector before taking that leap.
What I want to do right now is work in the space industry. While I got an interview with SpaceX, I wasn’t successful. I get the feeling that my resume and experience is intriguing to a lot of folks, the lack of private sector experience ends up disqualifying me. That was the initial impetus for doing consulting- cutting my teeth, and providing the missing experience. My feeling is that I’m going to have to make a 3-4 year detour before getting into the space industry
I am a retired DoD civilian, and would recommend you try to get a civilian DoD position. We had many former active duty folks working at our Agency. The pay is not as good as the private sector, but the benefits and working conditions more than made up for it.
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I’m finding that is the case. I am a believer that a school’s brand shouldn’t matter that much, but there seem to be a few industries, like PE/IB, where the brand of your school alone can disqualify you. Generally, that helps inform me of what companies/industries to stay away from as that can be a pretty dumb way of discriminating/segmenting. However, PE is interesting to me, and the work is something I imagine I’d be happy to get wrapped up in- especially on the operations side of things. So, it’s unfortunate that my school doesn’t have the reputation or connections.
I’ve looked into supply chain as I enjoyed the MBA classes I took that dealt with supply chain/operations management. And I agree, I think my military experience has a lot of value here. Thank you for the suggestion- I’ll look into roles in this area.
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I’ve had to refine this quite a bit, and yes, become a lot better at telling my story. When I left the Army, a lot of folks told me that “everyone wants to hire veterans,” which hasn’t been my experience thus far. I’ve realized that how I was telling my story might have been a big reason why.
And yes, I’d prefer to leave Texas. Austin and San Antonio are cool, but not where I imagined I’d be raising my family. Thanks for your reply!
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You don’t do consulting for life. You use consulting as a fast-track to land on one of the management positions in one of your clients. It will get you there probably 3-4X faster than the traditional path.
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Thank you for your, and your family’s, service.
100% this. Doing the consulting/traveling gig with young kids is pretty brutal… that’s why I got out of it. But it does provide tremendous experience (love it or hate it) and opens many doors. What I told myself was that it is going to be family first and I didn’t want to end up like the career consultants/partners I was meeting - didn’t know their kids, divorced with trophy partners, no firm roots.
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Look into Federal Sales, You can transition into a consultant and be paid for relationships.
Great advice- this is a realization I had last summer during my internship.
Defense contracting is a slippery slope for me. With my active security clearance and military experience I believe I would be desirable to a defense contractor. That was one of the jobs I told myself I was not going to do when I left the military. I had a good amount of experience on the other side of those defense contracts, and the whole institution they represent was incredibly frustrating. I think a lot of members of this particular community would feel the same way if they saw how tax dollars were being spent, and the connections between these businesses and the military/government.
But, some of the contractors are also very involved in the space industry, so maybe I just need to get over it
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Will you? Or will you spend all your time optimizing the cap structure? And occasionally parachute in to tell all the people on the ground that you’re smarter than all of them combined?