How about an ACTUARY???
I’ve heard that’s high paying. Would that require a business major or a mathematics major?
It requires you to look it up.
Why are you so focused on what you’re going to be making as soon as you leave school? Money is good. You’ll need it. But will you need $100K when you’re 23? If you make $65K, are you less of a success? Why is this the benchmark you’ve set for yourself?
There’s a lot more to life than your bank balance. When you have down time (which it doesn’t sound like you allow yourself much of), what do you want to do? I have a niece in engineering school (Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech). Since she was younger than you are now she’s wanted to be involved in the engineering of car seats. It’s her passion. When she did community service, she participated in car seat checks given at fire stations and churches to make sure the seats were installed correctly. In her spare time (besides taking AP courses, etc) she would go to stores, borrow carseats, install them in her mother’s car and take pictures. She posted on carseat message boards. This career should give her a reasonably good income, but most importantly, she’ll be doing what she loves.
StG
Actuaries aren’t hired based on what school they went to, they’re hired based on how well they did on their actuarial tests. DO SOME RESEARCH.
Also, $60K as a single 23 year old is a fair amount of money to have if you live in most of the country.
Okay, okay. But at least answer this: Do you need to double major in Mathematics and Business, or is only majoring in Mathematics okay to become an actuary?
The whole point of figuring out what I want to be is so that I know what major I’m going to be taking in college, and then I can see what colleges are good for that major.
I thought the message of the film was that you should do what you are passionate about (and what you’re good at), success will follow.
http://www.beanactuary.org/study/?fa=education-faqs
It took 3 seconds of Googling to find that.
If you have your heart set on going to extremely elite university, you need to stop viewing it as job training. To be an actuary, you could get there through any number of educational routes - math, engineering, business, sociology, etc. You’re going to find out (if you did any research) that this is going to be true for a large number of career paths. Want to be a lawyer? Major is pretty much any damned thing you want - just excel at it, be able to express yourself clearly in writing, and do well on the LSAT. Want to be a lawyer? You can find people who are accepted at top medical schools who were French majors in undergrad.
In other words, the world is not a game of Perfection where everything fits perfectly into a corresponding hole, but no other hole. You have 8 years ahead of you to find out what career you want - in the mean time find out everything else about yourself.
If you’re MIT material, you’re that kid who devised some clever scheme to get all the pegs in the wrong holes without brute force.
Dang it! That should be:
Want to be a lawyer? Major in pretty much any damned thing you want - just excel at it, be able to express yourself clearly in writing, and do well on the LSAT. Want to be a doctor? You can find people who are accepted at top medical schools who were French majors in undergrad.
I recommend Science Fair Season, by Judy Dutton, to the OP. (In fact, it’s a terrific book, and I recommend it to everyone.) It’s about high school students who are really passionate about their research projects, not because they want to get into a prestigious school, although some do, but because they care about the science/engineering involved.
For example, one student is a Native American and lived in an unheated trailer until he figured out how to engineer some heat for himself and his family.
If the film maker’s interested in making documentaries, there’s about a half-dozen stories in here that would be great ones.
(For those with suspicious minds who remember that I’m an author, I’m not this author.)
Another great username/subject response.
I also wanted to draw your attention to the character in the film who was so stressed out by the pressure to succeed that he committed suicide.
I feel bad for jumping in on this thread so late. There is just too many pages to wade through but I’m sure what I’m about to say has already been hashed and rehashed but maybe I can phrase it in a way that would help.
1 - You are way too stressed, and this is not just mumbo jumbo. Anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders are real disorders. They deal with real chemical imbalances in the brain and can be managed with drugs. It’s not much different than your spleen or your kidneys malfunctioning and it will affect your life. You should look into this.
2 - Smart and talented people will succeed regardless of field or school. I was CONVINCED I wanted to be a physics major until I took econ classes. I ended up grabbing an econ minor and there will now forever be a part of me that wonders what-if, especially since a good friend of mine now is at Berkeley doing some wickedly interesting grad work in game theory.
3 - You can find 100k jobs out of college most easily in banking. You can go into banking with pretty much any degree. I know physics majors, math majors, commerce majors, and even philosophy majors who now work on Wall St. Other people who make great money are biomedically related fields, lawyers (but not as well as you’d expect), and of course doctors (but again, not as well as you’d expect). The rest of the 6-figure mid-20-somethings I know find their own way either as entrepreneurs, playing online poker, or whatever hodgepodge way of making money. This really is just an expansion of the 2nd point of not worrying about money if you’re confident in your own abilities.
4 - Good colleges look for well-rounded candidates. Great colleges look for geniuses. Your resume is a fairly standard resume for top-100-bound students the nation over. You’ll have no problem getting into most schools but if you’re looking at MIT, you really need to work your butt off. That’s the problem with giving advice to kids who are looking for Harvard/MIT app advice. There is no “one way”. I have 3 friends who got into MIT. One kid came up with his own robotics programming language. Another did a science experiment and extracted some chemical from arctic fish blood to use as antifreeze. Another kid rode with EMTs his entire junior and senior year and interned at a biomedical engineering firm. There’s just no telling. You can try to emulate those resumes but there’s no guarantee.
5 - It really doesn’t bode well for you to be so restrictive and rigid in your thinking. Aiming for set SAT scores, projecting your future paycheck, and looking at what other people HAVE done really puts on the blinders and just feeds into the cookie-cutterness of your application. That’s why so many people have told you to do what you like and to like what you do. If you genuinely have an affinity for robotics, you might go ahead and make headway in robotics and stamp your own admission ticket. However, if you don’t, you won’t be able to have anything to show for it other than “Robotics Olympiad 2012-2016” on a resume.
6 - “STEM” is such a wide field with so many jobs. Then to say that you will automatically deserve a six-figure salary in such a smart field with so many smart people in it, and to think it as a HS freshman shows really just how myopic your world-view is. Someone has to pay you a six-figure salary to do six-figure work. In order to do six-figure work you need to possess six-figure abilities. That means to type with proper grammar even in the face of technology (I don’t even know how that applies). That means to be able to think about your ultimate goal (in this case getting into MIT) and problem solve your way into achieving that goal. That means to be able to take advice - even seemingly bad advice - and pick out useful bits out of a pile of dung. If you’re unwilling or incapable of doing these basic things then I’m afraid middle-management is the best you can hope for and that only pays in the mid-60’s at best.
The bit I bolded is the most promising thing you have said in this whole thread. No college will be turned off because you keep playing the violin, even if you dont make a career. It is the kind of thing they like to see, because it shows more of you as a person.
Re your problem 1. these kinds of compulsive thoughts might well be your biggest problem in graduating from MIT, or any good school. Life is full of uncertainty; college will be full of uncertainty (as you are finding out). You need to be able to handle that. Learning to manage your anxiety and perfectionism will become more and more important. You should really think about researching techniques to help you cope, maybe seeing a therapist.
So my last general question maybe is is it okay for me to just keep what I am doing: get straight A’s, get great standerdized test scores, keep playing the violin and really expanding on it, participate in math/science clubs and activities, and try to create a life story. I heard that an excellent method for applying to top schools is having a life story. But my point is, is it okay for me to keep doing what I am doing, or am I lacking something/doing something wrong?
AND PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR ANY GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES! I AM ON A SMARTPHONE!
Short answer: Probably not. You should add a legitimate extracurricular activity that’s also scholastic, usually done in the summer. Internship, independent research, etc. And again, if you ask “like what?” to an internet message board, you’re already a step behind the other kids who are hypercompetitive.
I think if you’re really into music, doing something like organizing a charity violin recital, or even better, getting some of your friends in on a whole charity orchestra night would look really good. But only do it if you want to do that sort of thing, just doing it because you think it will help you get in will probably fail spectacularly.
No, I mean it’s something I would enjoy doing.
But, do you think I should enroll into an internship?
And do I need community service hours, if so how many?
I know the last two questions are probably good for me to ask my guidance counselor about, and the last one should probably be asked by the admissions officer.
But I was just wondering what you had to say about it.