Dr. Julie-Ann McFann over at Around the Academy wrote a beautiful post about the new GI Bill issue. She writes from the perspective of not only the daughter-in-law of a WWII veteran who benefited greatly from the GI Bill, but also as an educator who has taught students that enlisted in the military because it was the most realistic shot any of them had at paying for a college education. She’s as cranky as I am about the whole thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

According to the Wall Street Journal, recent college grads are giving up on trying to find a decent job in the currently crappy job market, and are opting instead to spend a year or two working and/or volunteering for one of the following world-improvement organizations:

Peace Corps
AmeriCorps
Teach for America
Jesuit Volunteers
WorldTeach

The applicant and enlistment numbers for these organizations have been increasing over the past few years. The Peace Corps numbers for 2007 were the highest they’d been since the 1970s, and Teach for America has had a 36% increase since last year.

The job market does kind of blow at the moment, but I think a large part of what drives the twenty-somethings to do what they can to change the world for the better is that they are a pretty aware generation as far as the plight of their fellow man goes. As good as this stuff looks on a résumé, I find it hard to believe that huge increase in low- or no-pay enlistment is due to a bunch of shiny newly-grads wanting to add some stellar bullet points. I think they might just be nice. In which case, I’m very impressed.

Further Reading:

Why Teach for America
College Grads Are Not Just Chasing the Almighty Dollar
Obama: Can We Get a Little Service Here?
2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change

Posted by Alexa Harrington

And now here’s some good news (and some super cheerful flower pictures) to balance out the bad news of the previous post (and my constant ranting about the SAT). The San Francisco Chronicle had a happy story about Carolyn Barnes, a young woman who grew up with way more reality to deal with than any kid should. (The complicated childhood isn’t the happy part). After high school she attended Virginia Tech on a full scholarship, graduated in three years at the top of her class, and is now twenty years old and about to begin her five-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. (This is pretty happy, but it gets better).

All of that would be good and wonderful enough. But in addition to using her brain to move herself in a happier direction, she’s planning on using her educational acquisitions (that full noggin of hers) to help ‘empower the poor.’ She’ll be working toward her doctorate in political science and public policy when she starts at the Univ. of Michigan, and wants to use her understanding of the subject matter — on both a personal and an intellectual level—to ‘become an expert on social welfare policy.’ See? Good and happy news. Someone with a kind soul who is using her powers to help her fellow humans.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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

In the Unconventional Career Advice category, I’m putting Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up. I’m a big fan of Martin’s writing, so it was a given that I would read his recent book about his stand-up comedy career.

I was expecting a well-written description of what happened in the 1970s, when he’d already made a name for himself and was selling out gigantic arenas. He does cover that, but the main focus of the book is everything leading up to that point, all of which turns out to be much more interesting.

Obviously, if you’re planning on becoming a stand-up comedian when you grow up, you could do worse than take advice from Steve Martin. But while I was reading the book, I kept seeing how solid and telling and honest and thorough Martin’s ‘advice’ is, and therefore how relevant that makes it for any other endeavor. He doesn’t even necessarily intend for it to be an advisory, how-to volume; his main intent is to explain how and why he made such an all-consuming journey.

Cal Newport, over at Study Hacks, was also struck by how well the book works as advice on more than just becoming a comedian. You should read the excellent post he has about how to become famous using ‘the Steve Martin method,’ which he outlines perfectly in the post.

Gary Woodill at Brandon Hall Research uses Martin’s memoir, along with Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary, Comedian, as examples of deep learning, which is the type of learning that takes “years to acquire, engaged immersion in the world, and lots of hard work.” Surface learning, on the other hand, requires much less time and effort. Surface learning is just the memorization of (and not the full-on learning of) the material or the process.

There is nothing ‘surface’ about Steve Martin’s comedic process; he swims in it, lives it, and breathes it for eighteen years until he burns out and walks away. It’s exhausting to read about, but it’s also pretty damned riveting to follow someone’s intense and incredibly focused journey to success. He doesn’t let up, he’s constantly learning and revising and thinking about the details and trying to grok the bigger picture. I think if you have that much focus and energy and depth of thought to put into something, you’re going to be okay.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I freely admit to not being (wo)man enough to allow my two-year-old son to play with items 2 and 6 on the list of things Gever Tulley of the Tinkering School says we should let our kids play with. I do, however, absolutely agree with what he says about letting our kids explore their world and that risk-taking is an important part of the learning process. Watching the video (see below) of Tulley’s talk at TED.com will help any parent understand why their kids should be allowed to engage in the following activities:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA
6. Drive a car

Open Education’s article about Tulley’s philosophy on risk-taking segues from a paper published a few years ago about how risk is viewed in our society: Understanding the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk. None is somehow considered best, but what does that mean for society later on down the road? What will our kids have learned if they’ve never been allowed to explore and take risks? How are they supposed to figure out how to move through the world if they’re so padded and coddled that they effectively go through childhood with fuzzy blinders on and are never aware of their surrounding and how to make good decisions?

I don’t let my kids play in traffic, and I’m a huge fan of the seat belt, and as much as I want my kids to be safe in the world, even I am reduced to head-shaking disgust and disappointment when I go to the park and all the playground equipment has warning labels worthy of a recently-sued fast food franchise.

Yes, I get it already: if my kid falls off of this particular piece of equipment, he may very well sustain bodily injuries that could result in death; I get it that it’s my choice to let him play on said equipment; and I also get it that apparently, because you’ve slapped a humongous yellow warning label on your big plastic slide, it will be tougher for me to sue you.

Sometimes I want to go back in time, find some primordial ooze, and apologize profusely to any and all single-celled creatures I can scoop up for humanity having evolved into the warning-label freaks we are today. I’m not going to sue a playground equipment company. Good grief. I’m just happy they put wood chips under the equipment these days. Although, who knows what that’s doing to the gene pool.

Anyway, Tulley has a good philosophy about how to teach our children independence and awareness of themselves and of their surroundings. Watching his talk is pretty convincing; afterwards I was ready to teach my six-year-old to build stuff using something more powerful than a hammer and nails.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Again I say: there but for the grace of All Things Holy go I. A phone call to my parental units might be in order so I can thank them excessively for bringing me into this world at a time when computers took up entire rooms, tiny technology was available only in science fiction books, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook hadn’t yet been conceived of.

By no means was I an over-the-top party girl in high school or college, but I feel confident that had the technology been in place, I could have certainly captured some detrimental moments for posterity. Any number of which, I can guarantee, would somehow, somewhere, have been unearthed by a prospective employer.

Bowling Green’s online newspaper has an article up about the increasingly standard use employers make of sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen job applicants. I don’t agree with the practice, and part of me feels like it’s an invasion of privacy for employers to go digging around online for information. Which brings me around to the impossible-to-refute point that nothing posted online where the whole world can see it can be considered personal or private.

It sucks that teens and twenty-somethings have to work harder that any other generation since the Victorian age to mind their reputations, but all this technology is probably here to stay. Don’t put s**t out there that you don’t want people to see. Like all things logical, it’s elegant in its simplicity. So either keep your proverbial pants on or mark the “friends only” box on your chosen social networking site. Good luck.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Education doesn’t stop, even after you’ve finished that last final exam and have turned in that last paper. Fruit flies have an average life span of only 37 days, their brains are minuscule, and they still have to endure learning experiences every damn day. So, comparatively speaking, humans have thousands more learning opportunities in our lifetimes.

Not news you want to hear right after graduation, I realize. Please don’t kill the messenger. I recall hollering with glee, ”I’m never reading anything but fiction again!” after what I thought would be my last final for a while. And then I went back to school because I just couldn’t get enough.

To help you with the learning part of life, and to hopefully avoid the painful mistakes, I have an awesomely simplified resource for post-college adult responsibility that will help you to understand the grown-up world of money, even if you’re in your twenties and are pretty sure you don’t need to know about something you don’t have yet.

Most college graduates are pretty new to the concept of money coming in, even if it’s at a trickle. Ramit Sethi’s site, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has a huge number of articles, resources and advice on how to deal with the having (or not, as the case may be) of money. Sethi explains the hell out of retirement planning; a two-year-old could understand it (and find it necessary). He’s also got great information on simple stuff college students can use, like how to use a separate debit card for an enveloping system, or more complicated topics like personal entrepreneurship or investing.

Go learn something and try not to screw up your finances at a young age.

Posted by Alexa Harrington