If you read around the net much you will come across something like this:
“I paid $50K for a college degree. I have a job in my field (Chem Eng) but the debt is killing me.”
What he is saying is that he got scammed by the school racket to pay $50K for knowledge that is available to those who want it for free. When I was growing up it was hard. You had to go to libraries and occasionally buy books. We now have the internet. You don’t have to put on clothes or leave your bedroom. I worked my way up from bench technician to aerospace engineer. Getting paid every step of the way.
The difference between me and the rest of the mopes who paid the big bucks in the hopes of buying a ticket and getting it punched? Motivation. I WANTED it. Bad. So bad that I was notorious for taking my technical books and magazines to parties. I wanted the college PARTY experience AND an education. I got it. Both its. In all my years I never saw anyone else doing what I did. I can’t figure out why. It was FUN.
If you like reading technical stuff you can read mine here:
Some of you are probably asking, “How did he prove he had the knowledge so he could get the job?” Good question. I did it by working. Every time I took a new job (I was a contractor) I took the most challenging assignment I could get. On the jobs (when there was slack and I was asked “can you do…?” I said, “Yes.”) I always asked for the most challenging work I thought I could handle. When I completed it I added it to my resume. Even school kids are judged more by what they have done than by what they did in school – once they are past their first job.
So my secret was basically the American secret. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
Comments
9 responses to “The Post College Debt Malaise”
I’ve known lots of guys who worked their way up from technician to engineer. So many, that when I find a good technician who is willing to remain a technician, I always recommend to his manager that his pay be raised to at least the pay of a senior engineer.
Somebody has to assemble prototypes, and engineers (myself, especially) are always too distracted to get it done efficiently!
Simon, Bravo!
And Neil, we know. 😛
I’m Internet tech, and well…we don’t exactly have Internet engineers – instead, we have, sigh, Developers (and Clients who think we all just wave magic wands and Make It Happen). Umm… don’t talk to me about prototypes, ok?
I still like building my own prototypes. There is something about the smell of hot rosin that still excites me.
Here’s an example of what you can do with today’s technology and available information. From dvice.com on a study using Ethiopian children:
“What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa. …”
The learning passivity induced by the Western school structure is going to get us left far behind:
JKB,
Wait until the general public finds out that teachers are an anachronism.
I have thought for quite some time that past a certain age (8 or 10) teachers are unnecessary.
That is unrealistic for most people in most professions.
Most employers proviude HR with unalterable minimum hiring standards, which usually includes a degree. In a situation with lots of applicants (i.e., almost every vacancy now), HR will cull the field using degrees as a proxy.
The path you describe barely exists anymore.
The $50k isn’t about the knowledge. Its about the credential. Some companies are bigoted about degrees, some aren’t. years ago, I worked for a place that walked prospective customers through the cube farm and told them “More than half our programmers have Masters or PhDs.” My experience is that most of those PhDs couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. I’m degreed, but I got mine from a state school, and back when you didn’t have to mortgage the rest of your life to get it. Some of the best guys (and gals) I’ve worked with didn’t have the holy piece of paper. Bottom line, if you want to climb the ladder in a big-name company you’d better have that sheepskin. But if you “just” want to do good work, get paid well, and be respected by your peers, its pretty hard to justify a traditional degree today, that that will only become truer moving forward.
Larry,
The key is “contractor”. With the passing of the at will doctrine no one will hire an “untested” person. Except contractors are still at will.
Simon,
Interesting you picked those ages (8 or 10). Last year I came across (online) an oft-cited, prior to 1935, treatise on teaching children how to study (cite below). Prof. McMurry promoted the start of teaching children how to study at 8 yrs old. A review of his factors of study would reveal them to be essentially the much touted critical thinking that is supposedly the value of a liberal arts undergraduate education. A hundred years ago, we taught such skills to elementary students at the beginning of their school career rather than its end.
He also articulated a finding about classroom education that keeps getting “rediscovered.”
“In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.”
How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University