Here's a tip on how life works: You have to solve problems. It's not impossible to make $50k a month. I've met plenty of people making that much money by selling cookies, selling drinks, selling retarded cosmetics that probably don't even work. 95% of people can make a million dollars from the food industry within 3-5 years... but you'll end up working long hours with minimal profit margins and high risk.
Most people think it's about getting a good degree, then getting a good job, then saving up the money from that job and starting a business. Bullshit. But most people don't know how bad this advice is, because it's how they've survived.
You should be aiming to start a business with no money. A lot of business fail because they start off with too much money without the founder having the skillset to do it with little money. What you want for the long run is to create a product that nobody else can do. Your focus in life is to become an expert in something - the rarer your expertise is, the higher your profit margins, the more you make from it.
Go to college for the soft skills. I did engineering. Tech gets obsolete fast. But the soft skills, the organizational skills, work rate you learn in college lasts forever. The best colleges are heavily theoretical, but so are the worst.
Think of your degree not as a recommendation to into a job. Think of it as useless as a degree in philosophy. Soft skills. You're in college to learn to solve problems. Take the hardest college and the hardest course you can get into. In the real world, you won't have the luxury of failing to solve certain problems, so mess up while you're in college, even if it means taking a course that you'll possibly fail. Learn to network in college; find a college where interesting people go, who are in a field you want to work in.
The real question is - what kinds of problems do you want to spend your life solving? Pick one answer, it can be anything, and learn to stick to it until you make your first million.
If medical equipment in your part of the world sucks, maybe work on biomedical. If you want to build exoskeletons, go for mechatronics. If you want to answer some really difficult questions, aim for something more theoretical, like physics or math. If you want to fight injustice, take law. Whatever it is, look for a problem to solve, which nobody is solving.
This is a really important question, because engineering can be brutal. You'll need a very strong internal drive to punch through that willpower barrier. From what I've seen out of a good college, half the class barely manage to pass, the other half make about a C average, and 1-2 guys get full marks. Those full marks guys know what they're doing and why they're doing it. If you get past the bachelor's stage, you'll be questioning yourself and why you're doing it almost constantly.
Don't think from an angle of "which job pays the most", "which job makes me look coolest/smartest". High paying jobs (e.g. oil/mining) mean a lot of very smart competition and a lot of office politics. Cool jobs (e.g. game dev) means high competition, competing with smarter people who can work 14 hours a day. Looking smart is foolish - while you're stuck working on your PhD, your exclassmate will be off building the next Microsoft or IKEA. I don't oppose PhDs but most people who take them do so simply because they want to know everything, without knowing what to do with the knowledge.
Then once you get on to getting a job, do so with apprenticeship in mind. You'll need a mentor to get anywhere, college gives you relatively little to go on. Heck, the best reason for postgrad is being able to pick your own mentor.
Work with the motive of being an apprentice, even if it pays a little less than some other jobs. If you're not learning anything, switch jobs. You should take a few more risks at work, use it as a safety net to do what you plan to do. If you bring enough passion into a job, you'll get promoted quickly and see how things work at a higher level. Eventually use that knowledge to cut off from your mentor and do your own thing.. but don't burn bridges with your previous boss/job.
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Topic: Choosing College (Read 1058 times)