Advice for College Freshmen

Date Posted: November 4th, 2009

It was in my third year of University that I realized something was wrong. I was feeling resentful about how much time I had to spend working on school work. I didn’t have time to work on the things that were important to me or spend time with the people that were important to me. School had become a drudgery. I didn’t enjoy learning about my major, and even worse, the thought of the work I’d be doing when I graduated made my stomach unhappy. Bad signs.

Third year is just about the worst time to have this realization. By this time I was halfway done with my EE major, and most of the credits I had didn’t transfer to anything else I might have wanted to do. Not that I knew what I wanted to do anyway. Ultimately I stuck it out, cared less about my grades and focused on just passing. I also promised myself I wouldn’t actually work in the EE field. GPA doesn’t matter as much when you’re not working your field of study. A degree, no matter what it is, does.

Those were hard years school-wise. I learned a lot about myself and what I wanted out of life, but the cost–monetary and emotional–were awfully high. I don’t know if I’d recommend it to someone else, and I don’t know if there’s much to recommend to someone that far in. At that point I was already tired of school so dropping everything and starting over would have been hard and expensive.

If I were to have a talk with my younger self, I’d have had it with my 18 year-old freshman self. As a freshman I still had energy and wouldn’t have lost much time or money dropping everything and switching to something more me. Here’s what I would have told her:

The Road Less Traveled is not Necessarily the Right Road
I’d had the weird belief that picking a difficult major that few women did, just because I knew I was capable, was a good idea. If I didn’t care at all about the work I did, I suppose that’d be true. I’m a rarity. People would want to hire me.

But that decision to pick a major where I was in a minority severely limited the number of options I had. Psychology, right out. Journalism, yep out. You get the idea. Engineering jobs would be much easier for me to get and would be higher paying from the start. From a strictly practical standpoint it’s not a bad choice.

The problem is that in engineering I’d do alright, but my fire wouldn’t burn that brightly. I would not be living up to my potential.

Doing something Hard is not the same as Doing your Best
I’d really believed that if I picked a major that was easy for me–psychology or journalism or history or musicology–I’d have been wasting my ability. I was capable of doing things much more difficult, therefore I should do them.

The thing is, if you pick something you’re capable of doing but aren’t really interested in you will always be mediocre. My interest had never been truly in engineering or science or math. It was always a forced interest. Whenever I envisioned how I’d spend my spare time it usually wasn’t doing that stuff. I liked those things, I wasn’t afraid of them, but I didn’t love them.

If you can’t imagine spending your spare time doing something, you really shouldn’t be majoring in it. Even if you’re capable, you’ll never be as awesome as if you’d focused on something you loved.

Making Money from Something You Love Won’t Necessarily Cause You to Hate It
The belief that being financially dependent on something you love is a bad idea is a complicated misconception. It’s true if your self-worth is tied into how much money you’re making from your love. If you’re awesome and unappreciated it can be easy to develop a bad feelings toward your loved work. A classical musician who can’t find anyone interested in her music might not be the happiest person ever. An artist who can’t find a buyer has similar problems. She may have to play music or make paintings that don’t meet her standards just to make ends meet. More likely she’ll be stuck working odd jobs to pay rent and do her art on the side. How romantic…

This is really an issue of being dependent on a skill that isn’t valued, not of doing something you love. If you’re doing something you love and it’s valued by others life is pretty good. There’s a certain joy in working on something until you’ve mastered it. There’s also a joy in using your skills to serve others. As long as you focus on how you’ll make it valuable to others, you won’t have to worry too much about hating it.

Which leads me to the next topic: what happens if there’s no obvious career path for your passion? Will you be stuck creating a business that eats your life?

Working for Yourself Does Not Have to Eat Your Life
When I was a freshman I hazily saw my future as working for a big company doing whatever it is Electrical Engineers do. School was the hard part, after that life would be easy street. I’d have time when I got home from my 9-5 day to work on the things that really mattered to me without having to worry about making money from them.

My internships taught me that it wasn’t quite as nice as that. Work’s still challenging, it’s just a different kind of challenge than school. It’ll still takes up a lot of time and energy, the only difference is there’s a paycheck at the end of it. Having the energy when you get home to do anything more than stare at the TV is a challenge.

I’d always lived under the assumption that working for yourself was a time and energy suck, way worse than a 9-5 job. From what I’ve read, though, that’s simply not true. Yes it’s harder to get started, but once your business is working, if you designed it right you’ll have a lot more freedom than with your typical job.

Start Thinking Now About How You’ll Provide Value for Others

It’s one thing to have an interest, it’s another thing for that interest to be of value to anyone else. This goes back to the “Hating What You Love When You Try to Make a Living At It” thing. Be open to ways in which you could use your passion to help others. What kind of change do you want to create in the world? What will people pay you for? What will be worth their money? Thinking in terms of service goes a long way toward making the act of making money more palatable. The earlier you think about how you can turn your passions into value the easier it will be to pick good, useful classes and put yourself in positions to meet the right people too.

If I’d have had these beliefs as a freshman, I’d have had a much more useful and less painful college experience. Hopefully all you youngins out there won’t make the same mistakes I did. We need more people who love what they do.

Another Article You Might be Interested in: 15 Signs You May Have Picked the Wrong Major (or Career)

Tags: Career, Character-Development, College, Purpose.
Posted at 1:15 pm

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