Before You Fly The Nest: Advice for kids heading to college
August 5, 2022·5 comments·In Brief
Everyone talks about college as a launching pad for careers, but that's only half the equation. The real battle happens in the margins: how you spend your free time, who you become when no one's watching, which small decisions to protect yourself from. Most of the guidance students get treats these as secondary to academics. The evidence suggests otherwise.
• Most people enter college with a plan and leave doing something entirely different. Locking yourself into one major or one career path at 18 is rarely the constraint that matters. What matters is whether you stayed curious enough to find what actually resonates.
• The habits you develop now follow you for decades. Being organized, exercising regularly, showing up on time, taking notes efficiently. These feel like college skills. They're actually the foundation for how you'll operate for the rest of your life.
• You become an average of the people around you, whether you intend to or not. This isn't motivational poster talk. It's documented in research repeatedly. If your close friends exercise, you'll exercise more. If they drink five nights a week, you will too. Choosing your people is choosing your future.
• There's a vast difference between normal mistakes and irreversible ones. Everyone messes up in college. But some decisions can rewrite your entire life trajectory. The addiction that starts as a one-time experiment. The drunk drive home. The unprotected moment. Knowing which decisions are actually dangerous is the skill nobody teaches.
• College is built to reward two things simultaneously, and most students treat them as mutually exclusive. You need the accreditation that gets you jobs. You also need the self-invention that lets you live autonomously. Both are harder to build after graduation. The question is whether you'll actually do both while you have the chance.
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Comments
All good advice. My best advice these days, however, is “skip college, go do something real”.
I think the advice about avoiding mistakes with long-term consequences is great, but perhaps best given as kids enter high school, perhaps earlier.
Object lessons of people who did not expect one decision to stick with them the rest of their lives abound…and we found encouraging kids to have compassion for those whose decisions resulted in lasting harm both helps form full hearts, and them avoid the same bad decisions.
So yes to this, but long before they’re tempted to “experiment.” Those experiments have been run, the longitudinal results are available. This time is not different.
My sage advice is to listen to your professor.
About halfway through engineering school, I noticed if a professor repeated a point, it almost always happened to be on the test. Learn what they are trying to teach you.
Don’t waste time exploring philosophically interesting or controversial topics, especially if they piss off your professor.
Your professor is the customer. They are always right. You need to figure out what they want to make them happy. That’s your goal.
Deal with the cool and interesting stuff on your own time - when you graduate.
After a hard dose of the real world, I figured it out. The result was a step-change in performance.
You make your plans, then life happens anyway. Don’t beat yourself up when your expectations don’t materialize. I totally aced all aspects of university right through to two post-grad degrees, then got no traction in my life for the next twenty years, and I sure beat myself up around that.
Everyone studies what “successful” people did, but nobody studies what “failures” did, and very few spend much time defining success and failure.
My advice to all: Learn every skill you can, learn to live on a shoestring, take care of your health, and stay out of debt.
Let’s not split hairs about “good” debt and “bad” debt. You know what I mean.
I second the advice, “Don’t half-ass it.” If something is worth your time, go all in; if not, go home.
Re-reading this - thanks Brent and Ben - my only daughter off to college in a few months - good stuff.
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