Yahoo Finance’s Living Not So Fabulously is produced by Dennis Golin.
You just shared about how um you went to school for French classical French Horn and that wasn’t necessarily the most lucrative career path. With the growing student loan debt crisis and seemingly no support from Washington anytime soon, how do you, what’s your advice for to graduates who are struggling with finding a job, especially ones commensurate with their student loans.
Well, I think that’s true for most degrees right now. I think job security itself is becoming an increasingly antiquated term. Um, you know, even people, I went to the University of Illinois for undergrad, and that was a fabulous school for and is a fabulous school for computer science, for example. Um, and so kind of what you the talk on campus was, well if you’re in Comp Sci, you’re pretty much set for life. But then, you know, a piece actually came out, I think it was in New York Times last year, talking about how for for computer scientists, you know, the the skills that are being learned in college now are more directly relevant. People computer scientists my age did not learn machine learning at university. And now it is like absolu like absolutely essential that that’s one of the core things you learn because that’s so much of what it is now, right? So nothing’s guaranteed. Nothing’s I mean, medicine, law, you know, everything is changing so much. And so, I think what comes up with with college and with university is pursuing the things that you’re passionate about, pursuing things that are related to continuing to educate your skill yourself and actually developing those skills, because it’s through that process that you’re going to figure out what you actually want to do. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, right? I don’t know if the two of you know yet. And I think that’s true for a lot of people. and so it’s, um, so I think it does have to be looked at as an investment in your intellectual capital, so to speak, right? and just being able to think critically. And also the college experience. For me, I grew up in the rural Midwest. I grew up not around any gay people. Um, it was absolutely my game plan to stay in the closet when I was in high school and get the biggest, fattest scholarship I could to get as far away as I could for college so that I could start my new life coming out as a gay man and learn how to be gay as an adult, you know, living on my own. That was actually a substantial factor for me in terms of my academic motivation. You know, I didn’t I didn’t care that much about math, but I was going to do well in math class in order to potentially pursue that, pursue that, um financial solution and pursue that solution for my young adult life to to go to school, to get away from home, and to get that experience of living by myself and being in a new city and making new friends.
