DiabloFans

Yeah, I'm still living at home, all that good stuff. I just inherited my dad's '86 Honda Accord (don't worry, he's still alive), but I definitely don't want to ship that thing all over the tri-city area; I just wanted something that was direct and reliable.

It just felt like a bad deal. I'm not comfortable with it at all.

Sounds really shady. I wouldn't have filled anything out without asking some information about the recycling job.

I can't say that I tried, but they tried really hard to make sure I filled out every form before they even let the dude know I was there. I didn't talk to him until after I filled out every form and, even then, it was far too late to turn back.

I'm sketched out about leaving this place too because I don't know if I'll have to list it on future applications as previous work experience.

Go to college, simple as that. Local community colleges are cheap and get you the same damn education that you get at Harvard without the Million Dollar debt.

You do not have to list it as work experience. Unless it is related to the job at hand.

Quote from Azriel

Hey, guys. I'm gonna tell you the story of how I got fucked over and lied to.

So I went on...

[all that mess]

If anyone wants to throw some advice my way, it'd be much appreciated. My parents don't think it's a good idea to continue association with this place, but I just wanted some other opinions as well. I feel very cheated and, frankly, I want no part in this. If anyone sees any sort of value in this, then I'd be happy to hear your opinion.

You have to be careful of agencies, some them will even try to charge you money for them to go find a job for you, and then they don't serious as a heart attack. If I had it to do all over again with the benefit of starting over living at home, I would not get a job, I would start my own business, and you can do it without having to spend much money at all.

When you hand someone an application or resume, as you said in your post you "lack of job experience." When you hand someone a business card you are suddenly the expert, I shit you not. I ran my IT consulting and service company for a few years and found that out. I was quite surprised at how drastically that transformation occurred. I closed that business because an IT consulting business is a terrible business model full of headaches, essentially you are the business.

You have a computer and camera, you could open a web design company for very little, all it takes is doing some research for a good angle. So you know I'm not just giving BS advice, in about 3 years my stock options will have paid out at the start-up company I work at now, when that ends, I won't take another job ever again. I will have an online business up and running by that time.

Why am I recommending this? You are single, young, you live at home. You can afford to invest the time, failure doesn't mean going hungry or homeless and you don't have a wife that will nag you about not seeing you or risking the family's security.

It is a statistical fact that 1 out of every 10 businesses fail. To ensure 100% success, all you have to do is be willing to start 10 businesses understanding you might fail 9 times before succeeding. It probably won't take you that many times, what you learn in that process will be invaluable because each failure will help you do better next time. Failure is a necessary part of success, like falling is a necessary part of learning to walk for a baby. I assure you when you do succeed, you will make more than enough to cover the failures a 100 times over.

Quote from Lt. Venom

Go to college, simple as that. Local community colleges are cheap and get you the same damn education that you get at Harvard without the Million Dollar debt.

You do not have to list it as work experience. Unless it is related to the job at hand.

Yeah, the thing is that I'm trying to get a job so I can actually go to community college and pay for stuff on my car like insurance and gas. I'm only 18 and, even though I don't have many responsibilities, I need to get my shit together if I'm going to be able to shift into the college life comfortably. Even after I get my Associate's, I'm going to transfer to a 4-year Uni to get my Master's in Business and Engineering.

It just makes me feel like the dude kind of molested my trust a little bit. Yes, that is the euphemism I would like to use.

Quote from VegasRage

Quote from Azriel

Hey, guys. I'm gonna tell you the story of how I got fucked over and lied to.

So I went on...

[all that mess]

If anyone wants to throw some advice my way, it'd be much appreciated. My parents don't think it's a good idea to continue association with this place, but I just wanted some other opinions as well. I feel very cheated and, frankly, I want no part in this. If anyone sees any sort of value in this, then I'd be happy to hear your opinion.

Hecka OP advice, my man

The reason why I wanted to go to college is because I do want to start my own business. I can try the web design thing, but I'm not that talented of an artist. I've recently started writing reviews of albums and I'm trying to get more notoriety. I think, in the future, I'd want to sit down and actually write a book and see where that takes me.

College is a good thing and I would have loved to have gone myself in retrospect. Understand though it won't necessarily teach you how to start a successful business. My old room mate started two nutrition companies EAS and then MRI, he has 2 years community college under his belt which he never finished. He is worth millions today. Myself, I've been a computer systems and network engineer for 20 years and currently am a VP of IT systems and security with just a high school education. It boils down to determination, the initiative to educate yourself, and real life lessons even after you get the book smarts. You will get that lesson regardless if you go to school or not in the real world. I'm not down on college, nor am I telling you not to go, but I think it's important to know, you can still make it without it if you are determined.

I played in a weekly Magic: The Gathering tournament called Friday Night Magic yesterday. I won two and lost two, and I am neither pleased nor dissatisfied with the performance of my zombie horde. I think that I could have done better had I used all of my Lashwrithe and my fourth Vampire Nighthawk. Also, I ended up winning the same random prize I won last week.

Fucking awesome!

College is overrated. You will hear this one and only one time from me, a career professor and here are the situations and reasons why:

1. Degree Mills: The bachelor is currently worth fairly close to nothing. Work experience is more highly prized and post-graduate education is assumed or greatly desired anywhere that degree training is relevant.

2. Contracted Economy: The work-force grows and the number of employers has shrunk. Vegas made a very appropriate assumption in suggesting that this was a good time to start a business (although certainly no guarantee of success).

3. Public Knowledge: Almost all the information our species has, collectively, is online somewhere. Given a strong enough desire to learn about something, you can readily self-teach more than ever.

Having said all that, it is untenable that -most- [potential] students should choose this path. It would lead to a reversal of situations where degrees are over-valued, employers too numerous, and information closely guarded. I think we may indeed be trending this way with the most recent generation understanding the failures of post-secondary institutions.

I also think that a well-rounded education does make better persons, but given the option of recommending someone to attend a rather expensive four year institution or telling them to find out about their topics of interest at khanacademy.org (or some such) is a no-brainer. It is more imrpotant than ever to truly grasp what one wants out of their education before making an investment into it.

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My advice would be more generalized: to find an interest and then try to shoe-horn it into a career.

My heart has always been with writing as a career. I know that is particularly risky as most authors don't get very far, but I have a lot of ideas for novels and I feel that they are unique enough that they would make a good impression on what I have to offer. I know that saying that may seem a bit... naive on my part, but I have faith in my abilities. Everyone who has ever read what I've written has said I had a "natural talent" and that I could become a writer if I really wanted to.

I mean, at least I'm not shooting in the dark with that idea. Other people have confidence in my abilities (unless they were just trying to be nice and I suck ass at writing).

If you follow your passion you can't go wrong, you will do well because it is play to you, so you never really work.

Quote from proletaria

College is overrated. You will hear this one and only one time from me, a career professor and here are the situations and reasons why:

1. Degree Mills: The bachelor is currently worth fairly close to nothing. Work experience is more highly prized and post-graduate education is assumed or greatly desired anywhere that degree training is relevant.

2. Contracted Economy: The work-force grows and the number of employers has shrunk. Vegas made a very appropriate assumption in suggesting that this was a good time to start a business (although certainly no guarantee of success).

3. Public Knowledge: Almost all the information our species has, collectively, is online somewhere. Given a strong enough desire to learn about something, you can readily self-teach more than ever.

Having said all that, it is untenable that -most- [potential] students should choose this path. It would lead to a reversal of situations where degrees are over-valued, employers too numerous, and information closely guarded. I think we may indeed be trending this way with the most recent generation understanding the failures of post-secondary institutions.

I also think that a well-rounded education does make better persons, but given the option of recommending someone to attend a rather expensive four year institution or telling them to find out about their topics of interest at khanacademy.org (or some such) is a no-brainer. It is more imrpotant than ever to truly grasp what one wants out of their education before making an investment into it.

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My advice would be more generalized: to find an interest and then try to shoe-horn it into a career.

Very nice. I have been playing with those ideas myself for the past few years. Especially as a artist, it is cut and dry as far as the bachelor is concerned. The degree means nothing in my field. Thus, I'm actually at school to learn. Go figure lol.

Maybe, once this opinion is widely recognized as a relative truth, the approach to secondary school will evolve. As is, the system still sets under the guise of "come pay lots of money to say you have a degree with us". In other words, reputation is still important. Maybe once there is such an over inflation of degrees, the school systems might change the motto to "hey, come spend some money to actually learn something since we all know that nobody cares about what school you went to anymore!"

Not to say that such a scenario will occur soon or even ever. Just a thought. Maybe we just won't have physical schools in the future.


Yet, there is still an important motto to consider that holds true today. "It's not what you know, but who you know". Aside from the actual skill that I am learning, the most important thing is the people I have been connected to. And at any one of those massively prestigious schools there are certainly a few good people to know there.

Edit: I agree Vegas. And I REALLY hope that holds true for me. So far so good!

Grades are inflated and I wish I could tell you it were not systemic, but it most certainly is the case for most every secondary school and especially those with rather open acceptance policies. I refused to take part in the generous curving process in my career and it slowed the process of my becoming tenured in a very dramatic fashion. Administrators the country over (possibly the world over, but I've only worked in the US with a brief stint in the UK) have gone from academics to financially driven managers. School at some point in the 80s underwent a very obvious metamorphosis from process of enrichment to method of rubber-stamping socio-economic status. Wealthy kids get the inside-road to ivy league institutes and attain the highest stamp. Relatively poor first-generation college students in community schools attain the lowest stamp.

So the education becomes more widely desired. Everyone wants that rubber stamp to riches. Public education accelerates the mythos that if everyone simply got more education then nobody would be poor. We would simply automate all the jobs we didn't want and the world would be populated by a bunch of highly intellectual engineers, doctors, and the like. Obviously utopia failed to emerge. What did emerge; however, by the 90s was a post-secondary system in high-gear flooding the job market with over-trained and under-evaluated individuals. There were not enough specialist jobs to give out and even if there were, nobody was going to hang the new bridge-building project over to an architect from DeVry who got his degree in a year over chatroom lecture.

It's hard to say exactly how this process will reverse itself or simply evolve the education and job training systems we now take for granted into something more efficient (or less, parish the thought), but I will re-iterate that it is of the utmost importance to like what you do for a living. Chances are it will not pay dividends. Chances are you will not become rich. Chances are you will be quite poverty stricken at some point in your life. These are not simply hand-waiving claims, they are statistical and economical realities. The more one is willing to either hang onto their beloved niche and make it into a steady living, the better off they are.

Never for a moment listen to the fatuous and self-serving employers who tell everyone going into college to become "flexible," and to attain all the wondrous serf-like traits that they so desire in a peasant employee. There is something to be said for a career change and there is certainly a comfortable safety in having a back-up plan or new experience, but simply chasing the almighty dollar from one hack job to the next is a means of gaining life-long depression, not wealth.

Oh, and to hit on the specific point of writing. If indeed that is your passion, I would recommend you subscribe and submit regularly to some form of periodical. Print media may be a dying breed, but it is certainly a more effective way of being discovered for a paying job than is plastering your work across the internet by way of blog (although this has been the success of some). As the late, great Christopher Hitches would say; however, a writer is not one who simply likes or loves to write. A writer is one who simply cannot imagine life without writing. I wish you the best of luck in that career path, for it is fraught with much more uncertainty than most. I won't be the first or last to admit that it was my dream too to become a writer and I ended up with a teaching job to keep a roof over my head.

I've heard people say that college is a debt sentence. When my parents and I were talking about college, they said that they'd take out loans and the such and I would have to move back in to help pay them off. I was okay with that, but it definitely went against what people expect of a twenty-five year old just coming out of college. The facade is that college is a golden ticket to prosperity and happiness; sometimes it is, but just because you put in money doesn't mean that you aren't going to have an extremely depressing life trying to pay all that off. I wanted to live my life debt-free which, in the beginning, turned me away from college.

I think the most efficient propaganda used is the idea that if you don't go to college, then you're sentenced to a life in a trailer park, working a shitty job, and never finding happiness. They hype up college to be the remedy to all those possible consequences. Then they talk about the "college experience" and they hype up the "value of knowledge" to make the idea of modern day colleges something more than the degree mills that they actually are. They make it out to be like a piece of paper symbolizes prosperity in life.

I just think that people need to rethink what an "education" really is. Once you assign a monetary value to something as ethereal as "education," its value diminishes. Education is a time investment and should have never been about money in the first place. Taking away the money aspect of it all, students put in time and effort to gain knowledge (in a perfect world). Students have to pay money in order to obtain the mere privilege of putting in time and effort. There's something wrong with that.

And, in my opinion, a GPA hardly means anything nowadays, not with what No Child Left Behind did to school curriculums. A GPA means something if you took AP classes or something marginally more difficult than basic algebra, history, and science. My senior year classes consisted of AP US government, AP literature, AP calculus, and advanced chemistry. If I had gotten a good GPA (which I didn't), I would've been viewed as a viable candidate for many scholarships. However, I didn't put in much effort to do all my homework and it reflected. I think I graduated with about a 2.5 or something.

I learned from those classes. Oh yeah. The idea that GPA reflects knowledge learned is a complete farce. There are people out there who don't care to do their homework because they think it's a waste of time. I was one of those people. I retained the knowledge I gained, but I couldn't give a shit about the work unless it was a big assignment or project. I did all my packets, essays, and all those huge projects that were grade-makers. I wrote beautiful essays, did very well on tests, and ended up getting 3s on my AP government and AP literature tests (I feel I did way better than that, but whatever). I learned something. A bad GPA doesn't reflect a person's capacity to learn. Anyone can take shit classes, do all the cute homework assignments, and walk out of the PBS equivalent of high school with a 4.0, get scholarships because of that GPA, and get into a very good school based on that alone.

The K-12 school systems are heavily flawed. Unless kids are offered better classes that have the freedom to form their own curriculum, our collective intelligence isn't going anywhere. And we need better teachers. I've had terrible teachers over the years and that's not just my opinion; when I look at how that teacher performed compared to a teacher who actually knew what they were doing, the difference is night and day. Some people were born to be teachers. Some people were born to give out assignments.

/rant

Quote from Daemaro

The thing about college that bothers me the most I guess is that it is looked at a lot from a business standpoint. The more people you round up and get to believe college will solve all their problems then the more loans are taken out and the more money people can make from the students.

In a word, yes. As I said, the administrators now are not former professors, but rather trained business administrator types specifically driven to see the profitability of their institutions rise. Like many other boom industries over the years, this one is reaching meteoric heights on some rather spurious assumptions: The value of education is nearly infinite.

Quote from Daemaro

Debt has always been something that you incur rather early on in life but at some point the average goal switched from finish highschool settle down and buy a house and fall into debt, to finish high school go directly to college and into debt, then after years of paying that back attempt to get a house and get put into more debt.

It just seems like you're expected to be in some form of debt nearly every day of your life. Medical, housing, school, credit cards, there's always something.

And I'm quite sure banks and various other lending institutions are thrilled by this; however, I wouldn't draw the unnecessary connection between financial industry and education sector. As far as I can discern there isn't a collusion between the two, but rather an unhealthy symbiosis developed over many years.

Quote from Azriel

I've heard people say that college is a debt sentence. When my parents and I were talking about college, they said that they'd take out loans and the such and I would have to move back in to help pay them off. I was okay with that, but it definitely went against what people expect of a twenty-five year old just coming out of college. The facade is that college is a golden ticket to prosperity and happiness; sometimes it is, but just because you put in money doesn't mean that you aren't going to have an extremely depressing life trying to pay all that off. I wanted to live my life debt-free which, in the beginning, turned me away from college.

Well, there are ways to minimize the debt burden on yourself and your family. I don't think the obviously over-sold notion that college is an automatic ticket to a comfortable middle-class job is true, but it certainly isn't impossible to make something of a degree either. Ultimately, if you want to be completely debt-free at all times, you will have to do some seriously hard work either earning scholarship/grant money or taking on two and three part-time jobs at once to save up the necessary funds.

I went through school (all of a dozen years to the PhD) with a series of scholarships and one or two part-time jobs at all times, so it can be done, although you will not get much sleep.

Quote from Azriel

I think the most efficient propaganda used is the idea that if you don't go to college, then you're sentenced to a life in a trailer park, working a shitty job, and never finding happiness. They hype up college to be the remedy to all those possible consequences. Then they talk about the "college experience" and they hype up the "value of knowledge" to make the idea of modern day colleges something more than the degree mills that they actually are. They make it out to be like a piece of paper symbolizes prosperity in life.

Depending on how well connected and evaluated the specific college of a specific university is, there are some which do grant a better chance at prosperity than others. Most of the students who take a general studies degree at community college aren't getting a thing; however, a graduate from the prestegious engineering program at a well-known science and technology university are quite likely to find an opportunity awaits the completion of their course work. The problem is that college in general is over-sold, but the larger issue is that any degree from any school is FAR over-sold.

As a potential writer you will find that a common practice is to only hire those with some kind of degree in hand. That isn't to say it is impossible to get a foothold without one, but you happen to have selected a genre of career that does not really lend itself to bypassing the post-secondary education rout. I would advise you look into schools with a strong journalism, editorial, creative writing, or literature program. I would also strongly advise you prepare to move a lot and quite probably pick up a new language or two.

Quote from Azriel

I just think that people need to rethink what an "education" really is. Once you assign a monetary value to something as ethereal as "education," its value diminishes. Education is a time investment and should have never been about money in the first place. Taking away the money aspect of it all, students put in time and effort to gain knowledge (in a perfect world). Students have to pay money in order to obtain the mere privilege of putting in time and effort. There's something wrong with that.

Well, I think describing anything as "ethereal," is rather nonsensical. Even something as abstract as education carries with it some cost. Our society is not entirely socialist enough to grant post-secondary training as a right of all citizens, so there will be monetary concerns in lieu of such a break-through. After all, we professors might be over-paid (although administrative costs dominate the inflation of tuition price), but we still need to eat.

Quote from Azriel

And, in my opinion, a GPA hardly means anything nowadays, not with what No Child Left Behind did to school curriculums. A GPA means something if you took AP classes or something marginally more difficult than basic algebra, history, and science. My senior year classes consisted of AP US government, AP literature, AP calculus, and advanced chemistry. If I had gotten a good GPA (which I didn't), I would've been viewed as a viable candidate for many scholarships. However, I didn't put in much effort to do all my homework and it reflected. I think I graduated with about a 2.5 or something.

The admission rubric does take into account the difficulty of advanced course work. To the best of my knowledge a 2.5 with AP classes would be weighted more highly than a 3.0 without. I will concur; however, that "no child," really benefited from that failed policy and in-fact many were left behind as they were shuffled up the grade latter in a rather dispassionate move to make the nation look smarter than it is.

Quote from Azriel

I learned from those classes. Oh yeah. The idea that GPA reflects knowledge learned is a complete farce. There are people out there who don't care to do their homework because they think it's a waste of time. I was one of those people. I retained the knowledge I gained, but I couldn't give a shit about the work unless it was a big assignment or project. I did all my packets, essays, and all those huge projects that were grade-makers. I wrote beautiful essays, did very well on tests, and ended up getting 3s on my AP government and AP literature tests (I feel I did way better than that, but whatever). I learned something. A bad GPA doesn't reflect a person's capacity to learn. Anyone can take shit classes, do all the cute homework assignments, and walk out of the PBS equivalent of high school with a 4.0, get scholarships because of that GPA, and get into a very good school based on that alone.

I think you may be quite shocked to find this out, but gpa is not the end-all statistic you're making it out to be. In-fact I have several students (and graduate students) who did not attain the almighty 4.0 and still earned several lucrative scholarships. If you are indeed capable of writing an eloquent essay, the attainment of such a grant of aid should be quite trivially easy. There are literally thousands of groups with cash-in-hand, waiting to read just such an honest appeal.

Quote from Azriel

The K-12 school systems are heavily flawed. Unless kids are offered better classes that have the freedom to form their own curriculum, our collective intelligence isn't going anywhere. And we need better teachers. I've had terrible teachers over the years and that's not just my opinion; when I look at how that teacher performed compared to a teacher who actually knew what they were doing, the difference is night and day. Some people were born to be teachers. Some people were born to give out assignments.

I find it difficulty to take the notion that students could design their own grade-school curriculum seriously. As you mentioned on more than one occasion thus-far, you were not particularly fond of homework or studying (many students are of like mind on this - as I'm sure you're aware). I think it would be tragic to see students allowed to take a bunch of nonsense physical education courses while being allowed to bypass literature, history, mathematics, sciences, etc.

As for the performance of teachers, I think there is a very nasty tendency for administrators, parents, and students alike to shuffle most of the blame onto regular educators. Yes, I have seen and been under the tutelage of some very obviously "bad," teachers in my lifetime; however, I would not use this as a write-off to excuse poor policy, lack of parenting, and systemic lack of resources. Many of the best teachers in grammar school lack the funding to be supplied with chalk and printed copies of their exams. You honestly have to love the job in some form or fashion to take on such a burden.

I'm never snapping my fingers again.

Oh, balls, that's a lot to reply to.

I've looked at the acceptance rates of most Washington state universities and a 4.0 is a shoe in regardless of the classes taken. I know that the admission essay is weighed along with the classes you took and the background you provide; I'm not saying that colleges are denying anybody. I'm just trying to say that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the value of the GPA and what college may or may not provide in the long run. I'm sure I could get in to University of Washington or Central Washington University if I really wanted to. I've talked to my career counselor extensively on getting accepted and he said that my GPA may make it a little difficult for me to get in to a 4-year. He also said, however, that the classes I took reflect more than I may realize.

Professors need to be paid, that is an indisputable fact. I could care less about how much professors are paid because I know they've well earned to be in the spot they're in today. And, as you said, administrative costs are what's driving up tuition rates.

I'm just giving my view on what I've heard many of my former classmates say; college makes everything better. That may hold some truth, but it's not a guarantee. I don't mind paying for an education. I do mind, however, the promise made with no guarantee. If I'm going to put my time, money, and effort into something, I want to make sure that I get back what I put in. That's what an investment is.