While we’re on the topic of student loans and the lifetime of debt college grads will face, here are some informative articles and resources to peruse (find a paper bag and try to remember to breathe slowly and evenly).
The world order has finally reconciled itself! Barbie no longer thinks “Math class is tough!” Now she’s lighting up cubicle jockeys with her smokin’ bod and her tight pants! She will be fetching lattes for no one.
I actually like Barbie, to be honest. I know she’s supposed to be evil and make little girls feel badly about themselves, but I had about 20 Barbies when I was an impressionable young thing and I’ve never had body issues. Besides, how can you not respect a girl who can maintain that posture and walk around 24/7 on her tip-toes with a rack like that? Barbie’s a badass, I don’t care what the angry hippies say.
Which humans grow up wanting to be professors? Usually not the conservatives. Which humans hope to head for a career in nursing? Usually not the boys. According to their paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?”, Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse say nursing is a “gender typed” career, while being a professor is more “politically typed.”
The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.
A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.
“…nerdy, long-winded, secular…” Wait! That exactly describes my grandfathers! They were both total science nerd professors, but whatever. They both were liberal, and both saw themselves heading toward careers as tweed-wearing research profs. Coincidence? I think not.
Gross and Fosse’s theory is 100% right according to my family. But it makes sense in the real world as well. Not that my family doesn’t have a foothold in reality…
Redirecting your thought process is difficult on a good day. Redirecting your post-high school plans is nearly impossible, especially if college has been the one all-consuming thought you and your parents have had since you were exhibiting sheer finger-painting genius in preschool. The farther you’ve driven, the harder it is to turn the car around.
Even though eighteen-year-old me would never have listened to any advice involving my not going to college, that doesn’t mean I was correct in my closed-mindedness. Whether or not it’s advice you want to take, only fools assume their way is always right and disregard all other input and information. (That was directed at me. I’m the idiot. Or, I was the idiot. I’ve made so many horrific blunders that now I’m wise beyond all measure.)
Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist has an excellent piece about college education and what it really means in this day and age. It’s difficult to open one’s mind up and really consider what she says, especially if you’ve grown up thinking the way I do about higher education. But that’s part of growing the hell up and learning to examine all options and relevant information when making a decision. Penelope tends to think outside the box, and the more miles you walk through this world, the more you’ll realize how valuable that quality is.
There are days when one must finally succumb to reality and admit that despite the intense need and desire to beat the To Do List into submission, the day that was once full of productivity possibility is FUBAR to the fullest extent of that term and Plan B is the only viable option.
Below please find Plan B (what I do when everything goes all to hell). It’s a re-post. Not good at reading between the lines? Please see FUBAR above and apply it to my day.
Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.
This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.
My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.
A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.
I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.
I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.
My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.
According to Time Magazine, this has been the decade from hell. Awesome. I’m going to cross “survive a crappy decade” off my list right away.
One could argue the point that it’s going to take us all a while to clean up after a decade this bad. College is too expensive and won’t help anyone to get a job in this economy, so why spend next year working too damn hard at school and the job you have to hold down in order to live somewhere other than a van down by the river?
I would suggest, to the college students (or recent college graduates who still haven’t found a job), that taking a gap year might not be a bad idea. Getting out of the country is the most expensive portion; you’d be surprised by how little money a traveler willing to rough it can subsist on, especially if one avoids Europe.
For inspiration, you can read Cody McKibben’s post over at Thrilling Heroics, in which he wraps up the year he just spent living in Thailand.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
How unfair is it to have gone through 13 grades of school, done everything better than anyone else, been involved in an unreasonable number of activities, been the high school valedictorian, gone off to George Washington University, graduated magna cum laude from the GW business school, applied for dozens of jobs and been turned down for every one of them?
You can read the article in the Washington Post about Melissa Meyer, who is currently living back at home with her successful parents, getting no end of s**t from her successful siblings, and is trying to come to terms with the nearly unacceptable fact that doing everything according to The Plan for a Super Successful Adulthood has not worked out in the slightest. If you string out the factual bits in a line, you’ll see that they go against every property of matter and all laws of nature and physics.
She works the counter in a record store selling CDs and incense and spends her nights working as a hostess in a restaurant. She’s killing herself trying to find a job; she shot for the starlit jobs all GW business school grads are expected to apply for, and is now mucking about in the bottom of the barrel along with all but the handful of fellow GW graduates who won the For God’s Sake, Please Hire Me lottery.
She’s been at it for months and is wanting to take the universe’s big fat hint and just go be something else for a while. Travel that’s totally unrelated to success is her goal. She has certainly paid her dues and moved as many mountains as she could find. Life is short, and rarely works out the way you planned it. I hope she can let go a little and can have a grand and wholly deserved adventure.
Smooth Harold, Blake Snow’s alter ego/blog, has an outstanding list of the 50-Most-Common-Interview-Questions-and-Answers. It’s so good, having access to it makes me feel like a naughty little cheater. Knowing at least fifty of the questions an interviewer might throw at me, as well as solid advice on how I should go about answering them intelligently, reduces my stress level significantly (I prefer not to be caught off guard in situations where everyone is watching me and scoring how well I jump through hoops, climb vertical rock faces, and leap over nether-region-clenching chasms).
I’m not currently on the job hunt, but the Gen-Xers (my people, dude) were cursed several years back when some think-tanker told everyone that we would change jobs and careers a stupid number of times throughout our professional lives. Which basically means that by the time I’m in my sixties and will (hopefully) be a decade or so away from retirement, I’ll be able to interview my parents and my grandparents under the table.
Of course, they will either be already dead or nearly there, so some will argue that it’s not going to be a fair fight. Whatever. I’ll be so cranky about having to switch career paths and jobs every few years that I will no longer give a flying rat’s ass about the obsolete concept of “fairness.”
And what I meant by all that was: Woohoo! Interviews! Go out there and interview your asses off, people! Forward motion is good, and knowing you can nail several of the questions the suits in the tiny room will want you to answer with inimitable aplomb and captivating perfection is such a chest-swellingly marvelous feeling. It’s so good, it’s probably addictive. It’s also totally legal, so go nuts.
Ah, autumn. Students are somewhere between ankle- and knee-deep in the new school year. Which makes parents across the nation breathe a big fat sigh of relief because the kids will be mostly out of the house for the next nine months. Except for the unfortunate few who’ve completed their primary, middle, secondary and higher levels of education and were then spit right out into this charming economy. Sucks to be you, pal.
It also sucks to be your parents; they were this close to having a kid-free home. If you’ve recently arrived on the safe shores of your parents’ front steps, you can coast for a while on parental love and sympathy. But that will not last, and if you don’t show some major effort with the Job Hunting Task of Doom, they’ll get cranky.
When the ‘rents begin to act oddly, they’ve probably read this article and are trying to get rid of you. It’s not because they don’t love you; they love you unbearably much but would like to continue to love you, which is why you have to move out as soon as is humanly possible.
What path makes for a better teacher? Does having a degree in education or child psychology or early childhood development make someone more adept at getting through to the kids? Is raw enthusiasm enough? Is it a natural talent thing, and you either have it or you don’t? Should the inexperienced but gung-ho Teach for America and The New Teacher Project people be thrown into the public school lion’s den? Clearly, those folks have made their choice to sink or swim, but are the parents, the students and the other degreed-up teachers going to be pleased with the inexperienced newbies?
I have no idea. The exact thing that makes a bright, shining star of an educator is probably some elusive logarithm of innate skill, empathy, and ass kickery combined with smarts, traditional and non-traditional learning, personality, the ability to look ahead while being fully in the moment with a kid you’re about to have a breakthrough with on long division, training, lack of training, real life experience, and the awesome talent of being able to withstand the trial by fire that absolutely is the first year of teaching (regardless of one’s level of training or higher education).
Fully educated teachers are capable of have crappy teaching careers, and the same can be said for wet-behind-the-ears whippersnappers who’ve had little or no learning about the teaching. And the untrained twenty-somethings can be in possession of that confounding logarithm which enables them to bring inspired brilliance to the classroom, as can the teachers who’ve collected several pertinent degrees in educating the children.
My own personal theory is similar to the Spaghetti Test. It’s highly scientific, of course (do I ever do anything not well-tested and science-y?). Much like the Spaghetti Test, it involves pulling a few strands/prospective teachers out of the pot and flinging them against the wall/into a public school. Whatever sticks is good to go.
