9 things I wish someone had told me about life after college

The last two years of high school every teacher talked about getting us ready for college. I guess they did a good job because the transition to college was relatively painless. I packed up all of my stuff and moved to Boulder but for the most part, transitioning was easy.

Nobody talks about transitioning out of college, into the real world, where your life is a brand new place. I’m writing this because I found the transition from college to life after college to be much harder than I expected.

Everyone I’ve talked to about the transition agrees. Nobody talks about this transition much, so I thought I’d write a little something about it. This is the advice that I wish someone had given me about life after college:

  • Prepare for your world to change. There’s no more Spring break or three months off for summer. Wednesday is just Wednesday from here on out.
  • Your first job out of college won’t make you or break you, most likely. Finding great people to work with is most important.
  • As soon as you get out of college, join a gym. Figure out a time to go and go. Or run. Make sure you stay active somehow, because life gets in the way really quickly when you don’t have the comfortable lattice of school.
  • Go to group dinners and put everyone’s phone in a bag. Great conversations ensue.
  • Keep those hobbies going. Keep playing soccer, or pool, or surfing. Keep doing yoga. Keep reading. Keep doing you. You’ll develop some great friends around those interests.
  • Happiness is already built in, you just need to look around. Getting to whatever that thing is won’t make you happy long-term. 
  • Play with your schedule. Wake up earlier, go to bed later. Time-shifting is your friend.
  • Work hard, be nice to people. If you make eye contact, say hi. Everybody felt this way at some point, you’re not the only one who’s uncomfortable.
  • The un-comfortability is good for you. Comfort zones need to be stretched.

Is College Necessary?: An Argument from the Inside Out

TL;DR - There’s no correct choice as to whether you should go to college or not. It depends on you and sort of depends on where you want to go to school. Pick an avenue and make it great.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the practicality of higher education. Student loan debt is reaching the $1 trillion mark and universities keep hiking tuition higher and higher, year after year. Do you or your kids need to go to college? 

With one more semester to go, I figured that I should weight in on this discussion, since I’m in an interesting situation as it pertains to this debate.

Background

I’m incredibly close to graduating yet I have no desire to stay in school. I’ve devoted my time outside of classes to answering my own questions about life, business, building a company, creating great products, visual design, user experience and much, much more. I’m straddling both sides of the argument about the benefits of college. 

Some of you may be thinking, “Zack, you’re a 21-year-old guy; you’re an adult, the decision is in your hands.

The answer to your potentially hypothetical statement is that I’m staying in school mostly for my parents, and how hard they’ve worked to allow me to go to college. I’m also staying in because many of my mentors, whom I highly respect, have told me to stick it out. Truth is, I’m getting by in class, nothing more, while maximizing my time outside of the University of Colorado to pursue my own endeavors.

Life Outside of College

Last Friday I completed a six month internship with Next Big Sound, a former TechStars company. During that six months, I got tremendous amounts out of my internship, because I truly wanted to. I asked to sit in on meetings just to observe and learn. I built my own mini-projects and consulted the NBS team when I needed help or had questions. I made mistakes. And learned a ton.

Talking to Sam Pucci, an engineer at NBS, he told me about the five years he spent at Brown University getting a dual BS/MS in Computer Science. Sam told me that the curriculum was pretty free-form. Sam could take the classes he wanted while centralizing his education generally around the field of Computer Science. He didn’t have strict requirements like other colleges have. That model of a university is extremely attractive - universities should do a lot more of that.

In the past few months I’ve been to Stanford twice. Each time, I’m in awe of the system they’ve set up for students wishing to pursue their passions, whether it be in tech startups or otherwise. Stanford runs on a quarter system and, as far as I could tell, saw no problem in students dropping out for a quarter or two to start a business, learn a new skill or do something that meant something to the student, with no questions asked. The door is always open for their return.

This summer I get to work at TechStars. I have the extraordinary opportunity to go through the #1 startup incubator in the world and take in the same information as the teams who have been lucky enough to be selected for the program. I believe that a program like TechStars is a phenomenal learning experience and I plan on starting a company on the other side of this summer. For what I’m interested in, TechStars has more to teach me than college does.

Conclusion

Should you go to college? Maybe. Should you drop out or skip college? Maybe. It all depends on who you are. We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world, despite what the news pundits say about issues facing society.

The college money-maker is bad, undoubtedly. Part of it is a scheme. Throw Standardized Testing in that boat too.

For the extraordinary young man or woman, for the natural born hustler who actually knows what they want to do, college may not be right for them. The path to a job through an internship is alive and well, as it always has been and always will be. Apprenticeships still exist. They’re called internships.

Regardless of your stance on the college “bubble,” I believe this to be fundamentally true: We need to stop teaching children that all mistakes are bad and should be avoided. We should encourage trial and error and banging on life in order to figure out what’s on the other side of our efforts. 

Whether that path includes college or not is up to you to decide. As Marissa Mayer from Google told me a few weeks ago, “Pick one thing and make it great.”

"Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn’t scare you, it probably should."
–

Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert - “How to Get a Real Education at College”

One of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. 

Revamped Journalism Courses Attract Hordes of Students

At a time when the newspaper industry is in free fall and thousands of jobs are being cut each year, one would think that the halls of the nation’s journalism schools would be awfully quiet. Think again.
Many universities report that journalism enrollments are up this year. Over the past few weeks, a lot of these budding journalists have been blogging, broadcasting, and tweeting their way through introductory courses that have been revamped to embrace the digital age.

I just wish my journalism school was teaching this kind of stuff. Colorado has offered one class on social media which was a Summer course called Twitter Democracy. In it people learned how to use Twitter, some of the ways the media uses Twitter and how to game the system to drive your follower number up in short amounts of time. What people are starting to realize (hopefully) is that the number of followers is useless if the audience isn’t the audience you want. I’d rather have 10 followers that all interact with me than 2,000 followers who are nothing but companies, spammers and people who generally don’t care.

At Colorado, other than Twitter Democracy, not many courses are offered that teach new media, changing media practices or courses that teach us how to adapt to the changing world of journalism. We’ve got to figure that one out for ourselves.

According to Christopher Harper, an associate professor of journalism at Temple University, ”The future is for smart, hard-working students to band together, create their own media, and make a business out of it.” And that’s what I plan to do. Because the future of journalism is up in the air that taking risks and taking shots in the dark are worth it. You might just find something that will work for you.

The direction that journalism is going right now is a subscription-based route. People want to subscribe to certain feeds to pull news from the sources that they want. Where our parents read one newspaper every morning for years, we sit down at our computers and check Twitter and RSS feeds to see where the latest links are coming from from the sources that we trust. So maybe the future of journalism isn’t in organizations per se but with the individual, and with the shared sources that they trust.

GPOYSW - The I’m Moving Edition. Note: Me, not present. Editors Note: I took the picture.

GPOYSW - The I’m Moving Edition.

Note: Me, not present.

Editors Note: I took the picture.