Use the alumni network!!! A surprisingly high percentage of Johnnies manage, after wandering around for five years saying “Wah! I’m confused and possibly useless and I just want to be back in college” – after that – we/they manage through unduplicatable circumstances to fall buttfirst into fabulous and fulfilling careers. With alumni assistance, you may be able to skip forward by five years. I’ll be on campus early next week. Let me know if I can help with specifics.
I’ve even edited my profile, so that the email address now works.
Start some sort of international non-profit foundation for whatever kind of charity work you get all het up about: health care, adult literacy, agriculture, technology, so on. Learn to schmooze for funds and apply for grants. Travel and do good in places where the world needs it.
On that same train of thought (sorry) you could work on a river barge. The advantage is that you will be living at your job for a month at a time so there would be no living expenses. If you could manage to work a year straight you could probably pay your loan off and be done with it.
Advantages, see the world as you boat past it.
Disadvantages, you’re working a month at a time straight.
Au contraire. They give you a bit over $6,000 ‘readjustment allowance’. I know, it’s a drop in the bucket in the light of over $50,000 student debt, but hey, it can certainly keep you in rice and beans until you land that high-paying job. Also, returned volunteers are very well networked with one another; you might be able to land a decent job through them. Trust me on that one. I know a bunch of returned volunteers, and they’re like their own little clique.
But, yes, sorry, you have to live in a third-world country. But at the very worst, it looks really awesome on a résumé…
If the third world country bit gets you down on the Peace Corps, you might consider the domestic Americorps program. They do one year commitments instead of two, and you stay in the United States. It doesn’t pay much (I think something like $12,000/year), but your loans will be deferred and you get a ~$5,000 education award after completing the year.
There are a variety of different programs you can choose from based all over the United States, and you can almost certainly find something you’re passionate about. It’s also a pretty good way to get a taste of the working environment in the field you end up choosing - you can see if it’s something you think you might want to do more of, and you’ll come out of it with some more experience and connections you can bring to your next job.
Don’t go to law school. There are only a couple good reasons to go to law school and many many bad reasons. I get the sense that your reason is not in the good category. I’m there right now, and half my classmates hate their lives, and will continue to hate their lives for the next 20 years, because they chose law school for the wrong reason.
Wrong reasons include:[ul][li]Your parents are pressuring you into it.[/li][li]It seems like it’ll be lucrative.[/li][li]You don’t want to quit going to school. (<–You?)[/li][li]You want to be a “doctor-or-lawyer” but you don’t have the science for med school.[/li][li]You like arguing and consider yourself very persuasive.[/li][li]Wow. Google “bad reasons” “law school” and check about a hundred pages with much better lists than this. Read them, and think to yourself: “Whoa, that’s me.”[/ul]Right reasons are:[ul][*]You already understand the practice of law and you already have a real passion for it.[/li][li]That’s about it.[/ul]Your job out of law school is heavily influenced by your grades in law school, so if you’re not the high-grades type, your results will be unsatisfactory. [/li]
My advice? Go to Israel! Then wait tables or something for a couple of years to get some good life experience, then go back to school and get a graduate degree in international relations. Go to work in a US embassy in some obscure country. Spend 10 years working your way up until you are a big wig diplomat. Travel around the world mending relations between various belligerent nations while quietly cosying up to one of the two major American political parties. Eventually use your political connections to get a job with the US Secretary of State. When he becomes president, have him appoint you the new Secretary of State. (You think I’m kidding, but somebody has to be Secretary of State in 2032-2040: why not you? What do you think the 2032 SoS is doing right now, in 2008?) Enjoy that post for eight years, then run for President. Lose narrowly, then retire and write your memoirs. Also, take up bowling.
In one of your posts, you raise the possibility of going to grad school. There are only two good reasons to go to grad school. Those are:
- You have a deep, passionate, and abiding drive to devote your life to a particular field or project, and
- You really need the accreditation for advancement or greater opportunities in a particular career you’ve already started.
Bad reasons for going to grad school include:
- It looks like more fun or would give you more hipster bragging rights than getting a “real” job.
- The job market is bad, and further education will pay off someday, even though you don’t know how.
- You don’t know what you want to do with your life, and going to grad school would help you put off that decision for a few more years.
- Any reason other than the two good reasons I’ve mentioned above.
Grad school can be pretty isolating, ego-crushing, and stressful. Not only that, but the opportunity costs are high. If you have no idea what you want to do after you graduate from college, choose something–anything–other than going to grad school.
As someone who works with lawyers professionally on a regular basis, I should also point out that most of them are douchebags. They may have started out as perfectly normal, nice people, but the constant pressure to succeed makes most of them bitter, stressed out, arrogant and neurotic.
Listen to Scribble. Scribble is wise. Nobody in their right mind goes to grad school just for kicks.
Does no one go to grad school because they truly feel passionate about something and just want to learn more about it? Because that would be one of my two primary reasons (the other, of course, being that my undergrad degree is kind of a degree in nothing).
If you don’t have to earn a living, go for it. Otherwise, going to grad school without a specific plan is a great way to rack up more debt, kill your social life for several years, and ensure that you’re over-qualified for a lot of jobs. There are a ton of blogs out there written by bitter, bitter folks who lived on Ramen for years, sweated blood over their dissertation, and now feel doomed to a life of adjunct-dom.
Note, though, that my advice applies to grad school in the humanities. Getting an MS in chemistry is probably a whole 'nother ballpark.
If you want to keep going to school, I recommend going to community college and getting training in something practical, rather than heading straight for grad school. If you’re interested in science, you could check into getting certified to do some kind of lab work in the medical field. Or, hell, become a welder for a couple of years. Earn good money, pay down your debts, and figure out where you want to head with your life.
My vote is for Peace Corps.
Yeah, you don’t make a ton of money, but you do get the 5k and honestly most people don’t manage to save 5k in their first couple years out of college even when they have “real” jobs. The standard of living is a little rustic, but it’s comfortable enough and most volunteers here even manage to save a bit. For example, I was able to buy a plane ticket from Cameroon to Mali using my Peace Corps living allowance.
Peace Corps is a good starting point for people who have vague “working internationally helping people” ambitions. It gives you a chance to explore exactly what that entails and decide what parts interest you. It gives you the entry level experience you’ll need to get a job with an NGO, and most importantly it hooks you up into an amazing contact network. There are a lot of returned Peace Corps volunteers in international development, and they are usually pretty eager to hire other returned Peace Corps volunteers. You also have a lot of chance to make contacts with various internation development groups and NGOs while in country.
Finally, if you do decide to go to grad school after, you may find an interesting Fellows USA program that provides some pretty good benefits to returned volunteers.
Anyway, it’s the adventure of a life time, and I wish I had done it right after college instead of kicking around wasting time years on end trying to figure out what to do.
You could do what a couple of my kids did and take a job in Tech Support. It will apparently give you a great deal of perspective on what is desirable in a job and will motivate you to focus on a good job search.
That’s really the only reason to go for an advanced degree in most subjects–after all, it’s not like a PhD in history is a particularly valuable credential in industry. But it really can’t be overstated how hard grad school is. My estimate–and others can comment on this–is that the first two years of a graduate program cover about as much material as the entire four years of an undergrad program. You can’t get through something like that unless you really can’t see any other options for yourself.
I want to be perfectly clear here: I’m a grad student, and I’m a fan of higher education in general. If it’s really the right thing for you to do, then you shouldn’t even hesitate to go for it. But you need to absolutely certain about that, or you’re going to be completely miserable for as long as you stay.
It is hard, and it’s not terribly similar to undergrad. If you’re going because you enjoyed college and want more of the same, you’ll be disappointed.
In astronomy, people do go to grad school because they love it, but it’s uncommon for an astronomy grad student to pay his/her own way through grad school (I’ve never heard of anyone doing it). You almost always get an offer of a fellowship (they give you money for sitting on your ass), a TAship (they give you money for being a TA) or an RAship (they give you money for being a research assistant). These stipends almost always include tuition and fees. Astronomy grad students don’t make as much money as they could if they left school and got a regular job, but they’re not racking up student loan debt, either.
This is so true.
Add me to the chorus of voices telling you not to go to grad school unless you have a really really good reason, and “the love of learning” is not it. I don’t know what I learned in my program. Oh wait, yes I do. Last night I finished a film theory paper that I was really proud of…I realized I was proud of it and thought, “Oh shit, I did it wrong.” Because that’s what I’ve learned in grad school…I’ve done it wrong, do it wrong, and will probably continue to do it wrong. And now I have an MA in British and American Lit (well, I will next week) and I don’t know what the hell to do with it.
Though in my small, small defense, I planned to get a PhD and continue in academia for the rest of my life. I really thought I wanted to be a literature professor. Grad school took that desire, dragged it down a dark alley, beat the fuck out of it, left it for dead, came back the next morning, beat the fuck out of it again, dragged it to the hospital, nursed it back to health, just so it could get the pleasure of stabbing it a hundred times with a rusty knife.
I should have listened when people told me not to go. Though it hasn’t all been bad. I did enjoy my TAship, for the most part, and met some interesting people, and now I know what I don’t want to do. So I guess that’s narrowed things down for me.
Grad school may be right for you one day. There were lots of older people in my program who came back to school for whatever reason. But it doesn’t sound like it’s right for you right now.
I still say your degree doesn’t sound like ‘nothing’, but a lot of ‘something’. I wish I’d done something like that for my undergraduate degree.
Can you give some details about the math and science that you took?
Grad school can also be hell if you don’t have the right personality. If you’re not assertive, self-directing, confident to the point of arrogant, or tolerate of other people’s craziness, then you’ll struggle in a graduate program. Of course, you can pick these things up along the way, but not everyone’s good at adapting. And there’s a less forgiving attitude when you mess up in graduate school, especially if you’re working under a hard-ass advisor.
Also, grad school is free from some of the stress of undergrad, but if you have any depressive/anxiety issues (like I do), then they will only be magnified under the rigors.
Of course, plenty of people go to graduate school because they are passionate and want to continue learning. (I’d like to think this was me, but I fell more into the “I don’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer, so might as well get a Ph.D” category). But the thing is, only rich people can really afford to be so self-indulgent. Supposedly, you went to undergrad and majored in liberal arts because you were already passionate and wanted to continue learning for the sake of learning. So you’ve gotten plenty of this experience. IMHO, the desire to experience even MORE passionate learning isn’t a real good reason to go to grad school. I honestly think you come out of grad school feeling more stupid than you did when you entered, but maybe that’s just me.
Do you feel grown up yet? How are you with speaking off the cuff and in public? How confident are you when people ask you questions? How are your people skills? How willing are you to break out of your comfort zone? Before worrying about the debt thing (which is important, to be sure, but you’re not the only one in that situation), just try to get a good skill set together. You’re aiming to enter the world of social activism, which is admirable, but this line of work almost requires you to be a “people person”. It’s not enough for you to know stuff; you’ve also got to be able to relate to folks. So in looking for jobs, look for something that taps into the extraverted side of your personality. Volunteer for a non-profit even if they don’t have any paying positions available.
(I’d just like to say, I remember when you started posting here as a high school student. Man, does time fly! Little Ninja’s all growed up! :sniff: