What to do in college right now
It used to be controversial to say that college is a rip off. At this point, I think the arguments have reached the mainstream. The problem is that, while some kids win the intellectual lottery, it’s too risky for most kids to skip out on the credentials.
So the question is: how can you make the most of the fact that you are going to college at a time when most people think college does not prepare you for the next step in your life?
Here are seven things you can do right now:
1. If you’re taking out loans, transfer to a cheap school.
Believe it or not, there is no undergraduate degree that is worth taking out student loans to complete. This is true even for the Ivy League: Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that the indicator of whether someone will be a super achiever is not whether they attended Harvard or Princeton, but whether they applied. So the act of seeing yourself as a high achiever is more valuable than taking out loans to attend a high achiever school.
Here are many other arguments as to why you should not take out student loans for college. And Zach Bissonnette wrote my favorite book on the topic. But the bottom line is to figure out how to transfer to a very cheap school right now. Because the biggest thing you can do to preserve your ability to land a job in the future is to keep yourself debt-free now, so you can afford a job that does not pay well.
2. If you’re rich, get your parents involved.
For those of you who have rich parents, expensive schools are a possibility. I, for one, am a big fan of using the money you would have spent on college and instead, start a business. Even if you fail, the failure will do more to prepare you for your adult life than college will.
But if you’re not going to take that advice, what’s the best way to make sure you grow while you’re at college? The answer, according to the educators themselves, is that you need to rely on your parents. The value of college is personal growth, but that value is hard to get to, according to Richard Arum, professor at NYU and author of the book, Academically Adrift, He writes that “No actor in the system has the student’s growth as their primary goal.” So Arum argues that parents need to take a bigger role. Which, finally, is a seal of approval for helicopter parenting. (Which I have said all along is great for kids to have.)
3. Start looking for an internship.
Look, you can tell me you are at college for the love of learning. But if you really love to learn you can do it your whole life, every free hour you have. But not if you starve to death. Which is why recent grads say one of their biggest regrets about the time they were in college is that they didn’t get good internships.
According to Vault, 90% of students graduating from college have had an internship. So it’s not like a leg up on the competition if you get one. Getting one is just surviving.
If you want a leg up, you need to get a good internship, and most of those get locked up in the fall. That’s right. Before winter break, most of the people who are going to get great internships have already spent tons of time making the perfect application and sending it in.
So get moving now to line up a good summer job for next year.
4. Invent jobs for yourself.
Actually, you don’t need an internship to build a resume. Start and sell a company. That’s a great way to look like a college prodigy without even having rip-roaring success. Also, start adding bullets to your resume by making up projects for yourself.
You do not, for example, need permission from Nike to do a social media campaign. You can write a great tweet and link to a page on Nike’s site. Then you can count the retweets. And here’s what it looks like on your resume: Designed and executed a social media campaign for Nike.
In the interview, when you have to talk about what you did, talk about how you decided to drive traffic to that page, and how to quantify success by counting retweets. You’ll sound smart. No one cares if you got paid to be smart once they notice how you sound smart.
5. Understand yourself.
Take a personality test. Your score isn’t going to change anymore. So change your major to match your score. Because you are likely to discover that whatever your parents raised you to be — doctor, lawyer, artist — is not right for you. That’s okay. Better you should find out now, when you can get a grip on who you are and what you can expect from yourself in the workforce.
Also, while you’re being honest with yourself, now is the time to face the fact that you have been a depressive, or neurotic, or drunkard for too many years of your life. Because many mental illnesses are largely latent until one’s early 20s. So if you’ve got it, it’s probably going to get bad in college. Investigate mental illnesses, and get help for it in college, where there’s a built-in support system.
6. Read Lolita.
Reading fiction is a great way to understand yourself and other people.
It is not cool to say there is a western canon, but I think there is a canon, it’s just different. It’s not Harold Bloom’s list, because, let’s just all admit that we did not read Thomas Kyd and Charles Lamb. The list is not fun. It is tiresome. So don’t bother with it in college.
However the idea that we have a shared frame of reference is fun. And there is a group of books that so many idea-oriented people have read that the books become part of the fabric of contemporary thinking.
And, to begin the discussion about what is the new canon, I’d like to propose we measure literature by how many people have made entries on a book’s Wikipedia page. Lolita has 2,300 changes.
Note: While researching links to support my claim that Harold Bloom is a bore, I did come across Thomas Kyd, who is on the list for writing a grisly report of a wife who poisons her husband.
Now that I grow all my own food and cook three meals a day, I wonder why more women do not poison their mate. Surely this topic should be part of the new canon. So maybe we can each read Thomas Kyd, and make an edit to the Wikipedia page.
with your list here I was thinking if it’s possible to do a hybrid program for what you degree you want. for example, I want to get a masters in psych. but I don’t want to spend my time in schools so I’d love to do online. But for that there is hardly any programs that can do the lab part and then meet all licensing reqs. So i was thinking that maybe possibly hopefully one can take online classes from an accredited college for all theory and then “transfer” to a regular college to finish all licensing reqs. There will be credit loss as always in the tranfer but this could be done carefully. That way I, and people who need to, can still work and go to school. That way cutting down on the time that they have to be trapped in the capricious scheduling wars that happen when in school.
With unemployment rates being what they are – how about a post on what to do right now if you have been unemployed
I’m following all of the advice anyway, except starting my own company. I have no idea what to start a business doing, anyway. I work as a writing tutor and an editor-in-chief of an emerging newspaper and I feel like that’s good enough.
I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that my MBTI won’t change. I always fluctuate between INTJ and INFJ depending on the day.
Publish an ebook or article on Amazon and market it. That would be a great thing to add to your resume, especially if you can hit the top 50 for your topic category.
M
I’m in accounting.
And for your readers, these are my humble tips to reduce cost of food, books and tuition in college. See if this can help your kids. http://onecentatatime.com/practical-tips-to-reduce-college-food-books-and-tuition-costs/
Point of order: my Myers-Briggs score has indeed changed over the last 15 years. I used to be deeply INFP and now I’m a borderline INTP/INTJ. That F to T is a solid difference in my outlook. My mom went from an I to an E over the years – again, a radical change in perspective.
1. I think the best advice in college is to find something to do well and stick with it. The debt burden is a huge distraction and parents and kids should absolutely factor that in, but don’t fail to apply just because the price tag looks high–wait until you see the financial aid package.
2. I will not be a helicopter parent. My job is to be there for my kids when they need me but I’m going to challenge the meaning of “need” if it involves crazy money. Get good at some kind of scholarshipable sport now, kids.
3. Absolutely, get an internship that adds to your education. Don’t spend the summer working temp jobs to make money so you can just break even on summer housing. Contrary to #2 above, I’m happy to pay 3 months rent so you can do an internship that doesn’t add to the tuition cost.
4. Invent a job? What does that mean? How about find a way to make your internship pay or find a way to make money off some thing you like doing during the semester…
5. Take the Meyers-Briggs, but don’t let it box you in. It can help you understand how to relate to the different types of people and understand why you react to things in various ways, but it’s not a career selection tool. According to that test I just took, Guy Kawasaki and Hillary Clinton are INTJs–I guess they need a course from DeVry to be successful!
6. Or read Atlas Shrugged and the Grapes of Wrath and see how it affects you. Don’t waste your free time reading “nonfiction” business books; there is a lot more truth to be learned from fiction because it exposes the passions that really drive human behavior. Even when you think it’s BS, it is helpful to exercise your frame of reference.
Finally, recognize that you have an unbelievable amount of free time in college that you will have a hard time finding again. The work in your classes is hard to you now and maybe you are allways pulling “all-nighters” to survive, but just wait until you have kids and choice is removed from the equation :)
Good question, the answer to the last question is that most poison will show up on the autopsy. ;-/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/2/
Some impossible advice that worked for me: Make your own “internship.” Quit college and join the Marines. They put me in IT, without a degree, and sent me to Japan. I learned marketable skills which have kept me employed for 35 years. I took a year’s worth of college classes while I was over there, taught English as a volunteer, and had a wonderful time doing things no tourist ever will. I met a lot of great people, foremost among them my wife. Time enough for finishing college later.
The downside: Well, there was this war over in Vietnam, and not all my peers returned alive. You aren’t going to live forever. A lot of the people you meet will never live at all. I would not change a thing.
“The value of college is personal growth.”
Uh, no. Unless you are an immature dolt, the “personal growth” is going to happen anyway as part of the process of leaving your parents and becoming an independent adult. The value of college is (or should be) to learn something, including how to apply yourself to a focused task over time. I went to college to learn thermodynamics, physical chemistry, abstract algebra, and computer programming. These are hard subjects to learn in your spare time with only a high school education as background.
Students who major in the physical sciences or math or accounting/finance will have a better chance of a better paying job than humanities or arts majors even if the arts major went to a more expensive school
quantitative or technical fields are
also far easier for males to get jobs
s or promotions in as hr and marketing and management are in this day and age almost exclusively female
Students who major in the physical sciences or math or accounting/finance will have a better chance of a better paying job than humanities or arts majors even if the arts major went to a more expensive school
quantitative or technical fields are
also far easier for males to get jobs
s or promotions in as hr and marketing and management are in this day and age almost exclusively female
This is the second comment I’ve seen you make that assumes a gender disparity in HR, management, and marketing. I suppose that may be true, and if so, it is probably occurring naturally because of different gender tendencies, but really, do you have that much of a bone to pick? I suspect that if you were truly qualified over a woman for the same job, if the employer was far-sighted enough they would hire you–perhaps you have a chip on your shoulder.
I’ve had commenters chirp on me ‘cuz I wouldn’t hire a candidate who couldn’t tell the difference ‘tween “less than” and “fewer”…
I’ve interviewed Grade 8 dropouts who have described the difference.
I’ve interviewed college grajooits who couldn’t organize their next ten minutes let alone the week I expect them to.
The normal curve continues to show half below the mean.
It doesn’t take much to prove you’re on the right side of the curve.
Shit, if you’re on the left side, a little proper attention will get you over the mean!
I dropped out of college for a semester and too some of these tests and they told me I should be a high-school English teacher. Rather than do something which I strongly felt would leave me feeling suicidal, I went back and double-majored in Biology and Chemistry (there was no Biochemistry major then) and then got qualified for a guild that would enable me to take care of a family. I now think that guild is largely responsible for the decline and impending fall of Western Civilization, but it did allow me to do some interesting stuff and raise my kids and take care of my wife. Too bad about Western Civilization. Maybe next time they’ll know better than to give government licenses to doctors.
I dropped out of college for a semester and too some of these tests and they told me I should be a high-school English teacher. Rather than do something which I strongly felt would leave me feeling suicidal, I went back and double-majored in Biology and Chemistry (there was no Biochemistry major then) and then got qualified for a guild that would enable me to take care of a family. I now think that guild is largely responsible for the decline and impending fall of Western Civilization, but it did allow me to do some interesting stuff and raise my kids and take care of my wife. Too bad about Western Civilization. Maybe next time they’ll know better than to give government licenses to doctors.
I think student loan debt is the next bubble to burst. It’s become an ugly collusion of banks (who often staffed ‘financial aid’ departments of colleges) colleges and government. The colleges like it because they can charge more tution (just like the mortgage bubble) the banks like it because the gov. guarantees the loan – the government likes it because it takes people out of the economy and gives certain ideologies a chance to indoctrinate young people (on their dime!)
also, when they student gets out and finds money tight they can ‘hook’ them on more debt – college is often the time young people start to feel dependent on debt… banks get debt slaves for live…that’s a money lender’s economy, not a healthy one.
when a society starts to prey on young people this way, its a sign we’ve sunk pretty low.
Executive Summary
This report is based on findings from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted this spring. One is a telephone survey taken among a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 two-year and four-year private, public and for-profit colleges and universities. (See the our survey methodology for more information.)
For more click on the link below.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1993/survey-is-college-degree-worth-cost-debt-college-presidents-higher-education-system
people should be encouraged to start their own business.. spent years at uni spend thousands to get a job.. and at the end it didnt matter!
This article made me think of you Penelope: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/at-colleges-the-marketers-are-everywhere.html?src=me&ref=general
This article made me think of you Penelope: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/at-colleges-the-marketers-are-everywhere.html?src=me&ref=general
Stop thinking and start enjoying… It is possible once you’re not hungry.
I agree that you should not take out student loans to go to school. I also agree with creating your own job by starting a company or business. I how ever are among the ones that think college is a scam and is not for most people. Unless someone wants to become someone in the professional fields like doctor, lawyer etc.. I do not want my kids to go to college unless they make money first and go to college because they love to learn, not because they feel they need a job! We home educate and have a online based business, we will assist our children in starting their own business of their choice from home as teens so that they will have choice because they have money! College is a scam because people spend money that they don’t have to chase a lie that says you need a job to be financially free! All in all you have given some good info that the average person can use, great post!
That is a good point about the impact of credit on career. A degree from even a lower-priced school will give someone confidence and a few more options, not bad for an investment of four years of not-too-hard work.
Most folks seem to be cut out of the traditional college career due to the high and ever increasing tuition hikes. While there are alot of ways to pay for the education it does seem that they are dwindly too.
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Great tips for college students! I think all college students should get an internship. I did and that is the only way that I got a job when I graduated college. I think I was the only one of my friends who had an internship and got a job though. They wish they would have now!
You do not, for example, need permission from Nike to do a social media
campaign. You can write a great tweet and link to a page on Nike's
site. Then you can count the retweets. And here's what it looks like on
your resume: Designed and executed a social media campaign for Nike.
JUST CLICK….
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Great advice Penelope. As the mother of two college grads (who are both gainfully employed and off my payroll) and a current college student; the more kids can figure out before committing to a college, the more they will get out of it. Liberal Arts educations are invaluable, but in this economy having focus and direction is really important. The Myers-Briggs is a great assessment tool that I use with the students and career seekers that I work with. I also use the Strong Interest Inventory which provides people with tons of information about their personal interests and how people with similar interests are making a living. This is important information for high school students to have about themselves and so important if they are planning to invest the time and money into a college education.
Great advice Penelope. As the mother of two college grads (who are both gainfully employed and off my payroll) and a current college student; the more kids can figure out before committing to a college, the more they will get out of it. Liberal Arts educations are invaluable, but in this economy having focus and direction is really important. The Myers-Briggs is a great assessment tool that I use with the students and career seekers that I work with. I also use the Strong Interest Inventory which provides people with tons of information about their personal interests and how people with similar interests are making a living. This is important information for high school students to have about themselves and so important if they are planning to invest the time and money into a college education.
On the contrary, getting a college degree is one of the best things you can do in this day and age. The trick is to find a good school where companies recruit from. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the best. Study smart is now the new work smart.
Whether you agree or disagree I enjoy the intelligent debate this blog has created. (Checked my spelling before posting!)
I’m not entirely against going to college, or trade school. But, this is the true hard facts about college- It’s A BUSINESS!!! It’s no longer about helping create successful people, and sending them out into the world with knowledge and experience.
Which brings me to my second point- You spend a lot of time and money waiting to obtain a degree, while not getting any experience or very little. So, while the other person that decided to post-pone or not go to school at all. Their finding resources, and knowledgeable people that can give this person a reference, possibly mentor, their personal knowledge, &/or experience.
Third point- Competition is getting so fierce in the most common areas that require a degree.
Now, everyone gets pounded in their heads from a very young age, that the only way to succeed is to get a college education and get a degree. Everyone is fighting for the same jobs w/ the same degree’s. Sooner or later the degree will lose it’s value. So, they go to college. The parents have their dreams, naturally. The kid is absolutely clueless on what is right and appropriate for them. The college is presenting them a sales pitch for potential careers that isn’t for them.
Final Point- Not Everyone is Supposed To Go To College!…contrary to popular belief. But, popular belief doesn’t care about other people and their passions, interests, and goals. They care about Money. In our country, money is getting harder and harder to obtain,(especially, for middle and poor class). People are different. People think, learn, and succeed differently. Some will thrive in college. Others wont. And they will find a way to be successful in their own time and way. But, it’s important to understand and recognize that you are not a failure if you don’t go to college. Your life will not end. However, if you’re the type of person whose life revolves around money and material possession…then college is your best bet.
To get more in depth information on this topic, watch the documentary, College Conspiracy
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I had an internship during college that taught me a few things from a great mentor (Thanks Howard):
– If you are studying an industry that is changing, find out what the industry ‘controlled subscription’ magazines are, and subscribe read and pay attention. These have what is happening today in the industry, not 10 years ago (as interpreted by a prof. that has not practiced in industry for 15).
– Join industry trade groups. Again, these are practicing professionals, not out of practice blowhards. Great networking opportunities and a chance to discuss real issues using current jargon and models. Most trade groups have student rates. Participate in the activities, and see if you can speak or present at local chapters.
– Attend industry trade shows (even if you are not sure if you like the industry/major). This is the quickest way to learn what is really happening in an industry and gain some real exposure. As a consultant, I have often gone to trade shows and typically provide valuable ideas and insights just because I was paying attention and asking what the issues are. Again, here is another opportunity to practice your communication skills in an industry with professional. Oh, and great networking opportunities. They often have keynotes that blow away professor lectures and are far more current and relevant. They model how to communicate complex ideas for an audience with a wide range of understanding on a topic. They allow interaction with professionals that will really understand if what was shared was on target or way off base, and they give you blogging topics to prove you understand the industry/major/profession.
Since my interning long ago, I would add (thanks David):
– Watch TEDtalks – it helps expand your frames of reference to other thought leaders. TEDtalks also models effectively communication with an audience that does not have the background you do. This is how you move into management or higher paid positions.
– Join real groups in your area of interest. In person, if there is one in town. Or join virtual/online groups or forums if you are in remote areas (but consider why are you at this school if there is no community in town? – it is like going to Agriculture school in downtown New York City).
– Read a different magazine each month from your ‘normal reading’. It expands your vocabulary, solution set, and understanding of the world. I am continually amazed how helpful this has been over the years in building relationships with professionals, coming up with solutions that others find helpful (ie willing to pay for), quicker, and less expensive.
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I am currently a senior in my undergraduate degree, and I wish that I had access to this advice before I even started school! I am constantly kicking myself for attending a pricey, private college and anxiously await November post graduation. With the way loans are dealt out, I will no doubt ensure my future children only go somewhere they can *actually* afford. Love your posts, thanks again for the great advice!
“Start a blog” should be number 7 on your list.