OK, so look at where you are and see how you can make something positive out of it. Take control of your life, and set out to do something with it. You can get a lot of good experience in the military, so think of it as stepping stone to something else (assuming it isn’t your career choice). Just being able to support yourself, as you are now, is a good thing. Work from there, and don’t let outside circumstances bring you down. BTW, just from the way you write you seem like a well-above-average person, intelligence wise.
Coincidentally, I have both undergraduate and graduate degrees in anthropology. I’ve never made a buck in the field of anthropology. But I did attend a rather prestigious college and employers are impressed that I completed the programs in four and two years. (I had to work a couple jobs and take out loans, but it wasn’t terribly difficult.)
When I enrolled, I promised myself that I would spend just as much time on elective classes (general requirements) as on my required classes for my major. Every term I went through the course catalog and selected a wide variety of courses just for the educational experience. I took several fine arts courses, several philosophy courses, a couple courses on the New and Old Testaments, a course on post-Meiji Japan, and many others. I worked hard and got better grades in these than I did in my major.
I firmly believe that these classes helped me in numerous ways in my professional life. And, frankly, my life would be quite a bit emptier if I had not been exposed to these lectures, books, materials, and discussions. I wish I could find adult education courses now that are as challenging as those courses were back in college and grad school.
OK, you’re unhappy with some of the choices you made.
Ask yourself this: what do you want to do for the rest of your life?
One GOOD thing that has come out of this is that you have proven you CAN complete something, even something you think is pointless, worthless, and an expensive waste of time. That says you have a lot of self-discipline. You also have some idea of what you DON’T want to do, so that eliminates some stuff from consideration.
Find something you WANT to do and apply that same self-discipline and worth ethic.
Is making money your goal?
Is having a lot of time off to goof around while having enough to pay your essential bills important?
How lavish or spartan a physical environment are you comfortable with?
Yeah, you thought I was going to ask you about professions and careers, didn’t you? What you need to do is figure out what you actually want in life THEN find a career (or at least a job-to-pay-the-bills) that fits it.
What do YOU want to do? What kind of work do you find rewarding, or at least tolerable? Do you like interacting with people, or do you prefer to not have a lot of people contact? Do you like variety or routine?
You’ve got some serious valuable skills there, now put them to use for you. Even if you’ve made mistakes you are, apparently, able to support yourself as an independent adult which is not a bad thing to accomplish.
Thank you. I work as an aircraft mechanic for the army. I don’t get out until around this time in 2022, but I’ve already got a plan. I plan to use my GI Bill to study to get my A&P (Airframe and Powerplant) licence. I’m also saving up every penny I can. An A&P licence + the good bit of money I’ll have saved up + my over 5 years of job experience + my college degree and I should be basically unstoppable.
I blame K-12. You seem to have had the impression that if you did the bare minimum that was expexted, that would be good enough. K-12 fosters this: we make it all about turning in coupons (assignments) to get grades, like the coupons actually mean anything. Kids focus on getting the correct scribbles on the coupon. They don’t see any connection, they don’t think it’s for anything, they have zero big picture. Most teachers have no vision of a big picture to convey to the kids.
This is why, swear to God, I have quit putting grades on almost anything and spend my energy on feedback, metacognition, and getting kids to see why it matters. Grades are inflated to Hell and back, but test scores have skyrocketed.
You thought school was supposed to “make you” do the stuff that really mattered–the internships, the special projects, the independent study building on what you knew, the networking where you would have learned about industries that might have hired you. But they don’t insist on that. After all, it’s for your good, not theirs. They insist on assignments and tests. But that’s not enough.
There you go! It sounds like you just hit college at a bad time in your life. College definitely isn’t for everyone, and it needn’t be right after HS, either. In fact, I think most people would benefit from a break between HS and college to get a taste of the real world. Or, as they do in some countries, start with an apprenticeship (could be blue collar or white collar) in your junior year of HS, where the idea is that you slowly transition from school to work instead of 100% school directly to 100% work. That latter method, which is what most of us do, makes no sense at all except that it’s the easiest to manage, administratively. But the system should work for the people, not the other way around.
That last post was sort of a 180 deg turn from your OP.
Maybe what we are seeing here is how many think having a college degree should qualify them to walk into their first job and start running the place that day. That might be part of what’s known as the entitled millennial attitude.
It would be better to consider graduation as the starting point and not the finish line. Don’t commencement speeches say anything about that?
Although I can sympathize with how going into so much debt you would expect something more tangible.
I think older workers appreciate the new guy more if he/she is looking to learn the job and don’t act like they have all the answers to everything built in from birth.
You might not think you’ve learned anything but with experience you will probably realize you’re putting knowledge gained from school to use and develop a whole new understanding of it.
The problem is that the larger the percentage of people attend college, the less anyone else is going to be impressed with a college degree. Get a degree when 5% of all people do? You’re golden. Get a degree when 50% of people do? What else you got?
I agree with Gato - you did it wrong. Not to say I did it exactly right. I took 11 years to get my degree. Started in 1966, dropped out and went to work in 68, then went back in 75, graduated in 77. Paid for it all myself, which sadly you can’t do these days.
But I would love to go back to college. I learned to love learning from my college work. I have a BBA and some work toward an MBA and that bachelor’s degree has sent me to five foreign countries on somebody else’s dime. I now do consulting work in addition to running my Taekwondo school and I knock back 80 clams an hour doing it.
I found my public HS education in the 90’s to be worthless. Do you guys realize that I graduated HS without taking a single math class? Last math class was in 8th grade.
I had one class where all the teach did was play documentary videos all day most every day. Another that wouldn’t really teach but rather tell everyone to do these worksheets and give us hours worth of homework a night while not explaining anything during class…actually she didn’t talk much period.
Another teacher that if you coughed or sneezed in class, she would send you to the nurse saying you were disrupting the class except by doing so she was disrupting your education all because you sneezed. Allergy sufferers didn’t make the semester. She would also force everyone to line up their desks so they were inline perfectly and other dictator like things…we called her Ms Hitler.
Another teach I had liked to ignore bullies as they tormented some of us during class. And of course Mr Ellis…oh Mr Ellis, he’d give everyone an A+ if you filled out the front and back of a paper with gibberish writing because he never read them but rather just glanced to see if it was filled out front and back.
I honestly think the school rigged the SAT tests so it appeared everyone was passing so they’d get their funding.
I was actually so unprepared for college that I was unable to attend. My peers were the same, I didn’t know anyone in my graduating class that finished college.
Granted education is up to the child but when you have teachers that either let you get away without doing anything or just pass you along regardless then from a Childs mind perspective…why would you bother? *edit. Just basically saying that there are a lot of bad teachers out there and I think I had most all of them as I could go on to mention quite a few more during my 9-12 yrs and a few during elementary.
Computers were still new and just exploding into popularity at the time and lots of people were going around telling computer science graduates that they’d have a job for life just because of the degree
Concepts like Moore’s Law were just being discovered and talked about so the technology itself didn’t seem as short-lived (yet)
And make no mistake, unlike our OP, I made good use of my degree and it launched me into a pretty good programming career (rants in other threads notwithstanding). Even today, after dropping out of the tech sphere and doing business analysis, I’m able to hold intelligent conversations with developers and architects. The concepts I learned in college are still with me. I value my degree still and somewhat resent it that others see it as obsolete other than to check a box on the HR forms.
So did the college force you to take all these extraneous courses, or were you taking them to avoid your major?
Why didn’t you take courses that would or could be at least tangentially related to your major or professional life? Basic computer and typing, math, writing classes, etc?
Or are you just blaming them for allowing you to get away with this?
Wow. What state were you in? I’m from Alabama, and I think we required 2 years of math (and 2 of science) to graduate in the late 90s. I was college prep classes and they only required 3 years of math, though I took 4. I understand it changed to 4 years of math for the kids younger than us (we called it 4x4 because graduation requirement became 4 credits math, 4 credits science, 4 credits English, 4 credits social studies).
And I suspect that you probably got more out of college than you realize. The fact that you finished is accomplishment, if nothing else. And it seems that now you realize the value of having a long-term plan (air frame and power plant). Be prepared for contingencies, though.
From the careers listed here, it looks to me like every job on the manufacturing plant floor above the level of Rosie the riveter and Lunchpail Dale. These are the ones that work along side and daily direct the activities of the union workers. Includes some of the more specialty type plant floor positions. Pretty much the lower levels of management that report to the business degree people. These people are the ones responsible for actually implementing the corporate policies such as 5S, ISO9000, GMP.
In that case, your degree probably was from so long ago that the content is mostly out of date. It’s still good to have though, so long as you’ve been building on it since then.
I feel like the tech industry has become too enamored with what’s “new” and the mythology of the boy genius dropping out of college to start his own company. I’m sure there are many underlying concepts in mathematics and computer theory that are just as relevant as they were 30 years ago.
Then you’ve never had to look in the face of a job application that says “BS or equivalent required”. That’s the bottom rung of many good jobs. Even if you don’t take them, your life is better for at least having more options.
Five years from now you’ll be bitching about the time you spent in the Army. If you think your college degree is unhelpful, ask people who pulled an 8-year military stint with no sense of purpose or career planning. That’s not the Army’s fault; they can provide you opportunities, but they can’t utilize them for you.
I will also add…
Go get yourself into a masters’ program. It will be 100% topical for the career you choose. But it sounds like you don’t know what a career is, you’re just thinking about jobs. I will give you one piece of advice… if you seek “hard skills” like getting good at a piece of equipment, or some industrial process, you will spend your working life keeping a step ahead of competition from either robots or very motivated people from Asia.
Right now you have a college education, plus 5 years left on your enlistment. Let’s face it… you have no ideas or imagination or initiative, but you have adequate time and resources to pull your head out of your ass. Use it wisely.
All the classes I took that were not directly related to my field of work enchance my work.
Literature, Composition, and Statistics help me read for comprehension and write for content.
History, Philosophy/Humanities, and Governement let me know where we come from, why we hold the ideas, ideals and policies that we do, and how the history of those things affect my work today. We really do stand on the shoulders of giants.
Sociology helps me understand the behavior of the people I interact with- both my clients and my coworkers.
Ethics guides my interactions with others.
I pull ideas from all of these areas every day. When I add all those kinds of things the technical skill necessary to my work, I know why and how to be better at my work.
I hope you have a similar experience when you are able to put it all together.
I’m sorry you’re in a funk about it, but apply the things you learn to the work you do. Maybe you can’t do that today, but I’m sure you will in the future.
