Post #7 Future Income Risk
I think going in as a freshman from high school and starting off your collegiate career things don't seem as if they will impact you in the future and to be honest it really doesn't. As a high schooler you do things as in extra curricular activities because you want to see what you like and don't. But in high school I did E.P.I.C.S which i've talked about in a previous post. This was the first time I was introduced to thinking about what I wanted to major in. I think this was truly my first time thinking, "wow, maybe I should try and do engineering". E.P.I.C.S stood for Engineering projects in community service and I did this my Junior year. I actually put a lot of time and effort because for the first time I thought this would be good for me looking forward in the college application process and in hopefully later in my collegiate career if I did decided to become an engineer. As I was saying after your senior year and entering freshman year you don't think too much about your future because you think its freshman year I have a long 4 years ahead of me and I know everything will work itself out. Little did I know 4 years go by so fast and if I had one regret about my college experience its that I should've joined more things my freshman year.
A lot of different things have shaped my collegiate career. Starting off my career, I didn't even start at the University of Illinois. I went to New York Institute of Technology in New York City for 2 years and I was studying to be an engineer and If I have never left I think I would've never changed my major. Transferring universities was one of the biggest moves that have shaped my life. At the time I just thought I wanted to transfer so that I could be in a better university and it would be way cheaper than living in NYC. I transferred as pre-engineering and coming here really made me hate engineering. The course load compared to my old university was an extreme jump. This made me want leave engineering and thats what made me change my major to econ. I took some econ courses to see if it would be something that I would enjoy and it is. Although I didn't know it at the time the transfer would really change my entire career and my future.
I also joined SHPE which is an Engineering organization and through that I was able to meet so many people who have helped me with my career and connections that have helped me get interviews with different companies because of the ex-SHPE members. This was not something I thought would help me when joining SHPE, I just joined because my friends joined, but little did I know this would be a big help in my professional career.
Overall as you go on in your collegiate career every year you feel the pressure of getting your life together and think more about the future. As a freshman you really just live day to day, but now as a senior, I feel like every move that I am making will impact me in some way. To an extent that is true. I feel like the older you get the more you are able to calculate risk and see how much something is going to affect you in the future. Not all the time but I think it comes with wisdom and knowing that the older you get the more you think about things and think twice about risky situations that could affect you wether it be for good or bad.
A lot of different things have shaped my collegiate career. Starting off my career, I didn't even start at the University of Illinois. I went to New York Institute of Technology in New York City for 2 years and I was studying to be an engineer and If I have never left I think I would've never changed my major. Transferring universities was one of the biggest moves that have shaped my life. At the time I just thought I wanted to transfer so that I could be in a better university and it would be way cheaper than living in NYC. I transferred as pre-engineering and coming here really made me hate engineering. The course load compared to my old university was an extreme jump. This made me want leave engineering and thats what made me change my major to econ. I took some econ courses to see if it would be something that I would enjoy and it is. Although I didn't know it at the time the transfer would really change my entire career and my future.
I also joined SHPE which is an Engineering organization and through that I was able to meet so many people who have helped me with my career and connections that have helped me get interviews with different companies because of the ex-SHPE members. This was not something I thought would help me when joining SHPE, I just joined because my friends joined, but little did I know this would be a big help in my professional career.
Overall as you go on in your collegiate career every year you feel the pressure of getting your life together and think more about the future. As a freshman you really just live day to day, but now as a senior, I feel like every move that I am making will impact me in some way. To an extent that is true. I feel like the older you get the more you are able to calculate risk and see how much something is going to affect you in the future. Not all the time but I think it comes with wisdom and knowing that the older you get the more you think about things and think twice about risky situations that could affect you wether it be for good or bad.
It sounds like some of the opportunities that came your way were by serendipity rather than through planning. If that's right, you should ask yourself whether you did things in advance of those activities that prepared you for "having them find you." If you can identify those, the next question is whether you did those preparatory activities for some reason. It would be good to know whether that reason persists in how you choose what to do.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't mention tuition at all in making your choices - of which college to go to initially and whether to transfer. So I wonder if it mattered (you mention cost of living in NYC as mattering). I also wonder about possible alternative choices and why those weren't what you did. For example, did you consider Illinois Institute of Technology when applying to college initially? And did you consider other engineering schools to transfer to? Some of them are private and quite pricey. But maybe they would have been a better fit for you academically. So I wonder how that decision was made.
In other words, in what you've written you've told the story about outcomes. But choices typically involve alternatives that might have been selected yet weren't. So a story of this sort should also feature those alternatives and some explanation as to why you chose what you did choose.
Let me now talk about something you didn't mention at all - the social life at these schools and whether you had friends there already. I think that matters, perhaps it matters a lot. It's not about future income risk. It's about living in the present and not feeling alone at college. I wonder if it impacted your choices at all and, if so, how.