not to be in her shoes
i’m glad, that is.
my sister emailed me last night with a mild plea for help, or just some sisterly advice. she turns 18 in a few days, and with that comes the task of finishing senior year of high school on a high note, all while searching for colleges, figuring how to pay for it all, and addressing the general (and mildly loathed), “what the hell do i want to do with my life?”
points of conversation:
1) she knows what she wants to major in. um, yeah. so did i. or so i thought. i honest to goodness wanted to be a recording engineer. i thought if i couldn’t be a rock star, i could at least be in a studio with real rock stars. and i was kinda good at it, at least at first. and for being a girl – that part sounds silly to even note, but it was a point of contention. in fact, being pointed out by a highly regarded professional in the business, surrounded by his male minions, probably was a starting point for me leaving the program. that, and being told by another professor maybe 10% of our class would actually find jobs in the audio industry, if we were lucky and good. check, please!
2) she can’t decide if she wants a small school or large school. that was an easy one for me. i don’t fair well in larger classes. presentations in front of a huge group of my alleged peers tends to cause me grief, so i opted for a school where the class size was never more than 12. i got to be closer to my classmates and instructors, and being that the majority of my classes were hands-on, technical courses, i never felt self-conscious about presenting my projects. plus, i visited schools like mizzou and carbondale, and to be honest, they did nothing for me. sitting in giant lecture halls, being just a number to the prof, it all seemed quite sterile.
3) do any of the schools on her list have study abroad programs? she definitely knows one thing: she wants to live abroad for at least a semester. all my influence, thank you very much. and the thing is, i almost didn’t go. i was set to graduate a semester early because i accumulated too many credits over the summers. my advisor sat me down and said, “you really don’t want to graduate early. there’s nothing out there for you yet. you’re only 21, go have fun. go study in london or geneva or leiden or vienna.” wait, what? i can do that? and so i did. and i talk about london and my travels throughout the EU to this day.
4) no, really. how is she going to pay for it? i had a half scholarship for all four years, student loans and our parents helped me out. my sister doesn’t have that last luxury for many reasons i can’t and won’t get into here. based on her financial circumstances as well as her smarts, i have no doubt in my mind that she’ll get aid. she beat me by a lousy point on the ACT her first try, she’s far more active than i ever was, so money will be given to her. it’s the question of how much will be handed over. because honestly, i don’t want to see her taking the maximum in loans and then taking another 10 years or so to pay it off. that’s my situation, and it’s certainly not enviable. sure, financial advisors will encourage you to take loans out because places like sallie mae will give you a huge time frame to pay it all off. yeah, because they’re making a killing on your suffering. i advised her to hunt out grants and scholarships, because the money is out there. she just has to find it. signing her life away with loans should be a last resort, not a given.
4.1) if she does take out loans, does she know what she’s really getting into? she told me that her high school hasn’t been very helpful in the way of educating 17- and 18-year olds on how student loans truly work. glad to hear some things haven’t changed. i knew nothing. and i still don’t know everything, 10 years later. i told her to educate herself. to learn what the terms consolidation, forbearance, deferment, subsidized and unsubsidized all mean. because i had to learn the hard way.
5) above all, will she be happy in a small town, small school, big town, big school? what if she needs to get a part-time job to help pay for school, will there be on-campus work available or retail or non-profit agencies around the corner for accessibility? will she need her car? what if her chosen major isn’t really what she thought it was, will she be able to find another focus without changing schools?
the truth of the matter is, you need to enjoy your 4+ years. because when you get out, the degree matters, but not so much where it came from does. unless you’ve chosen an elite course of study, where i guess ivy league attendance speaks volumes.
i offered some other points of insight, if you want to call it that, and along the way we got into discussions about our parents. how they mean well and all, but… something else that hasn’t changed.
it just goes to show, if you want something badly enough, you need to do the leg-work yourself. which is probably just as well since it’ll mean much more in the end.