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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to downvote you for it, but this is terrible advice. If you're graduating form high school and don't know what you want to do for a living, don't make a multi-year commitment to a job that has a very significant chance of ruining your life. You can get out of waiting tables after 12 months if you want to, but you can't just drop out of the army, and waiting tables has a significantly smaller chance of removing one or more of your limbs.

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Depending on where you get your figures from, somewhere between 80-85% of the jobs in the US military are non-combat, where there is as little risk of losing a limb as there is going about your day-to-day civilian life and losing a limb in a car crash.

If you didn't find something in your breadth-but-not-depth high school studies that grabbed your interest to the point where you decide that it's worth pursuing a four-year college commitment to study it in further depth, I struggle to understand how twelve months in a minimum wage job (a repetitive daily routine that affords you little if any spending money) would help clarify a direction.

Your cautionary advice could also be directed to students who are unsure what they want to study and willing to go into serious debt to aimlessly explore. Sure you sign a year-long contract, but the military pays for it.

And while waiting tables, you might consider community college. It's a lot cheaper way to try some things and figure out what you want.

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