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December 18, 2002

Rambling... talking to a friend

Rambling... talking to a friend who's attending grad school right now, and some things have occured to me... one, that most of my friends have learned a lot in college, be it at UCLA or other schools. It's amazing- randomly pick a half-dozen people of the dozens I know, and you'll probably go from math to political science to engineering to organic chemistry. That kind of breadth is impressive in itself, and to be truly knowledgeable is even more impressive.

Two, it's that a lot of us have no idea what to do with this knowledge. It's overwhelming. A few are working good jobs right now, a bunch are in-between, and (as good news) only a few seem to be blundering around totally lost. It's the in-between bunch that worries me, or will worry me in a few months, anyway. You can't hang in the grey area of unemployement/crap-job-almost-as-good-as-unemployed too long while you wait for grad school decisions to come back to you (or even while debating whether or not to go to grad school!), and I'd hope that in all your time at school, you figured out something about what you want to do with your life before you graduated. I know some who just pushed through their majors and didn't care about the major itself, so maybe they have an extra excuse to be in limbo, but it still pains me to see friends unemployed or making $10/hour with a college degree. I know as a former engineer myself, I was getting the sweet end of the salary stick (engineering major friends have started at more than $50k/year), but everyone else... $10/hour had better damned well be a temp job!

I understand it's hard to decide what to do... we all understand, I think (not too many gifted geniuses out there, although I do know a few...)... but for the rest of us ordinary people, don't stay in limbo too long, ok?

Posted by brian at December 18, 2002 01:15 AM

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