Could you Break down the process of preparing, starting, and finishing college??

[tht1guy]

Originally Posted by Meemur

OP, you seem to have a number of problems. To quickly summarize from past posts:

- You don't like any of the jobs you have done so far.
- You're living at home with your parents and don't get along with them.
- You're not getting along with women your age.
- You don't have clear goals, just that you want things better RIGHT NOW!

These problems are very typical of young people, so you're not alone, and I'm not picking on you.

1. You need to be realistic about your skills right now and what you can actually do. It is not realistic to move to the UK or NYC, nor will such a move fix your problems. You need to fix yourself, first.

2. You can get your parents off your back and have better luck with women by developing clear, realistic goals and throwing all of your energy into working toward them.

Here is an example: (JUST AN EXAMPLE!)

• I will work at Arby's part-time and begin the program in accounting at the community college.
  I will take one or two classes at a time, pay cash as I go, and apply for scholarships when I am further along.
  I will help out more at home and keep repeating these goals to all who give me crap.
  It doesn't matter whether my co-workers or HS friends like me or not. I have a clear path to a better life, and there will be people who will like me and support my goals if I work hard at them.

3. Now, go talk to advisers at your local community colleges and look into the local programs where you have your best chance of having success. You don't have to love the program, but you need to pick something where there are jobs and where you will succeed with some work. Don't worry if you change your mind to a related program. The important thing is to get started. Also look into jobs you can do on campus.

Whatever you do, DO NOT take out loans at this point. DO NOT let anyone convince you to take out loans. Save that for when you are maybe in your last semester, know what you are doing, and have a job lined up. Otherwise, pay cash as you go. Since you are living at home, you can save money from working in fast food. So you hate it. Suck it up, and start looking at it from a business angle. How is the business run? Could you run it better? How? You will learn a lot when you approach your life from that viewpoint.

4. You got some great advice on this thread and past threads. Take some of that to heart!

Good luck and get going! You're wasting a lot of time and energy daydreaming that would be better spent with the great girlfriend that you are going to meet, once you get going on some realistic goals.

Not true my goals are very clear and I'm not going to school to study accounting. You're completely taking my posts out of context!! I and my personal relationships have nothing to do with my professional career it 2 deprecate areas!! And the classes I want to take aren't in kc THEY AREN'T IN KC. I repeated that because for some people you can't comprehend the fact that bigger cities have MORE opportunities PERIOD!
I'm not going to give you in detail what I'm going for. And I don't have a problem with my parents we just disagree with a few things. Btw how is it impossible to move to NYC? I work with a company that has many locations all OVER NYC for me to transfer to? And finding and apartment will be tough but I can do it. If I couldn't do it I wouldn't be doing it!

[Pitt Chick]

Seriously, if you don't want answers, don't ask questions.
It is very immature to ask for peoples' opinions and then get belligerent and rude when you get them. Not what I would expect from a 22 year old.


I would suspect that you cannot afford out of state tuition. Unless you saved a lot of money in the four years or so since high school, you more than likely NEED to stay local for school.

What DO you want to study? Why can't you do that instate?

[OwlAndSparrow]

If you're planning on moving somewhere else, if you think a public school is right for you, then find out the school's residency requirements. In-state tuition is much nicer than out-of-state tuition.

At private schools, this doesn't matter.



The first thing to do is to find what you want to study, then go online and find basic textbooks you can read. Study in your free time to pick up some of the basics and make sure you're actually going to finish. The worst mistake you can make is to start something you aren't going to finish, because you have to pay for it. Enrolling in college is like making a bet. The degree will help you cover the expense while also giving you a higher quality-of-life while you work (you get to do something you enjoy instead of being forced into either poverty or manual labor).

Make sure you have a viable plan for turning this into a real life. Majoring in literature is fun, and it's not a bad career move to have a dual major in, say, literature and business, but frankly, that's sort of a luxury that people have when they take a more traditional track through school. I actually have a humanities degree, but I dual-majored in something technical. The humanities major helps my resume stand out a little more, and, more importantly, the things I learned in school greatly improve the quality of my life and help me connect with people in the business world, but it's my knowledge of math that brings my company revenue, so that's why they pay me.

Certain majors are traps even though they don't seem like traps. If you go to a big school, find out what the football players are studying and avoid it. Plenty of other majors are commonly taken by people who don't know what they want out of like, like psychology, anthropology, and, these days, biology. These are all perfectly fine fields, but a BA or BS in one of these fields isn't going to help you stand out at all, since so many people have them. To go into these fields, you need grad school, and you have to be among to best to be considered for grad school.

Once you're all set, then also keep in mind that you don't necessarily save money by paying cash as you go. That's a safer route, but it could cost you money in the long run because you've exchanged years of your professional life for years of a fast food career, limited professional development, zero retirement savings, and zero home equity. It often leads to washing out of school. I've seen many students whose first priorities seemed to be work rather than school, and they often found themselves forced to sacrifice their grades for their temporary incomes. This makes it harder to graduate, and it means having a lower GPA and a worse understanding of the material you're supposed to know even when you do graduate. Having a $20k to $40k in loans at 3.5% isn't a huge deal if you're taking two years of a fast food salary in a place you don't want to live and replacing them with two years of a professional salary with professional networking and career development; the extra two years of school quite possibly cost more than the loans. For the cost of a few hundred dollars per month for a few years, you could make a lot more, and you can put that money into your 401k faster, so it will have more time to grow before you retire. It also means you'll get on the housing ladder sooner, so you'll flush less rent money down the financial toilet. If you're looking to start a family, you'll be able to do that sooner, and that two years is an extra two years you get to live with your kids, since they'll be born two years earlier.

Remember, the stuff you're studying in school is important. Don't think of it as a pursuing a credential. You're taking advantage of other people's experiences, successes, and mistakes. You're learning from the past. When you finish, if you really understand your subject, you can impress people at job interviews and at work. Your colleagues and bosses will be impressed if you come in already knowing something.

So, while you're in school, FOCUS! Take it seriously.

Develop broad skills, though. There are lots of little skills that are, by themselves, too insignificant to merit their own classes, but once you get out of school, you'll need them, and in a professional environment, you'll have to pick them up. No matter what field you go into, you'll want to know how to do fancy things with spreadsheets (not just how to type formulas or do pivot tables -- anyone can train a monkey to do that).

You'll also need to figure out how to apply for jobs. That way, you won't crash and burn as soon as you finish, wondering if your education was worth it after all. A lot of people go through that, and job searches can take longer and longer these days. Resumes are not as straightforward as they appear.

My advice, then, is to take some time every weekend to learn something useful outside of your major field of study. Your job will probably involve computers, so learn some software or a programming language, then put that on your resume. The things you really enjoy can be opportunities to explore deeper. Develop a portfolio of accomplishments. Say you turn out to love programming in Ruby. Well, have some nice projects you can point to! That's a way to prove you can do something difficult and technical and useful to someone.

Before you finish school, have an idea of where you want to live. Concentrate your job search there. Some people will tell you to apply everywhere in the country and then chase the jobs you find, but that's a good way to end up living in rural North Dakota, and then once that job ends, you're stuck in rural North Dakota with no further career prospects.

Get some experience however you can. Internships are competitive, but being able to say you worked for Company X will put you a step ahead of everyone who finishes with no experience at all. This isn't the most vital step in the world, because you will eventually find work, and your first job will lead to a second one and then a third one and so on.