I’ve been catching up on my blog reading since returning from vacation. While I was gone, I missed Penelope Trunk’s post about what a load of BS the idea of living up to your potential is. As someone who spent years turning herself inside out with over-achiever stress, I tend to agree.
Only twice, in all my years of striving for perfection and what I saw as my ultimate goal of the most excellent, marvelously achieved(diff word), fully potentialed version of me, did I ever feel satisfied, content or happy. Both instances were fleeting: the four months I spent traveling, and my senior year at Evergreen. Within a month of completing each of those, I was jumping into new plans and insane goals and could never seem to hold on to the feeling that I was done or that it was okay for me to stop. No matter how hard I worked, I never seemed to get any closer to being complete.
I painted such a golden portrait of what I saw as the future me. I conceived that image of myself when I was still in high school. I have a few pressing bits to attend to in my past should I ever have a few moments alone with a time machine, but if the powers that be ever decide to slingshot me back to high school for five minutes, I will happily find 1990s me and tell myself that life has the potential to be an enjoyable adventure, so ease the hell up, dammit.
I’m now a reformed over-achieving spaz, and have somehow managed to figure out how to be: a productive member of society while remaining calm and happy; a good parent, wife, friend, and human being; content with what I have at this point in time because life is short and sucking the life out of myself in order to win some imaginary race is a crappy way to mark time until I get squished by the proverbial bus. I’ve done the research, and happy is better.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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Mindless food service industry jobs have only two redeeming qualities for a college student: nearly unlimited access to free food and a meager paycheck. To avoid smelling like a greasy steamed hot dog and getting paid not nearly enough to smile at horrid customers, please consider a fall internship.
There’s a good chance you’ll make some money (not all internships are the work-for-free variety) and you’ll learn something. It might be valuable knowledge pertaining to your future career, or it might be the priceless realization that, when up-close and ankle deep in what you had imagined was your dream job, it turns out—not so much. It’s always better to know these things in advance.
I myself had a sweet, romantic notion of ornithology (birds and stuff) until I was given the opportunity to replicate the bird population study my grandfather had done 60 years previously at UW’s Friday Harbor Marine Labs. It was when I started seriously considering the use of napalm to decrease the foliage so that I might actually be able to count the damn birds that I realized perhaps ornithology was not something I should pursue.
Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation.
For anyone who has just graduated, this advice may come too late. But if you’re still in the throes of your higher education, Lifehacker.com has a solid, reader-written list of everything they wished they’d been told before they left college for the real world. It’s a pretty long list, but contains useful tidbits nonetheless. Looking down from my worldly and wise vantage point (total crap—I’m 34 but most days I feel more like I’m 12) I can also see that a lot of the words of wisdom are correct. The picture of post-college reality I had when I was 18 turned out to be severely false.
While I was reading through Lifehacker’s article, I was wishing someone had let me in on all of this need-to-know information. I was irate for 0.7 seconds, and then I remembered the teenaged me and couldn’t imagine that charming young lady sitting still long enough or opening her ears wide enough to ever actually hear some adult’s sage advice. So for all I know, I was appropriately advised with regards to college, life, and reality and I just don’t remember.
It’s worth your time not to make the same mistake. Also, reading advice online is way less annoying than having to sit and listen to some pedantic uncle carry on about his glory days and why YOU should help him to re-live them by following in his footsteps. Or, conversely, Uncle Whatsit hates his life and whippersnapper you should follow his advice to the letter so YOUR life will be fabulous and he can finally achieve his smashing success vicariously through you.
Don’t be anyone’s puppet. Live your own life, make your own decisions and all that. But sometimes older people do have smart stuff to say (usually because they’ve screwed up hugely and have since learned from their mistakes). You can read the Lifehacker thing, pay attention to the choice bits and skip anything smacking of pedantic uncle.
A few choice bits:
“No one cares about what grades you got.”
“Learn that there are things that are very valuable and are not taught in school.”
“If you’re not ready for higher education, then travel.”
“Your major doesn’t necessarily determine your future career path.”
“Don’t get caught up in what other people want you to do.”
“Everything you just learned means nothing in the real world.”
“No matter how prepared you are for Real Life, you’re not. It’s hard, stressful, and sometimes cruel. When your parents said, ‘College was the best time of their lives’, they weren’t kidding.”
“Use your vacation…don’t be that guy.”
“Get to know something abut each of your co-workers. Even, or especially, the quiet or odd ones.”
“Never stop learning and studying.”
“Don’t be afraid to look stupid…..I’ve met plenty of people I didn’t like, but I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t have SOMETHING they could teach me about.”
“Get out there and do things. College gives you plenty of easy opportunities…”
“Real life isn’t like high school, but some workplaces are.”
“The most important skills to remember from college include how to write clearly, how to think critically, and how to get along with people who are not like you.”
“Don’t be afraid of anything.”
“It’s just a job.”
“People you went to high school with won’t matter in 2-3 years. Quit worrying about them.”
“Floss. Exercise. Like, a lot.”
“Build your own life, don’t leech off of someone else.”
“Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you know everything.”
“Don’t get a credit card from those companies that come to campus and offer a free t-shirt if you apply. They aren’t really your friends and don’t give two craps about you.”
“Be completely honest with yourself and others, even if it means taking a risk. Tactful bluntness will carry you much further in life than telling people what they want to hear.”
“Time and time again—financial literacy.”
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation.
I’m managing to keep my crankiness under control regarding the new-found commonness of the term gap year. Where in the hell were those two words when I was a senior in high school? On another continent, that’s where. Young non-American adults are apparently encouraged (sometimes even expected) to take a gap year between high school and college. How nice for them.
In the land I am from, saying “I’m taking a year off before I start college,” means one of two things: either you’re a slacker and have no direction and do not wish to succeed in life, or your parents aren’t going to foot the tuition bill and you need a little time to think before you leap into the Student Loan Chasm of Doom.
So, clearly, as I was a spoiled girl (college paid for) with so much direction and focus it was coming out of my bottom (if you can convince yourself that you have a plan, then you can convince your family, too. It’s called suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it’s also called bull****), I went directly from high school to Cal State and did not pass Go. I took my break in the middle of my undergrad degree.
When I took my gap year, it was not referred to as such. It wasn’t even viewed as such. It was viewed by my family as “The year Alexa didn’t apply to medical school.” No, I was never planning on applying to medical school. Which explains my surprise upon learning that this was the plan as my grandparents saw it. So I didn’t see how taking part of a year off to work and travel was in any way going to interrupt my here-to-for unmentioned medical school application process.
Logic is not a language that translates well between generations, so my grandparents and I had to agree to not get along for a while. They came on board with the Europe Trip when my foster brother and I started sending very entertaining letters home. On paper. (It was like a blog, except that it was 1996 and it required postage stamps.)
Anyway, taking a gap year is normal if you grew up not in the U.S. And, oh happy day for everyone who isn’t me, parents across America are starting to accept the whole idea of their kiddos taking a year off between high school and college. I’m still reeling from the whole idea that my Year of Flake is suddenly a socially acceptable Gap Year. I‘m trying to recover from the reel and argue absolutely for taking a gap year if you are so inclined.
For the record, it was the best year ever. What do you learn when you’re not in school? A lot if your eyes are open. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in school, I love learning, and I’m better at being a student than I am at most other ventures. To be fair, I’ve spent more years as a student than I have at everything else except, you know, breathing. But sometimes you need to look up and see what’s happening outside the education furrow / rut you’ve been in for so long.
If you stare at books and the insides of lecture halls for years on end, eventually it all starts to blur together into one long road of memorization and red tape, punctuated by especially brutal finals or papers or lab write-ups. Looking at real life for even a few months gives you something solid to spackle your book knowledge to. Context and objectivity are pretty interesting animals. Who you are and how the world works when you’re in high school are changed completely when you hit college. The same goes for you in school vs. you in the world. Or you in the U.S. vs. you traveling across another continent.
And, yes, of course I grew, I learned, I came back a better version of me. I honestly don’t know how someone could do something different and manage to not learn from it. So I won’t go into the depth or the amazingness of the pre- vs. post-Gap Year Alexa. It was good, it was worth it, I highly recommend stepping outside of your comfort zone and seeing the world and yourself from another angle. And, as with everything in life, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. That’s right. Also, there’s no free lunch. I’m going to start my own inspirational poster company.
You probably shouldn’t go into it thinking that your gap year will be easier than school. If you do it right, it’ll probably be more fun, but not so much with the easy. I worked to earn the money for the trip. (That’s how I learned the valuable “food service sucks” lesson). I planned the trip (in cahoots with my foster brother). I had to work out traveling with another human (foster brother who may actually be an alien) and maintaining a good friendship.
If the red tape wasn’t properly dealt with prior to departure, I wasn’t going to be allowed to leave the country. If I pissed off a Turkish train conductor in Istanbul, I was the one who was going to be escorted from the train station before I ended up in a Turkish prison (the train guy started it). If all Americans and British passengers were going to be pulled off a Yugoslavian (it was 1996 and still Yugoslavia) train in the middle of nowhere and questioned (not in English) at gunpoint, I was the one who had to figure out how not to get shot. See? All kinds of learning experiences.
My “gap year” (which was less than a year) was amazing. It’s right in there with my senior year at Evergreen as far as how much I learned and how stupidly happy I was. I worked my ass off in both instances and am completely proud of what I managed to pull off.
I’m pro gap year, absolutely. But since I did it in the middle of my college career, and I also did it before it was cool, you might require a few more convincing (read: adult) arguments for taking some time off. Below are three adult arguments for taking a gap year in case you need some back-up logic to convince your parents (or yourself) that we learn better and grow more completely outside of the classroom box, and one excellent list of what to do and how to do it right (I had no big plan, I was flying strictly by the seat of my pants). And one really funny gap year article which you should not show your parents as it’s not that far off the mark.
Randy Pausch passed away today. Death pisses me off, especially when the dead people are fairly young and were exceptional human beings. (Apparently that means I don’t care if old a**holes die). Anyway, Randy Pausch was a Carnegie Mellon professor who taught and researched computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was considered one of the pioneers of virtual reality research.
He was best known to the non-tech world for the Last Lecture he gave at Carnegie Mellon after being diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, entitled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. The book he co-wrote with Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey Zaslow (via cell phone dictation), The Last Lecture, has been on the best-seller list for months.
He was smart, funny, straightforward, and a pretty happy guy both before and after his diagnosis. His students loved him, and as soon as the rest of the world met him via YouTube, they loved him as well.
I think what made the most profound impression on me was the fact that he didn’t do some sappy-ass tear-jerking farewell lecture. He used his final lecture as a way to tell his wife and kids what his childhood dreams had been, how he had gone about trying to realize those dreams, and what he learned from the achievement (or sometimes not quite) of each item on his list.
His lecture was certainly moving, but I wasn’t watching it and thinking words like heartbreaking, bittersweet and poetic. I was thinking, “This guy has always paid attention to what other people had to teach him.” The priceless bits of knowledge he gleaned while moving through life and working his way down his list of childhood dreams are uncomplicated and perfect. If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend watching his lecture.
Does anyone have summer jobs any more, or do the learning opportunities, résumé-building bullet points, key letters of recommendation, and invaluable experience of the summer internship far outweigh table-waiting wages? Summer’s half over; if you’re in the midst of your own personal interning adventure, here are some beneficial words of wisdom to assist you in milking your internship for all it’s worth:
And if this summer’s internship wasn’t all you had hoped it would be, you can start dreaming immediately of landing one of the most coveted internshipsnext summer.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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Friday June 27th 2008, 5:14 pm
Filed under: Advice
I am always happy to hear about people who use their powers for good. Cal Newport over yonder at Study Hacks is in that category, and has worked to bring to our attention the existence of Chris Guillebeau, also in the powers-for-good category. You can read Cal’s interview with Chris here.
Anyone with a blog entitled The Art of Nonconformity gets 20 points right out of the starting gate. And Guillebeau gets extra points for his just-released free PDF entitled A Brief Guide to World Domination (he means it in a benevolent way).
Frequently, the people who are thinking non-sheep-like thoughts and who are moving through the world differently than everyone else are viewed as slackerly or wing-nuttish. ‘Slacker’ isn’t an apt description of Guillebeau as he appears to be in a constant state of forward motion. And I fail to see how being thought of as odd or different or off-the-wall could have negative connotations since the proverbial sheep of the world rarely contribute to the progress or the creative thinking of the herd.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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This exquisitely informative article in the NY Times will help to lessen the shocking dose of reality that might otherwise paralyze the newly graduated twenty-somethings who’ve recently been unleashed on the job market. It sucks to have finally figured out the bureaucratic red tape that is student loans and financial aid, and now you’ve got a whole new mess of paperwork and money-related crap to wade through and comprehend.
The article explains quickly and simply what a newly-minted adult needs to know about retirement, health plans and taxes. These are good things to know about (and to avoid screwing up) sooner rather than later.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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