Essays Essays Essays

Do you have any tips on how to choose a college major?

unless you're getting a free ride scholarship or your family will be paying for your education, this will be one of the biggest financial decisions of your life. most of your friends and family are in student loan debt and hating every second of it.

first things first: why do you want to go to college? what kind of life do you want to live? will you be living it alone or with a spouse? will you be having kids? what income do you need to enjoy your overall quality of life?

have you considered a trade school or certifications?

when you consider a major, you need to be living in reality. not an ideal world where you can do something goofy and make a million dollars from it. be realistic, practical, and financially responsible. don't have your mind in lala land. I'm serious, choose wisely.

supply and demand. if everyone can do it with a reasonable amount of training, it will pay little. if it's hard to do and most can't do it without considerable effort/skill/risk, it will pay more. this is why fast food pays low. if any teenager off the street can be trained in a few hours to work here and be side by side with 40 year olds, it's not a lucrative thing. dental assistants and technicians make less than the dentist. guess why?

watch this video on useless degrees (not as in they are meaningless or have no value, but bc they cost money that you will struggle to pay back and the job market will not be kind to you)

and watch this one too

watch this video on good degrees

and this one too

if "following your heart" puts you 100k in debt, maybe follow your brain instead

you don't have to get a degree in something that you enjoy learning about but it doesn't translate well into the job market. you can learn about it at home, on youtube, at the library, you can purchase textbooks, you can take free open-learning courses. please don't spend 4 years cramming and going into debt for things when you don't have to. not all degrees are worth it. you're trying to get a job and live a nice life right? okay. act like it.

remember that school name is not the most important thing in the world and chances are, it won't matter much in your life. unless you're trying to be a doctor or lawyer etc, I wouldn't stress too much about trying to go to the best and most expensive school bc you'll probably only be getting bragging rights and 5 seconds of people being impressed when you tell them about it. this is something that has been socially conditioned into us our whole lives though, so I won't be mad if you can't magically stop that thinking overnight. shoot for the stars but don't be obsessed with them.

it might be in your best interest to go to community college and then transfer to a 4 year. saves money, and your degree will only have the name of where you graduate from bc that's all that matters.

unless you have a good financial support system (family with money, spouse with money), you might not want to go for a cute career that pays little. I absolutely love and respect teachers and things of that ilk, but if you're footing the bill by yourself in life, I'd maybe save that for a more financially secure time in my life. try to get a degree that gets you the most bang for your buck. I have a friend who wanted to be a teacher, but waited until she got married to a high earner who takes care of finances to become one. you don't have to do what she did, but I think it was a good idea of her.

a global poll by gallop revealed that 85% (!!!!) of people hate their jobs. that's tragic considering it's such a huge part of our lives and we spend so much time and mental bandwidth working, thinking about work, preparing for work, etc. You want to try your hardest to be in that 15% who don't dread their job. picking a major that you enjoy, are competent at, and pays well is so important.

notice that I said enjoy, are competent at, and pays well. you can love your work but suffer bc it pays pennies. you can have a high paying job but suffer bc it's so incredibly difficult for you to keep up with and you feel overloaded and stupid. you can have a high paying job that you're good at doing but you don't enjoy the work and it feels so boring and meaningless to you. these 3 things are hard to find in one career choice but by God it's something you need to search high and low for. if you can't meet all 3 points of the trinity, choose the 2 that matter most to you and go after them. you'll thank me later.

you probably will never be in the highest bracket of earners in your field. if the median income is 40k and the highest is 90k, you will likely be in the 40k range or close to it. don't be overly optimistic when looking at salaries for careers you're interested in. only a few people make it to the top of a pyramid.

also remember that changing majors is normal and what you like at (presumably) 17/18 may be different than when you're 20. I originally wanted to pursue pharmacy like my brother but computer science called my name later on.

don't be afraid to take time off to work and save money to avoid taking out loans (or at least to keep them as low as possible). don't be afraid to attend school part-time instead of full-time to help manage your course load. you can go back to school later in life and go after your passion projects when you can afford them if you so choose to. you don't have to rush things right now.

hope this helped

your honor in my defense i’m not reading all that shit

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

i miss her so fucking much (independent reading time)

For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I'm seeing more people saying "on accident" instead of "by accident." I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of "on accident" being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of "on accident" is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of "by accident." I like to call this prepositional shift.

Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt "strongly" or "very strongly" that "on accident" was wrong in all cases, and that "by accident" was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling "ambivalent" or "less strongly" about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.

When presented with options for the definitions of "by" and "on," we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas "on" has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either "by accident" or "on accident" is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as "sounding correct."

The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition "on purpose." While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of "on accident," they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase "by purpose." So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition "on."

Whether this means that the particular usage of "by" is becoming archaic or the definition of "on" is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of "on accident" versus "by accident" to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.

So now I'm curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):

cool girls study. (not me tho y’all stay safe)

there is also a wikipedia in your language

for @babyange1face 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10