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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

MBAs return to their roots

By Megan McArdle
Apr 22 2009, 3:34 PM ET Comment

The Wall Street Journal reports that MBAs, unable to find the lucrative jobs in consulting and finance that they paid big bucks to access, are going back to whatever it was they used to do.  That's what happened to my class in 2001--though not to me, because I'd come from the one field, technology consulting, that was doing worse than finance or management consulting.  I did sniff around to see if there were any jobs available, but as one recruiter pointed out, my skills were two years old, and the market was glutted.  "Find a nice guy," he advised, "and have his babies."

But even those who can return to the mother ship are usually more than a little embittered by the experience.  Most people get an MBA because they want to switch fields.  Paying $80-$100,000 for a promotion is a pretty hard pill to swallo.


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