Don’t stay with someone in a relationship because it is easier than breaking up. If you are not committed and the magic is gone, end it now. If you hold on, you are just going to end up breaking up later, and you’ll have missed a lot of opportunities in your life while you were investing in something that is going nowhere.
Don’t stay in a relationship if there are red flags. Those red flags mean something. Bad things will eventually happen.
Don’t cheat, and don’t get with a cheater. Beyond morals, on a practical level you will lose in the end.
Don’t explore depression. If it comes knocking on your door, slam that door shut. Don’t invite it in for tea. Don’t find it charming. Just reject it. You think you want to see over that edge, but you don’t. Don’t let it suck you in.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind sharing, what experience did you have that would cause you to issue such a warning? Because I would actually recommend the opposite (of course with the obligatory caveats about staying away from dirty old men and all that).
My school was huge but my major department, biology, was small. It was further divided into tracks, like microbiology, molecular biology, and ecology. We eco-hippies naturally gravitated to the old scruffy patriach of our program, especially since he taught most of the classes. He would take us camping and on road trips in the department’s beat-up van (it was truly from the 70s). We would go canoing with alligators, snorkling in springs with manatees (didn’t get to see any though :(), and trudge through thigh-high marsh mud to take depth measurements at high tide…all in pitch-black darkness (it’s fun when you’re in your 20s, but no way I’d want to do it now!) Once he took a bunch of us to his house (we were on our way to Stone Mountain and he needed to get something). It was the only time I’d ever gotten to see where one of my professors lived; before that, they just existed within the walls of the classroom, recessing back into them when class was over. Kinda like how those robotic animals at Chuckie Cheese do ;). He gave us the key to the lab so that we could do our wet chemistry on our own schedules…a priviledge that I’m sure few of the other biology majors enjoyed. Shortly after I graduated, he invited me and another classmate to join him on a weekend stay at our favorite barrier island, Sapelo. He was old and given to making racist jokes at my expense (one of his flaws, yes, and it DID work a nerve), but he wasn’t dirty. We had good, clean, educational fun, just the three of us, and I got a chance to say good-bye to a pristine world of river dolphins and sea cucumbers. I must say, if I hadn’t spent so much time with this particular professor, college would have been a lot more unbearable and I probably wouldn’t have had enough confidence to go to graduate school. He was one of two professors at my life-choking university that made me believe that I was as smart and capable as everyone else.
So I guess in my experience, it pays to hang around certain professors. But I know not all close interactions with them have such happy endings.
Don’t let a computer illiterate person decide which certification program to enroll in just because “this one seems to be the most popular.” Because then you will be stuck trying to absorb all kinds of boring networking/sysadmin knowledge when you’d rather be learning to write code, and you’ll end up dropping out of the program and going into software development anyway. In fact, don’t let anyone convince you to go to school for computers simply because the field is lucrative when your real passions are chemistry and astronomy.
Don’t try to overdose on painkillers. Seriously, don’t do it. You will severely regret it the next day and it will take you months to get back to your normal self.
Unfortunately, my experience was that professors who do all this personal stuff with students do not understand boundaries. Sooner or later, they really screw you up, emotionally or professionally or probably both. If I could do grad school again I’d much rather have a professor with no interest in seeing me off-campus.
I’m not the complete negative nelly lawyer type (don’t goooooooooooo!) since my law school experience was good (not great) and I never spent a day unemployed as an attorney, but I do advise people who are considering law as a career when they’re very young (18-ish) to think about keeping their options open academically and not jumping to law just because they hate math and their parents want them to have a high-income career.
Mainly because that’s how I ended up in law school and 13 years later it turned out that while I’m not as good at math as my genius father, I am actually very good, and my interests had switched from corporate law to finance so I had to spend shitloads of money taking courses to bring myself up to speed on it and get into a nice MBA program. Oh, and the reason I have to go the MBA route as opposed to switch directly (which a lot of lawyers with corporate transactional experience like mine have done) is because I have…the humanities/social science undergrad degree. Yay!
For that matter, I usually advise people who want to uber-specialise in a humanities/non quant undergrad to at least toss some business courses into the mix, or take a quantitative minor so they have more career options coming out of undergrad.
You know, all the stuff my parents begged me to do and I didn’t.
Don’t marry someone if there are ANY warning signs or reservations about it.
Don’t do it because all your friends are married and you’re left out of activities for being single.
Don’t do it because you’ve been single all your life and really want to be married.
Don’t hold back on anything because you’re afraid. You can take the shot and miss. But if you never take the shot out of fear of missing, you are chosing to miss without trying.
Don’t do anything because other people expect you to do it, unless it is your duty to do so.
Other people have their own ideas, their own way of doing things, and their own ideas of who you are. You are not bound by their expectations or demands.
Don’t blow off taking care of yourself. You’re the only one who will take care of yourself. As above, other people will ask you to blow off your own needs to meet theirs. Don’t do it.
I hung around with exactly this kind of professor, too. But the van was brand new. It actually WAS the 70’s.
By the way, I love your earlier advice, too. I second the suggestion that if people want life to turn out well, they should learn SAS. In particular, the macro facility, the annotate facility, proc nlin, and the x command for system interfacing are truly great.
