MinnesotaSmith
Membership Revoked
Wrote an expanded version of the OP...
When I had another young female relative graduate from high school.
I'm thinking of expanding it into a book.
Comments are welcome, especially from young women aged 15-23, or parents of same.
=======================================================
Hi, XXX. This is your high school graduation present from your Uncle XXX. This is an essay originally written to help a young woman who is about to graduate from high school make better college, career, and life decisions for her, on college major choice, career, and major life decisions. Whatever you read in it that you see as inapplicable or disagree with, don’t let that keep you from getting what use you can out of the rest. Hopefully it will help you as well.
Enclosed with this is an excellent book about making college major choices: Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey (2011).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The biggest choice you will have to make in your life that relates to your college major is where you want to be on the “career vs. motherhood” spectrum. Everything in life involves choices that preclude other ones (choosing to go through one one-way door out of a room means you don’t get to go through any of the other doors out of that room). Think of it this way, that there is a maximum possible 100% of you to go around during your coming adulthood, and no more. That is, to the extent you focus on one major thing in life, you inevitably do something else worse during that time, if you do it at all. (Alternatively, you can tell what is truly important to someone by what they spend their time on.)
I’d say a 100% mother would be one who gets married two weeks after high school, staying that way till death does her and her husband part, and from the beginning with her first child is exclusively a stay-at-home mother who homeschools her 5+ children to the end of high school. A 100% career-oriented woman would be more like Maureen Dowd, who has never been married and has no children. She is known mainly for writing smarmy columns for the New York Times newspaper. At age 57 (long past her biologically-possible child-bearing days), she has publicly mused that she might like to find a husband and settle down “one of these days”. (At this point she might as well just wait a bit longer, and simply show up to when the will is read out a week after the funeral was held for some random man she never met while he was alive, for all the part she and he played in each other’s lives, with this being all the marriage she is apparently going to have in her life.)
Odds are you will want to follow some path in between, perhaps a 70/30 or 50/50 split, dependent of course upon you getting a man you’d want to marry to go along with it. Note that men are rarely willing to enter into marriage planning from the start to be househusbands, and few of those that are, are remotely attractive to women financially capable of supporting a family alone. When a married couple unintentionally finds themselves in a situation (usually from him being laid off and not finding a good replacement job) where she continues working while he takes care of the children and runs the house, in most cases if it goes on long enough, she eventually loses all attraction for him and then divorces him. So, I’d advise you to forget the idea of being able to be totally career-focused with a stay-at-home husband and children at home; there are no traditional wives available for straight women.
Be aware that very few people find sufficient meaning in life from just their career. The probability that you will be another Salk or Sabin (vaccine inventors), Isaac Newton (inventor of Calculus and much of Physics), the composers Brahms/Mozart/Beethoven, a Fields Medal recipient, or any Science or Medical Nobel Prize winner are substantially less than one in 100,000, along the lines of your odds of being killed by bees or lightning, and less than your odds of dying by drowning. That means it would make more logical sense to plan your life on one of those sad events happening, than it would be to plan on being a science Nobel Prize winner (or an equivalent level achiever) at the price of never having had a family, if you were to think that would be an acceptable exchange. People have to have had a family of their own that they raise well to find sufficient meaning in life, in the vast majority of cases.
I read an essay a while back by a woman who worked at a hospice for a few years. She noted that in her experience there (talking daily with people on their deathbeds) that two kinds of people typically accepted their upcoming death fairly well. One type was those with very deep religious faith (we’re talking level of commitment to a religious vocation typical only for clergy/nuns who were that for practically their entire adult life, like a Catholic Cardinal or a Mother Theresa). The one other type of terminally ill people who commonly handled facing imminent death reasonably well were those who had had children. People who were dying who had had neither of those to give their past lives meaning often tragically found the prospect of death to be an absolutely terrifying prospect due to seeing no ultimate meaning at all from their entire lives, even when death for them would be a release from horrible untreatable pain. I find that observation to be very believable.
Speaking for myself, I consider everything I have done professionally in decades of working to be minor in real meaning compared to the prospect being a parent to the two young children of my own blood that I’m deeply involved in raising. Only as a means to an end do I believe a career (and the education that has made it possible) is really important. For me, that would primarily mean providing for them, before that having gotten prepared to provide for them, and learning things over the years through my work and schooling that would help me be a better parent to them, such as improving their nutrition or being able to do a better job of overseeing their education.
Note that replacement rate (break-even, or really a bare minimum) for the number of children in a family is three children, not two, as having just two children is a narrowing family tree, as unstable and vulnerable to collapse as any upside-down pyramid. (Jeremiah 29:6 [note the use of plurals in that verse] and Genesis 9:7 cover this subject quite precisely for Christians.) As an example, consider recent failed Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney; he has 20 grandchildren, to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s grand total of one grandchild, so arguably he is leaving much more of a legacy than the Clintons from his time here on Earth. Even then, at just three children, there is no guarantee of grandchildren, and your line not disappearing from the Earth like the dinosaurs and the Trilobites. I have a male relative (now departed) who sired four children, 2 sons of whom have died leaving no children, while his two surviving children (both daughters, now well past childbearing years) had only ONE grandchild between them, who is mixed-race.
(Plus, it’s nice for kids growing up to have cousins, and as adults, too.)
Note that to have a 90% chance of bearing just three children (a bare minimum to avoid a family line eventually dying out, if is a repeated pattern in a family line), a woman needs to be trying to conceive by age 23. If it takes just two years to find a husband and get married, that means she needs to have made looking for a husband her TOP priority (ahead of school/work/all forms of recreation) by age 21 at the latest. If it would take her longer than 2 years, she will then need to become open to marriage (and actively trying to get married) even younger than that. http://tinyurl.com/o6exd8w
Note that most surveys on the subject show that typically families with children eventually wish they’d had at least one more child than they did. I hope you will make good decisions in that area early enough in your life when you still have all your options open on family formation. (Search online for the “quiverfull movement” for insight here.)
A parent doing a first-rate job as both the provider and as a parent providing nearly all care and oversight for one’s children is nearly impossible, no matter how hard he or she tries, so being and staying married to the same man if any way at all possible the entire time while raising a family to maturity is the keystone for doing the best you can as a mother*. How to do that is a MUCH larger question, but one of the most important you will ever consider. I suggest you ask several different older men who you respect whom you are absolutely sure would never want to date you even if they had the chance (so they’ll tell you the brutally honest truth), to get insights on this subject in preference to asking any woman. These days, women commonly clearly do not understand men any better than men seem to understand women, going by the ever-higher divorce rates and plummeting marriage and legitimate birth rates.
*Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/pmj7w2v if you have any doubt about this.
Regardless, make your decision where you will go as a mother vs. career woman carefully, soon enough, and correctly for you (and for any children you choose to have), and be prepared to live with your choice for the rest of your life. The saying is to be good to your children, as they’ll pick your nursing home. That is, how loyal you were to them, is how loyal they likely will be to you in your inevitable, often otherwise terribly-lonely, declining years, in a future where corporate and government pensions and Social Security/Medicare are getting steadily smaller and less dependable. And, remember that if you never have any children, that also means you will never have any grandchildren…
More on the Worthless book by Aaron Clarey: it advises that a person should pursue a STEM (Science/Technology/ Engineering/Medical) degree if they attend college, or learn a skilled trade (electrician, plumber, welder, millwright, HVAC repair, etc.) if they do not. I basically agree. The principles to keep in mind about college major choice are:
1) Go to college (or trade school) only to learn about a field in which people are willing to pay you for working. (If you have no idea what you want to study in college, you’re not ready to enroll in one yet.)
2) Commonly, for 4-year college degrees, the amount of mathematics a major requires is usually a good (if not perfectly reliable) indicator that it’s very possibly a good choice. By math, I mean the major requires Calculus and Physics courses (preferably requires the same math courses the Math and Engineering majors have to take), and for the very best-paying majors, it probably will require that many of its higher-level courses actually use Calculus and/or Physics. (Yes, I am aware that that means Engineering is usually a better choice than most or all Science majors.)
3) The amount of Chemistry a major requires would seem a good indicator of desirability as well, but so-so majors like Biology and majors with lousy economic potential like Oceanography and Marine Biology require a fair amount of Chemistry, so it’s not that reliable. The best gauge of the economics of a college major relative to Chemistry is that a genuine STEM major usually will require at least a minimum of two college Chemistry classes. (And, how far you go in Math determines how far you can go in Chemistry.)
4) Here are some examples of majors unlikely to give you good employment prospects. DON’T major in any of these fields! They are alphabetized to avoid giving any impression of priority:
Advertising, advocacy of any kind,"alternative" (quack) medical studies of any kind (including chiropractic/herbal/aromatherapy/homeopathy/”traditional " or “folk” medicine), anthropology, archeology, architecture, art anything, astronomy, aviation (if you want to be a professional pilot, get trained by and experience through serving in the military; civilian entry-level pilots make very little money and typically can’t pay off their school loans, the same as most gourmet chefs who go through culinary school), business majors in most cases (exception: bookkeeping/tax/clerical courses that would help anyone in managing or helping administer a business, but commonly an entire 4-year degree in this is overkill outside of perhaps accounting), child “development”, communications, cosmetology, counseling (everyone thinks they’re a perfectly competent counselor, and anyway medical insurance pays ever-lessening amounts for that service, like every mental health field, with ever fewer numbers of government-funded jobs available in it), culinary arts (unless someone else pays for your school, and this doesn’t mean “loans you the money”), drama, English, environmental anything, ethnic studies, fashion design, film anything, floristry, foreign languages in many cases (it’s best to choose a foreign language at least over half a billion people speak and the number of speakers is not steadily declining with no apparent bottom, as French/German/Italian/ Greek/ Japanese are declining, while Hindi, the top two Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, Spanish, and Arabic are not declining in number of speakers [so probably would be above-average language choices], and anyway foreign language fluency typically pays off best when is in addition to another skill), gender/sexuality studies, history, interior decorating, legal anything (half of all lawyers in the U.S. make barely $30K/yr and many are now suing their law schools over them being blatantly lied to about job prospects for lawyers), literature, journalism (print newspapers are going bankrupt right and left due to better-quality and mostly free stuff available on the Internet that hardly anyone gets paid anything like middle-class wages to write), marine biology (U.S. colleges produce over 100 times the workplace demand for employees in that field), marketing, media anything, music anything (it’s now mostly gotten for free on the Internet, except in person for peanuts for all but the very top performers, which you would already be if you were ever going to be one of those top performers), oceanography, philosophy, poetry, political science, psychology, public relations, purely theoretical anything, social work (gov’t-dependent degree requiring a master’s degree to make more than barely above minimum wage), sociology, sports anything, theology (it’s tough to get actual full-time jobs in the ministry, especially in numerically-declining denominations, which nearly all denominations that ordain any women are so declining, aside from whether or not your Bible contains 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:12, or) or any major predominantly used in government employment (given the steadily continuing layoffs at most levels of government as their deficits worsen).
5) Minimize and/or avoid debt. I only see college loans as more probably justifiable than not for four-year degrees or beyond for Engineering or Medical/Dental schooling. Yes, that absolutely means that for many or most college students in most majors, they would have been better off not going to college at all than to go to college for those majors. Good graphic showing how student loans work: http://tinyurl.com/2955m47 (also at:
http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/ ) Note again that trade schools commonly are very worthwhile economically IF they involve getting dirty while using tools. Examples include electrician, plumber, welder, millwright, HVAC, locksmith, firearm repair, and large-engine mechanic. (Upholstery/fabric anything/cosmetology/ haircutting/massage/pet animal vet assistant/ craft things predominantly women like to do or buy, no, don’t go to trade schools for any of those.)
Remember that traditionally college students are supposed to have at least 115 I.Q.s for college to not be an ultimately-frustrating waste of their time and (someone’s) money. Here is a thought-provoking chart showing how to relate SAT scores to IQ: http://tinyurl.com/2dymqs .
And, here are graphs on comparing IQ by college major: http://tinyurl.com/oftxmzz (just lop off the bottom 75% or so to see who probably doesn’t even belong in college in any major) and http://tinyurl.com/naqc6po .
6) If at all possible, live at home at your parents’ for at least part (ideally all) of your undergraduate college years. This is because a) it’s cheaper, b) you’ll be less distracted by things that don’t matter (i.e., extracurriculars and dating), and c) you’ll be psychologically closer to your family, who can be helpful during your college time in many ways besides just paying for it.
7) Attend community college rather than a 4-year school for the first two years of school (not two years of time, but the first two years of classes).
When I had another young female relative graduate from high school.
I'm thinking of expanding it into a book.
Comments are welcome, especially from young women aged 15-23, or parents of same.
=======================================================
Hi, XXX. This is your high school graduation present from your Uncle XXX. This is an essay originally written to help a young woman who is about to graduate from high school make better college, career, and life decisions for her, on college major choice, career, and major life decisions. Whatever you read in it that you see as inapplicable or disagree with, don’t let that keep you from getting what use you can out of the rest. Hopefully it will help you as well.
Enclosed with this is an excellent book about making college major choices: Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey (2011).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The biggest choice you will have to make in your life that relates to your college major is where you want to be on the “career vs. motherhood” spectrum. Everything in life involves choices that preclude other ones (choosing to go through one one-way door out of a room means you don’t get to go through any of the other doors out of that room). Think of it this way, that there is a maximum possible 100% of you to go around during your coming adulthood, and no more. That is, to the extent you focus on one major thing in life, you inevitably do something else worse during that time, if you do it at all. (Alternatively, you can tell what is truly important to someone by what they spend their time on.)
I’d say a 100% mother would be one who gets married two weeks after high school, staying that way till death does her and her husband part, and from the beginning with her first child is exclusively a stay-at-home mother who homeschools her 5+ children to the end of high school. A 100% career-oriented woman would be more like Maureen Dowd, who has never been married and has no children. She is known mainly for writing smarmy columns for the New York Times newspaper. At age 57 (long past her biologically-possible child-bearing days), she has publicly mused that she might like to find a husband and settle down “one of these days”. (At this point she might as well just wait a bit longer, and simply show up to when the will is read out a week after the funeral was held for some random man she never met while he was alive, for all the part she and he played in each other’s lives, with this being all the marriage she is apparently going to have in her life.)
Odds are you will want to follow some path in between, perhaps a 70/30 or 50/50 split, dependent of course upon you getting a man you’d want to marry to go along with it. Note that men are rarely willing to enter into marriage planning from the start to be househusbands, and few of those that are, are remotely attractive to women financially capable of supporting a family alone. When a married couple unintentionally finds themselves in a situation (usually from him being laid off and not finding a good replacement job) where she continues working while he takes care of the children and runs the house, in most cases if it goes on long enough, she eventually loses all attraction for him and then divorces him. So, I’d advise you to forget the idea of being able to be totally career-focused with a stay-at-home husband and children at home; there are no traditional wives available for straight women.
Be aware that very few people find sufficient meaning in life from just their career. The probability that you will be another Salk or Sabin (vaccine inventors), Isaac Newton (inventor of Calculus and much of Physics), the composers Brahms/Mozart/Beethoven, a Fields Medal recipient, or any Science or Medical Nobel Prize winner are substantially less than one in 100,000, along the lines of your odds of being killed by bees or lightning, and less than your odds of dying by drowning. That means it would make more logical sense to plan your life on one of those sad events happening, than it would be to plan on being a science Nobel Prize winner (or an equivalent level achiever) at the price of never having had a family, if you were to think that would be an acceptable exchange. People have to have had a family of their own that they raise well to find sufficient meaning in life, in the vast majority of cases.
I read an essay a while back by a woman who worked at a hospice for a few years. She noted that in her experience there (talking daily with people on their deathbeds) that two kinds of people typically accepted their upcoming death fairly well. One type was those with very deep religious faith (we’re talking level of commitment to a religious vocation typical only for clergy/nuns who were that for practically their entire adult life, like a Catholic Cardinal or a Mother Theresa). The one other type of terminally ill people who commonly handled facing imminent death reasonably well were those who had had children. People who were dying who had had neither of those to give their past lives meaning often tragically found the prospect of death to be an absolutely terrifying prospect due to seeing no ultimate meaning at all from their entire lives, even when death for them would be a release from horrible untreatable pain. I find that observation to be very believable.
Speaking for myself, I consider everything I have done professionally in decades of working to be minor in real meaning compared to the prospect being a parent to the two young children of my own blood that I’m deeply involved in raising. Only as a means to an end do I believe a career (and the education that has made it possible) is really important. For me, that would primarily mean providing for them, before that having gotten prepared to provide for them, and learning things over the years through my work and schooling that would help me be a better parent to them, such as improving their nutrition or being able to do a better job of overseeing their education.
Note that replacement rate (break-even, or really a bare minimum) for the number of children in a family is three children, not two, as having just two children is a narrowing family tree, as unstable and vulnerable to collapse as any upside-down pyramid. (Jeremiah 29:6 [note the use of plurals in that verse] and Genesis 9:7 cover this subject quite precisely for Christians.) As an example, consider recent failed Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney; he has 20 grandchildren, to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s grand total of one grandchild, so arguably he is leaving much more of a legacy than the Clintons from his time here on Earth. Even then, at just three children, there is no guarantee of grandchildren, and your line not disappearing from the Earth like the dinosaurs and the Trilobites. I have a male relative (now departed) who sired four children, 2 sons of whom have died leaving no children, while his two surviving children (both daughters, now well past childbearing years) had only ONE grandchild between them, who is mixed-race.
(Plus, it’s nice for kids growing up to have cousins, and as adults, too.)
Note that to have a 90% chance of bearing just three children (a bare minimum to avoid a family line eventually dying out, if is a repeated pattern in a family line), a woman needs to be trying to conceive by age 23. If it takes just two years to find a husband and get married, that means she needs to have made looking for a husband her TOP priority (ahead of school/work/all forms of recreation) by age 21 at the latest. If it would take her longer than 2 years, she will then need to become open to marriage (and actively trying to get married) even younger than that. http://tinyurl.com/o6exd8w
Note that most surveys on the subject show that typically families with children eventually wish they’d had at least one more child than they did. I hope you will make good decisions in that area early enough in your life when you still have all your options open on family formation. (Search online for the “quiverfull movement” for insight here.)
A parent doing a first-rate job as both the provider and as a parent providing nearly all care and oversight for one’s children is nearly impossible, no matter how hard he or she tries, so being and staying married to the same man if any way at all possible the entire time while raising a family to maturity is the keystone for doing the best you can as a mother*. How to do that is a MUCH larger question, but one of the most important you will ever consider. I suggest you ask several different older men who you respect whom you are absolutely sure would never want to date you even if they had the chance (so they’ll tell you the brutally honest truth), to get insights on this subject in preference to asking any woman. These days, women commonly clearly do not understand men any better than men seem to understand women, going by the ever-higher divorce rates and plummeting marriage and legitimate birth rates.
*Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/pmj7w2v if you have any doubt about this.
Regardless, make your decision where you will go as a mother vs. career woman carefully, soon enough, and correctly for you (and for any children you choose to have), and be prepared to live with your choice for the rest of your life. The saying is to be good to your children, as they’ll pick your nursing home. That is, how loyal you were to them, is how loyal they likely will be to you in your inevitable, often otherwise terribly-lonely, declining years, in a future where corporate and government pensions and Social Security/Medicare are getting steadily smaller and less dependable. And, remember that if you never have any children, that also means you will never have any grandchildren…
More on the Worthless book by Aaron Clarey: it advises that a person should pursue a STEM (Science/Technology/ Engineering/Medical) degree if they attend college, or learn a skilled trade (electrician, plumber, welder, millwright, HVAC repair, etc.) if they do not. I basically agree. The principles to keep in mind about college major choice are:
1) Go to college (or trade school) only to learn about a field in which people are willing to pay you for working. (If you have no idea what you want to study in college, you’re not ready to enroll in one yet.)
2) Commonly, for 4-year college degrees, the amount of mathematics a major requires is usually a good (if not perfectly reliable) indicator that it’s very possibly a good choice. By math, I mean the major requires Calculus and Physics courses (preferably requires the same math courses the Math and Engineering majors have to take), and for the very best-paying majors, it probably will require that many of its higher-level courses actually use Calculus and/or Physics. (Yes, I am aware that that means Engineering is usually a better choice than most or all Science majors.)
3) The amount of Chemistry a major requires would seem a good indicator of desirability as well, but so-so majors like Biology and majors with lousy economic potential like Oceanography and Marine Biology require a fair amount of Chemistry, so it’s not that reliable. The best gauge of the economics of a college major relative to Chemistry is that a genuine STEM major usually will require at least a minimum of two college Chemistry classes. (And, how far you go in Math determines how far you can go in Chemistry.)
4) Here are some examples of majors unlikely to give you good employment prospects. DON’T major in any of these fields! They are alphabetized to avoid giving any impression of priority:
Advertising, advocacy of any kind,"alternative" (quack) medical studies of any kind (including chiropractic/herbal/aromatherapy/homeopathy/”traditional " or “folk” medicine), anthropology, archeology, architecture, art anything, astronomy, aviation (if you want to be a professional pilot, get trained by and experience through serving in the military; civilian entry-level pilots make very little money and typically can’t pay off their school loans, the same as most gourmet chefs who go through culinary school), business majors in most cases (exception: bookkeeping/tax/clerical courses that would help anyone in managing or helping administer a business, but commonly an entire 4-year degree in this is overkill outside of perhaps accounting), child “development”, communications, cosmetology, counseling (everyone thinks they’re a perfectly competent counselor, and anyway medical insurance pays ever-lessening amounts for that service, like every mental health field, with ever fewer numbers of government-funded jobs available in it), culinary arts (unless someone else pays for your school, and this doesn’t mean “loans you the money”), drama, English, environmental anything, ethnic studies, fashion design, film anything, floristry, foreign languages in many cases (it’s best to choose a foreign language at least over half a billion people speak and the number of speakers is not steadily declining with no apparent bottom, as French/German/Italian/ Greek/ Japanese are declining, while Hindi, the top two Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, Spanish, and Arabic are not declining in number of speakers [so probably would be above-average language choices], and anyway foreign language fluency typically pays off best when is in addition to another skill), gender/sexuality studies, history, interior decorating, legal anything (half of all lawyers in the U.S. make barely $30K/yr and many are now suing their law schools over them being blatantly lied to about job prospects for lawyers), literature, journalism (print newspapers are going bankrupt right and left due to better-quality and mostly free stuff available on the Internet that hardly anyone gets paid anything like middle-class wages to write), marine biology (U.S. colleges produce over 100 times the workplace demand for employees in that field), marketing, media anything, music anything (it’s now mostly gotten for free on the Internet, except in person for peanuts for all but the very top performers, which you would already be if you were ever going to be one of those top performers), oceanography, philosophy, poetry, political science, psychology, public relations, purely theoretical anything, social work (gov’t-dependent degree requiring a master’s degree to make more than barely above minimum wage), sociology, sports anything, theology (it’s tough to get actual full-time jobs in the ministry, especially in numerically-declining denominations, which nearly all denominations that ordain any women are so declining, aside from whether or not your Bible contains 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:12, or) or any major predominantly used in government employment (given the steadily continuing layoffs at most levels of government as their deficits worsen).
5) Minimize and/or avoid debt. I only see college loans as more probably justifiable than not for four-year degrees or beyond for Engineering or Medical/Dental schooling. Yes, that absolutely means that for many or most college students in most majors, they would have been better off not going to college at all than to go to college for those majors. Good graphic showing how student loans work: http://tinyurl.com/2955m47 (also at:
http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/ ) Note again that trade schools commonly are very worthwhile economically IF they involve getting dirty while using tools. Examples include electrician, plumber, welder, millwright, HVAC, locksmith, firearm repair, and large-engine mechanic. (Upholstery/fabric anything/cosmetology/ haircutting/massage/pet animal vet assistant/ craft things predominantly women like to do or buy, no, don’t go to trade schools for any of those.)
Remember that traditionally college students are supposed to have at least 115 I.Q.s for college to not be an ultimately-frustrating waste of their time and (someone’s) money. Here is a thought-provoking chart showing how to relate SAT scores to IQ: http://tinyurl.com/2dymqs .
And, here are graphs on comparing IQ by college major: http://tinyurl.com/oftxmzz (just lop off the bottom 75% or so to see who probably doesn’t even belong in college in any major) and http://tinyurl.com/naqc6po .
6) If at all possible, live at home at your parents’ for at least part (ideally all) of your undergraduate college years. This is because a) it’s cheaper, b) you’ll be less distracted by things that don’t matter (i.e., extracurriculars and dating), and c) you’ll be psychologically closer to your family, who can be helpful during your college time in many ways besides just paying for it.
7) Attend community college rather than a 4-year school for the first two years of school (not two years of time, but the first two years of classes).
