When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarter than your peers, but having that initiative lets you avoid competing with them directly. My particular path is just one of many.
Keep in mind that was 17 years ago, how do you know the job market is at all the same now?
I'm on the other side of the hiring table now. I proactively look for students that exhibit these traits. I'm not the only one.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
I paid for school (admittedly not that much, I stayed in state and lived in relatively poor accommodations). I’m also the only one of my siblings to not be a felon or dead before 45. Life is often a game of deltas: given the same or similar starting conditions, where did you wind up?
If you keep making delta positive outcomes, eventually you’ll wind up somewhere interesting.
I cannot think of a single person in my extended family across three generations for whom that heuristic is true. I don’t doubt that it applies in some situations. I can’t tell you what the actual ROI is; but “belonging there” seems a little encumbered by assumptions about the diversity of ways and timings in which young people develop academically and emotionally.
Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)
Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.
How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
1. Fact 1: There is unusually high unemployment rate for new STEM graduates, including those with advanced degrees like MS and PhDs
2. Fact 2: Our politicians and business leaders are noting there is a "massive shortage of workers in STEM" and thus we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to meet the demand.
How can both be true and in line with your position?
Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.
My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.
You don't need to restate your point. I understood and it's what's trite and insulting to new grads.
> Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire.
This isn't the alternative and hasn't been for a decade. It's absolutely mainstream thinking among students and new grads that the traditional career is dead and that they need to take alternative routes, one of the most common being to present themselves as "problem-solvers for hire", with personal brands, turning friends into networks, etc.
It's so common it's a trope, and of course the market of businesses who need problem-solvers for hire is absolutely saturated. It's a segment exploited by employers for cheap labour and terrible opportunities for progression as you're competing against so many people, many in LCOL areas.
So after their entire youth being told the same thing you're saying by podcasters, influencers, slightly older peers, etc and then arriving into a labour market which is absolutely barren, your advice is trite and it is insulting.
It's even worse than when challenged, you assume I must not get your profound advice and choose to reiterate it, instead of reflection on the possibility that the world and opportunities you enjoyed 20 years ago simply don't exist any more. Not that there aren't other opportunities.
> But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system.
The irony of this comment.
> By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
Yes, you and literally everyone else. It's almost ridiculous how out-of-touch this is.
> perhaps fine, for the trades.
As an aside, this is an absurdly arrogant comment.
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
Given that the T" is "Technology" I should hope so. Likewise the "E" and "M" are broad and include many fields that have nothing to do with "tech".
FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).
Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)
In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico
In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants
In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore