Most students have settled for scholarship money and student loans as their only income sources. They have accepted their social status as poor citizens. That is where the “ramen noodles for breakfast” memes come from. While education can be considered a full-time job, I think that being idle and letting five years pass by is ridiculous. In my opinion, that is what my school mates and other students are doing. They are settling for poor and accept that for the next five years, besides studying, they won’t develop themselves and their wealth any further. Here’s why I think that you can and should do better.
Learn the path you want to take
When you decide to take a student job, you learn valuable lessons. You learn what you will be doing when you graduate, how to negotiate pay, what issues you’ll encounter, and if you even want to do this type of work. You will learn how to apply what you learn in college to the real world, years before you have to apply it. In other words, you will begin your career before you begin your career. This means that you will be years in advance of others, who wait five years to start their career.
Besides getting work experience and improved technical skills, you will also straighten your expectations. You probably have expectations of what type of work you will do in the future and for what kind of company. But when that time comes, you might find that your expectations were completely different. You thought that you would code in the language you like, with the tools you prefer and the code style you have become comfortable with. When you get hired first time, they tell you to forget all that and read their best-practices Word document. Their Java code looks weird. You have never seen anything like it. It's like a complete different language. They use Spring Framework for dependency injection. WTF is Spring Framework!?
Yes, you will work with many different frameworks, and you won't learn them in college. College is busy teaching you more important stuff, like how a compiler works or how to query a database. They cannot teach you frameworks, since they might become obsolete before you graduate. You must learn them by yourself. You have five years to learn them. Do it. Do it at work. Get a job man!
Plan for the future
The earlier you start setting goals and plan your future, the more successful you will become. Planning early gives you a chance to screw up before you are too old to afford to. You cannot succeed on anything in life unless you have screwed up a few times before. If you screw up, you should be happy, because it means that you are taking action. If you never fail, it is because you never took action.
It is true that attending college is an investment in ones future. But visualize for a second where you want to be the second after you pass your last exam. There are two scenarios that come to my mind, when I visualize it for myself:
Broke, financial illiterate and inexperienced
"What now?", I ask. I don't know what I want to do. I've been so comfortable at not taking responsibility for my future, and thinking that taking my education is enough, that I did not see time fly by. Suddenly "the future" is now, and I am absolutely clueless. The job offers I got are a joke. They are not what I expected!
Financially confident, very experienced and ambitious
The last five years I've worked in four different companies, big and small. I've gained experience in Java, C#, Python, HTML/CSS/Javascript, PHP, Spring, Hibernate, Gradle, VBA and much more. I also have an active blog and a few apps that I've worked on in my free time. They are now generating me so much passive income, that it equals what a part-time job could get me. Since it pays the bills, I am not in a hurry to get a job. Because of my experience and the financial education I gave myself, I know exactly what type of work I want to do, and how much I should get paid.
Which scenario would you prefer? Of course you'd prefer the latter one, I would too. Actually it is how I see myself in three years, when I graduate. I am actively working on that vision. This blog is part of it!
Just understand it takes lots of work. If you calculate study time, job time and entrepreneurial time, it adds up to above 50 hours a week. You will be fine if you end up in the first scenario. It will take a few months, and you will become much more in touch with your purpose. I am sure of that. But you will be five years later than me, remember that.
Most students have settled for scholarship money and student loans as their only income sources. They have accepted their social status as poor citizens. That is where the “ramen noodles for breakfast” memes come from. While education can be considered a full-time job, I think that being idle and letting five years pass by is ridiculous.