Russ Ohlendorf received his bachelors degree in 2006 and now, a mere five years later, he will be making $2.025 million in 2011. The degree was in operations research and financial engineering at Princeton. It just goes to show how far you can go in operations research: salaries in the millions are possible!
Perhaps Russ has some skills beyond operations research, since he is a starting pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates which, against all rules of logic or fairness, is part of Major League Baseball. Still, I’m marching right into my dean’s office and asking for a raise to match the highest operations research salary in Pittsburgh!
Our profession is bringing new meanings to all different sectors of the industry. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Norm Zadeh’s wikipedia page. That was surprising too.
The year that I graduated from RPI, the list of average starting salaries by major had an incredible outlier of $250K per year for students with bachelors degrees in IT. This was a new program with only 4 graduates, one of whom had signed a million dollar a year contract with an NHL team…
Dear Mike,
I disagree with your analysis : you seem to deduce that his salary is “partially” due to ORMS. Why not conclude the opposite, that he could have been richer (or rich, sooner) without ORMS.
In the hope that your dean will not follow my reasoning 🙂
Considering that you can likely play baseball just as well, I say it’s a fair argument!