I’m a first semester college freshman who just recently made the decision to major in economics with a concentration in public policy. I don’t have many defined career goals, but I have a strong desire to work, as a federal employee or otherwise, in Washington, DC (mostly because I was born and raised in the metro area and I love the city). I understand this is very vague. What would my career options be assuming I do well in school? I identify myself as a male African American when asked (actually mulatto to be precise), how attractive would this make me in the job market? Is a graduate degree in econ helpful/necessary? I attend a medium sized public university in Virginia that isn’t one of the famous ones.
If you want to be an economist, then you will definitely need at least a minimum master’s or doctorate in economics. In terms of simply having a bachelor’s, I’m sure there are plenty of available employment opportunities for you with the federal government in Washington DC. However, there will also be competition against other qualified college students, particularly political science majors.
I really hate it when people ask if race plays a part of the process. (As if it wasn’t obvious enough.) Since you are an underrepresented minority, then yes, it will be a beneficial role in employment decisions.
Also, if you do decide that you want to pursue a graduate level degree in economics, you’ll need an extremely strong math background. Think double-majoring, unless your school’s program is very mathematical at the undergrad level (which is generally pretty rare).
You’ve only got a few weeks of your first semester under your belt, you should have tons of room to switch around your future courses and change your majors if you want to. Unless your college has insanely picky major tracks that force you to immediately declare a major and stick with it forever and make you take specific courses and that schedule leaves you no room to take any electives from the moment you get there, which I doubt, since colleges like that force you to apply to a specific major in your application. You should have tons of wiggling room to switch majors.
You sound very unsure of what you want to do, which is understandable for a freshman, but if you want to do economics graduate studies then at the least a minor in math is highly recommended. Physics also works as it is understood that to have a physics minor/major you need to know a certain amount of math. Basically the point here is that econ grad work involves a lot of math (undergrad, not so much, usually calc is enough). The reason for this is because, like physics, a lot of economics is all about modeling real life events, and math happens to be a great tool in doing this.
It took me all of my first three semesters at college to find out what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to be an engineer, then I switched to engineer/comp sci double, then I switched to comp sci/math double, then I switched to econ/math double (which finally stuck). And all of this happened within 3 semesters, while I was taking other courses outside of those 4 departments as well. You should really take a sampling of courses if you are so unsure of what you want to do, focus on econ, physics, math, and political science for your first year and see what you want to do, then take it from there. You usually don’t need to declare a major in your first year of college (at least in America).