CEG\'er
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443 |
Originally posted by svtizzle4stizzle:
Originally posted by Goonz SVT:
yea, you cant work sh!tty jobs all ur life in the begining and expect yourself living the rich life. School is the way to go and you will DEF. be rewarded in the end no matter how much you hate school, dont fail out..
kinda funny but out of the people i know closely, the highest paid ones never went to college.  all making pulling big salaries by the time they were 30. while a few people i know, not all, who got their bachelors work sh*tty jobs making average salaries.
of course, some of those who make good money are/went back to school because they eventually hit a ceiling at their job and couldnt go any higher.
I think it varies really. I went to college originally for engineering then switched into business school because I was working in the banking industry and thought I wanted to work in banking as a career, but by the end of my college career, I was sick of working in the banking industry.  So, I picked up on my computer hobby, dove into the sales side of the PC business, then moved into the technical support side about a year later. Never looked back, make a nice six figure salary today, DOING SOMETHING I REALLY LIKE DOING, and I think that's the key for college too, you have to be studying something that really interests you, and you need to find a school that does a half decent job of teaching you skillsets that you can use in the real world, which effectively means the professors need to have actually lived and functioned outside of academia for some significant part of their lives.
I went to the Univ of Delaware. Social experience was great (met my wife there! ), a few of the finance classes were interesting, a few of the elective classes were interesting, but I found most of the required "filler" courses to be pretty pointless and a waste of time and money, and largely a repeat instance of what I had already learned in highschool, with perhaps a bit more coverage of the subject at the college level, but I really had no earthly reason to learn that little bit more about Biology 101, given I had zero interest in biology anyways. 
IME people become well rounded through actual life experience, not by sitting through classes at school. I learned much more working in the banking industry part time, than I ever did in school as far as becoming a more well rounded person. Elective courses are simply a way for colleges to make more money and keep you on campus longer, simple as that. I'm all about efficiency, and I find this concept largely lacking in academia even today, though there has been some pressure on our university systems to start to conform more to real world business practices, especially in technology heavy professional areas, and the proliferation of the internet and online classes for ongoing/adult education is putting additional pressures on colleges to ensure their classes/curriculums are applicable to the business world, otherwise people will quickly go elsewhere to another college that offers real value. Capitalism at it's best, just applied to academia.
I had a mix of professors, some really good and some that were typical of what I find in academia. Those that were good (the minority I'm sorry to say), worked in the real world for a good period of time and turned to teaching because they had a passion for it, wanted to make a contribution to young people, and they were well compensated by the college, as they should be. Most of them, however, were academia types that IMHO had no place teaching students, because they had little real world experience to bring to the table, and that's what I value. I don't want to ONLY learn the accounting concepts for instance, I want to hear the professor's stories of his real world accounting experiences on the job. THAT is more valuable than the accounting concepts alone. My best finance professor owned his own financial consulting business even while he was a university professor, and always had great stories to tell and to apply to the concepts he taught, I can still remember those concepts to this day, because they were his real world experiences and they made sense when explained within the context of his real world examples. Even when I was in the engineering school, the best professors were the ones who really did work as engineers for a good length of time before returning to academia. The worst profs I had went straight through their Ph.D educations and then proceeded straight into an assistant professor and then into a full on professor position. I found these people to be very intelligent, sometimes brilliant intellectual people, with exceedingly little common sense and no real world experiences upon which to base their complex theories which held very little value to anyone who has lived outside of the world they've never left.
Just my .02...
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