Some things to do instead of college
Last week I wrote a short post on why I think college student’s should skip this next school year and get some real life experience, of which this is a follow on around what I would actually do with that time. You can read the original piece here.
One of the most stressful parts of college is leaving, looking for your first job, and wondering if it’s “the right one.” Upon graduating, students are either forced to finally come to terms with what jobs their choice of major affords them (sorry, Sociology majors), or are exposed to the realities of the job they’ve known awaited them (sorry, Econ and/or Accounting majors). In either case, the pressure of jumping headfirst into what (at the time can seem like) will set the course for your entire career can be overwhelming, and often comes with
a) not enough real-world foresight into the skills/experiences a particular career path actually requires and offers, and
b) a bunch of relatively useless knowledge you learned in college, but few practical skills.
When I was 19 I got a job selling ads for my college newspaper, and I absolutely hated it. It wasn’t the selling part I hated (I am a natural born killer), but I just couldn’t get behind trying to convince Bagel Café to drop $600 for a 3 inch x 3 inch ad. I believed in my heart it was a waste of their money, and couldn’t get into it. I left after 3 months, after learning one of the most important lessons of my career --- I cannot sell something I don’t personally believe in.
Learning what you’re not good at, or what you don’t like, is equally (if not more) important as knowing what you like --- and there is no better time than now to figure that out.
What if you could take a year in the middle of college to actually try some shit out? Not just a summer internship with a sugarcoated experience, but a full year to try your hand at something with the safety net of knowing you’re going back to college afterwards? Though that’s always been an option, the “gap year” has historically come with a tinge of negative stigma --- but the current situation has afforded college students the shove they need to take a year off, risk-free.
The college experience this next year is going to be very different, in a terrible way, which presents a perfect opportunity for students to take a year off - not to travel - but to try working on… whatever they are interested in.
To get the brain flowing, here are seven ideas for how a college student might spend this next year, all of which I’d argue are way, way more valuable than whatever you’d be learning in lecture.
1) Learn to code and build something
This is certainly not for everyone, (definitely would not have been for me), but for students with a proclivity for math or Legos or Sudoku or any other complex problem solving, this seems like a no-brainer. Software engineering is consistently one of the most in-demand/highest paying careers, and unlike all the other careers at the top of that list (surgeons, anesthesiologists, lawyers, etc) - its the only one that can feasibly be learned online to the point of getting you a real, full-time job. From YouTube to Coursera, there are countless incredible (and free/cheap) resources to teach yourself the basics of coding.
When I was 23 my roommate was waiting tables by night, and teaching himself to code by day. He eventually got a job at a small web design firm building websites for restaurants, taught himself some more on the job, and is now a full-stack developer at Procore, one of the most valuable privately held tech companies in the world . He never took a coding class in college in his life. Mad props, Kyle.
Try coding, practice by building something (or some things) you’re interested in, and see if it’s for you. At the end of the year, you can either a) decide you’re interested, and maybe dabble in college-level comp-sci courses when you return to college, b) give up because you hate it and never have to wonder later in your career if you “should have been a software engineer” as many thirty-somethings now do, or c) turn it into a real career and never go back to school. It could happen.
2) Be a people person: get an entry-level sales or marketing job
Numbers & Excel not for you? Find a job to learn basic sales and marketing skills, which will help make you more successful no matter what you eventually do. No matter your career path - from entertainment to tech to hospitality - being able to cold call, smooth talk strangers, and persuade people to do something or believe something you believe is an invaluable skill that will hands-down get you farther in life. Not enough kids learn this early on. Not sure how to get started?
Find a small business in your area where you believe in what they are selling (this is important), and offer to bring them new customers for a commission. Maybe it’s just going to the pool guy in your neighborhood, telling him you want $50 for each new customer you bring him, and then going knocking door to door pitching his services.
Or convincing a local nursery to let you try marketing for them on Facebook (it’s ok if you don’t know how to use Facebook for Marketing, there are youtube videos for that, too) to sell plants online if that’s not something they are yet doing.
Literally every small business could use help with sales + marketing --- think about what channels they aren’t using yet, and offer to do it for them. While you might need to offer your services for free for the first month, eventually you should be able to work out/negotiate a performance-based pay model, where you’re being compensated for the sales you drive them. If you’re any good, make sure you’re eventually getting paid.
3) Teach yourself Squarespace or other “No Code” platforms and build websites for other people
There is a growing trend in technology - No-Code - which is essentially a pre-existing software platform that allows you to build websites without code. Squarespace + Wix really popularized this space, but the technology has come A LONG WAY, and it’s now possible to replicate marketplaces like Airbnb, or full e-commerce experiences, or most other websites you use, without actually knowing how to code. MakerPad, a leader in the space, offers extensive courses + lessons, of which you can get unlimited access for $600 (and can try out for much cheaper). There are countless free resources teaching you how to build beautiful Squarespace sites for businesses ranging from Yoga teachers to aspiring bloggers. (I could use some help). Become a No-Code expert, and charge other people to build their websites for them. There are plenty of people with business ideas but no interest (or time) for learning how to actually build websites --- if this interests you, there is money to be made.
If this is of all interesting, here’s a challenge: Find a client before you even teach yourself the platform.
Maybe you’ve got an aunt who sells jewelry or fancy masks with butterflies on them on Etsy. She’s always wanted her own website, but doesn’t have the time to learn/build one. You’ve got nothing but time. Would she pay you $500 to build her a website on Squarespace, with an online store? (Multiple services will let you build an online store with absolutely no coding experience) Can you actually get paid to learn? What a radical idea.
Or maybe you just post on Facebook that you’re building a website development firm, and are looking for customers --- chances are, someone has an idea, but doesn’t feel like building the site (ie me, 99% of the time). Can you offer to help? Get your first projects/experience in any way, shape or form possible. At the early stages, you’re here to learn. By doing.
4) Volunteer / Save the World
Maybe you’re less a capitalist, and want to help people in need. Bless you. Countless charities & nonprofits are reeling right now, in dire need of additional help in all forms. Call your favorite charity or local organization (homeless shelter, animal shelter, VA, etc etc etc), and ask how you can help. Chances are, they’ve got something for you to do - whether it be calling potential donors, showing up on action days, or anything in between. If you’ve ever thought you might be interested in getting involved in the non-profit sector after college, no better way to get a taste for it then by giving a full year of your life to it now, and see what you like/don’t like.
5) Start a tutoring service or other online service
Are you good at literally anything? I bet you are. Math, guitar, writing, cooking, shakespeare, gel nails, whatever. Offer to tutor high school age students for $20/hour. Parents are going to be itching for ways to keep their kids engaged this summer with less outdoor activities/summer camps as options --- host a Zoom tutoring service, see how large you can grow it.
Really good at teaching math, but not at all interested in learning about how to market your services? Find one of your friends who you think would be really good at what I described in #2 - Sales & Marketing, and partner up.
6) Start a Newsletter or Blog
Maybe you’re passionate about something - food (cooking OR eating), video games, the growing demand by students for political correctness and how it’s changing the American college experience (GDBSFPCAHICTACE), whatever. Start a newsletter and try creating a new post once or twice a week, slowly building up your own audience. This will make you a better writer (also one of the most important skills you can have, no matter what you do), give you a reason to dive deeper into whatever your passion is, build your personal brand, and maybe (just maybe) build something that lasts beyond this little gap year experiment. Here’s some concrete examples from the above:
Food - Start a newsletter on the local restaurant scene, reviewing dishes, interviewing restaurateurs + chefs, talking about what its like trying to cope with the current covid shutdowns, etc etc etc. Chances are a lot of people in your area would read it. (disclaimer: this idea is directly stolen from Elena Kadvany’s The Peninsula Foodist - highly recommended for anyone in the Bay Area - who does this for her local newspaper). But you don’t need a newspaper. Start your own newsletter using a platform like Substack or TinyLetter.
Sidenote: if you are someone with the curse of wanting to be a journalist, this could also work for being your own little local reporter. Skip J-school, and just start reporting on your neighborhood. Could be food. Could be anything.
Video Games - Admittedly I am e-sports ignorant, but you could probably start a weekly newsletter summarizing whatever the F is happening in the world of Legends or whatever. More than 15,000,000 people use Twitch every single day -- I’m sure a few of them would be interested in whatever you have to say.
GDBSFPCAHICTACE - Whatever you’re passionate about - whether it be political, botanical, or fashion - try writing something. Worst case scenario, you shut it down in a year. More likely scenario? You have something awesome to point to on your resume, where you put your mind towards something and learned.
7) Become an expert on
Admittedly, though “starting things” sounds really fun to me, it’s not for everyone. Maybe you’re a nerd (in the best way possible), and just really, really love learning. College has been great, but what if you got to choose what you learn… on your own?
There are a million skills and topics with top-notch learning materials available online. This really doesn’t need much explaining, but here are 5 subjectively good ideas for things to teach yourself during a gap year that I came up with in about 10 minutes:
SEO - become an expert on how Google works, and how websites optimize to get more visitors from it. This is so valuable, no matter what industry you end up working in, and there are a million free online tools + communities to learn from.
Real Estate - The housing market is about to get dirty, but it will return - and real estate is an incredible way to create wealth, if you know what you’re doing. (or even create some money on the side, with your real estate license). A year is a lot of time… A good free online resource is BiggerPockets, though there are many more.
Learn another language - Like really go all in. Spend a year learning Chinese, or Spanish, or Russian. These are really difficult languages, but chances are you could make some serious headway in a year.
Modern Business - Not sure what you eventually want to do, but pretty sure it’s in “business?” Create your own 1-year MBA. Every day read the 10-K of 2 companies you are interested in (first read what a 10-K is), read two random HBR case studies, find a few good newsletters to subscribe to (my 3 favorites are The Hustle, Scott Galloway’s No Mercy/No Malice, and Fortune’s Term Sheet, though there is an infinite supply of good ones), and just inundate yourself with information on the modern business world - what’s working, what’s not, etc.
Space or some other cool science - Elon Musk famously came up with the idea for SpaceX after a meeting, and then literally just started reading books on rocket science. Though he did major in Physics, he didn’t exactly learn how to build his own rockets there. Turns out he basically did the same thing for Tesla and Solar City. Elon didn’t learn about the finer points of these things in college - he learned by performing his own research. Read a book, watch some YouTube videos, take some online courses, etc. Dirty secret --- school does not have a monopoly on learning, and if you are interested in some deep, intense science, there are likely a plethora of resources to teach yourself.
One of my favorite interview questions I’ve heard of recently asks candidates, “You have 48 hours to make money on the internet. How do you do it?” Among other things, it’s a test of whether the person understands how the internet works…. How do people make money on the internet? And how can you leverage that in terms of whatever you, personally, are interested in? (Or whatever the company you work for is trying to achieve?) The same goes for the world in general. Do you get how it works?
This isn’t taught in college classrooms, but there is plenty of learning to be done out of the classroom. I was recently speaking with Ivan Alo, founder/Managing Partner of New Age Capital, who started a Venture Capital firm from scratch, raising millions of dollars having never worked in VC before. When asked how he knew what to say when raising money… “I just watched YouTube videos for 2 months. You can learn anything on YouTube.”
Real learning takes place in the real world --- so here’s to the new gap year and doing something you love.
