Future Income Risk
The main reason for going to college should be to get a better, higher paying job once you finish compared to one you would be able to get without graduating from college. This has turned into sort of a gamble with how expensive college has become, as failing in college will leave you much worse off than if you had not gone, and it will also take many years working a higher paying job just to pay back the expenses incurred from college. In the end, however, succeeding in college can play a major role in earning more money in the future.
Although I am attending college to learn skills that would be helpful for a future job I would enjoy, when choosing my major the types of jobs I could get out of college were not one of the main factors contributing to this decision. Instead I thought about what kind of subjects I enjoyed most. I have enjoyed math all my life and love to analyze and problem-solve, and Economics became my choice as it entails a lot of these things I enjoy. Even though I was not thinking about the job I would want out of college, the kind of jobs that I will be best suited for and that will want my skills more are ones that align with my major. I did not analyze jobs I may want, but instead knew that if I chose a major that compliments my interests, then the jobs that I would be looking for with this major will most likely also align with my interests.
However, even though the end goal of graduating college is to attain a higher paying, more enjoyable job for myself, I feel that my internship over the summer has helped me more in this search and to prepare me for working after college. College seems more like a stepping stone for attaining a job, where succeeding in college allows you to gain experiences elsewhere and to advertise yourself to future possible employers. There are many resources offered that can help you in this search and that can help you gain skills you will need, but I feel there is very little in college that actually prepares you for what it is like to work in an organization, communicating with a boss and coworkers, and how to handle yourself in the workplace. These are things that my internship helped me understand more and gave me valuable experience with. On top of this, my internship also gave me a taste of one of the possible kinds of work I could be trying to do after college. I greatly enjoyed the company I worked at, but the specific department I was working with did not completely fit my interests. It was an external facing department, where members would talk with client firms, customers, and more. There was also little analysis of numbers, which I would greatly enjoy doing. However, I immensely enjoyed the working environment and the company that I worked for, CME Group.
CME Group is now my first choice for places I wish to work, and I am searching for a different department that I feel would better fit my interests. This includes talking to other interns from these different departments to find out their experiences, and the kind of work they participated in. Graduating from college is a requirement for a job within an organization, but I have gained more from my internship experience in terms of finding that job and being more prepared for it. CME Group also had intern workshops discussing applying for future jobs, both at there organization or elsewhere, and they emphasized that they like to look more at work experience, better if at similar jobs, than they like to look at academics. This is why I view achieving a degree from a university as a requirement that leads to work experience through internships and jobs out of college, but the most important thing that can help me find my dream job in the future is the experiences I have as an intern, the accomplishments I achieve there, and then how I perform at my first job after college. I think the most important aspects of trying to find the high-wage job I enjoy are yet to come.
Although I am attending college to learn skills that would be helpful for a future job I would enjoy, when choosing my major the types of jobs I could get out of college were not one of the main factors contributing to this decision. Instead I thought about what kind of subjects I enjoyed most. I have enjoyed math all my life and love to analyze and problem-solve, and Economics became my choice as it entails a lot of these things I enjoy. Even though I was not thinking about the job I would want out of college, the kind of jobs that I will be best suited for and that will want my skills more are ones that align with my major. I did not analyze jobs I may want, but instead knew that if I chose a major that compliments my interests, then the jobs that I would be looking for with this major will most likely also align with my interests.
However, even though the end goal of graduating college is to attain a higher paying, more enjoyable job for myself, I feel that my internship over the summer has helped me more in this search and to prepare me for working after college. College seems more like a stepping stone for attaining a job, where succeeding in college allows you to gain experiences elsewhere and to advertise yourself to future possible employers. There are many resources offered that can help you in this search and that can help you gain skills you will need, but I feel there is very little in college that actually prepares you for what it is like to work in an organization, communicating with a boss and coworkers, and how to handle yourself in the workplace. These are things that my internship helped me understand more and gave me valuable experience with. On top of this, my internship also gave me a taste of one of the possible kinds of work I could be trying to do after college. I greatly enjoyed the company I worked at, but the specific department I was working with did not completely fit my interests. It was an external facing department, where members would talk with client firms, customers, and more. There was also little analysis of numbers, which I would greatly enjoy doing. However, I immensely enjoyed the working environment and the company that I worked for, CME Group.
CME Group is now my first choice for places I wish to work, and I am searching for a different department that I feel would better fit my interests. This includes talking to other interns from these different departments to find out their experiences, and the kind of work they participated in. Graduating from college is a requirement for a job within an organization, but I have gained more from my internship experience in terms of finding that job and being more prepared for it. CME Group also had intern workshops discussing applying for future jobs, both at there organization or elsewhere, and they emphasized that they like to look more at work experience, better if at similar jobs, than they like to look at academics. This is why I view achieving a degree from a university as a requirement that leads to work experience through internships and jobs out of college, but the most important thing that can help me find my dream job in the future is the experiences I have as an intern, the accomplishments I achieve there, and then how I perform at my first job after college. I think the most important aspects of trying to find the high-wage job I enjoy are yet to come.
Let me offer a different view to what you said in the first paragraph about college being primarily about finding a good job after graduation. I think that is myopic for several reasons, some of which you actually mentioned later in the post. Before getting to those reasons let me advance a different view. College is mainly learning about yourself - you talents, your motivation, your weaknesses, and how you can reconcile these taken together. Not every student learns these things in college, for sure. It is my view, however, that those who do get a lot out of the experience learning these things.
ReplyDeleteNow, as to reasons about why college is not about getting a good job consider the following.
(1) If you do find a jobs at CME as a numbers guy, how long will that last, even if you are very good at the work? Might the job disappear in the not too distant future because it can be automated away? If that were to happen what would you do next?
(2) I don't know what current experts say on this score, but ten or twenty years ago the prediction was that a normal working adult would have four different jobs in the working lifetime. This means that an important skill you might develop now is learning to learn. At the appropriate time you train yourself (or take formal education for this purpose) to ready you for the next work. This requires being flexible about the work and adaptable to the new job's requirements.
(3) I did talk about general human capital. Some of that is communications skills. At many companies, the engineers and the number crunchers are not at the top of the food chain. Business types are. At some point in your trajectory you may say I've had enough as number cruncher and instead want to be in senior management. The question then is whether you are ready to make such a switch or if, instead, you are locked into the earlier work.
In other words, your college education should be setting you up for your full career, not just the first job you have after you graduate. (It should also do things on the good citizen front, but that I won't elaborate on here.) So the question is whether you can take this longer view and see if your college education has been effective that way.
I have taken a wide variety of classes, and I think that some of it is even forced by the university in a way, through the requirement of Gen Eds. I have taken very interesting courses that have very little to do with what my focus is that I enjoyed, such as Plant Pathology, History of Graffiti and Murals, and Severe Weather to name a few. However, not all students try to find interesting classes to widen their learning, and decide to search for the easiest classes and there are forums online that students use to help find those. Even though I don't think I would ever get a job related to things a learned in plant pathology, some of what I learned helped me understand the way agriculture futures move for my internship last summer.
DeleteAlso, the President of the Clearing House at CME Group was new, and he said he switches jobs (and companies) every few years in order to learn new things in different businesses. He also said he likes CME because if he does get tired of doing the same thing he can try to switch departments and learn completely different things within the same company which he really enjoys doing. He seemed to have a similar perspective as the one you described.
You talked about how important your internship was to you finding out what you want to do in terms of your career. This makes me think that four or five years after you graduated college you would have a altered opinion on the type of work you want to do. I do not know if you have thought about it. But to me, this makes me think that after that time, you would consider going to grad school to be better suited for what you know what you want to do after that time. At least this is the thought process that I have for what I think I am going to be doing in a few years.
ReplyDeleteI also believe procuring an internship is integral. I plan on extending my college career in order to do so as well. CME group is a fantastic company. I wish you all the best and hope you don't end up doing grunt work like in your internship as you had mentioned in your past posts.
ReplyDelete