Income risk
I have been aware of risks to my income for some time and have determined many of my actions in the past, present and future to be based around the least amount of risk to achieve the most preferable outcome. Even choosing to come to this university over all the other ones I had been accepted to was a choice where I took my future into consideration. While it is true that I would need to take out more loans to come here than some of the other schools due to the amount I would receive in aid and scholarships, I still choose to come here as it meant that there was a higher likelihood of being able to get a job that pays enough money to remove these debts within a couple of years. Additionally, my actions since I first began attending the university of Illinois have also been made with thoughts towards the future.
While I did intend to originally major in computer science and get a job coding software, I ended up declaring for a major in sociology with a minor in economics. Despite this, my original career remains viable and in fact even more likely now. As I have learned, my major is not as important as it once seems, as companies pay more attention to having a degree and where it is from than what the degree is in. Furthermore, I intend to take a class at northwestern after graduation that will give me a certification in both analytics and coding. This, combined with my already diverse major and minor which actually complement each other quite well, gives me a much wider range of job opportunities. This wider range is ultimately my form of risk removal.
With such a competitive environment for high paying jobs, having skills in coding, which is something the business world is severely lacking, means that I am far more likely to get hired. My knowledge of sociology and economics while supplement this as I may end up making software for financial companies, as well as having the possibility of making accurate projections of the market due to my increased understanding of human behavior. It is not just my education that is serving me well. My summer jobs have also been useful in ways I had not imagined until my father, a high ranking member of IBM who regularly interviews job applicants and oversees various deals and collaborations between other companies, explained why even menial jobs are valuable. According to him, jobs like working in the stock room of being a cashier signal to potential employers that I have experience in working long and unfulfilling tasks as well as being able to handle unruly and disrespectful people. That is not even mentioning my most recent job where I worked on quality assurance for both Amazon Alexa and Bose speakers. Just having my name associated with such big name companies will turn the heads of prestigious (and high paying) companies.
Finally, if all else fails I can just use one of the oldest and most reliable methods of obtaining a job, nepotism. As I stated earlier my father works for IBM and often works with its various clients. This also means that he has a lot of connections. With demand for coders being so high and my dad being able to get my foot in the door, I am practically guaranteed to get a job after I finish my northwestern course.
The type of job I end up getting is very likely to pay well as soon as I am hired, which tips things even further in my favor. This is because I have received a healthy amount of financial aid and scholarships, thus reducing the amount of my income that will needed to be allocated to paying off my student loans. While not directly an income risk, the debt from the loans might become too large if I ignore it or do not pay off a certain amount at a time, which in turn would harm the amount of my income I would have available for personal use. While I hesitate to call this a risk reduction, it is defintly something useful to have.
I've used this prompt for several years, yet you are the first student who has talked about family connections as form of both self-insurance and self-protection against income risk - when referring to one's own family. (Another student in our class talked about nepotism as an important factor, but she wasn't talking about herself.) As I've seen many students feeling stressed out about their future job prospects, I do hope this works out for you.
ReplyDeleteBut I want to come at this in a different way. Have you done any learning, coding in particular, where you self-taught outside of any course you were taking? Alternatively, do you have any hobbies the pursuit of which gives you some experience at self-teaching? The underlying question is not focused on what you will know immediately after graduation (or after you get the certificate from that course at Northwestern) but what you will know, say five years later. How will your human capital evolve and mature in that time period? Are there things you are doing now that help answer that question? Put differently, many students have their attention on the first job after graduation. But there will be a second job, and then a third. It might be by rising the job ladder within the company where you started. Or it might be by finding the next job at a different company. If you anticipate that happening, are there things you can do now to lessen the risks with moving along in your career?
Now let's consider still a different dimension. The income you do earn will be spent or saved (that's an economics tautology). If you lessen the spending, so save more, you'll have a bigger cushion in case you take an income bump in the future. (When I was a student this was called saving for a rainy day.) Are there things you might do now that will limit your spending so you can build such a cushion?
While I have not done any self teaching, nor do my hobbies increase my human capital, that does not mean that my capital will not expand and mature. It is due to the nature of the technology industry that coders are brought on to all sorts of projects and learn to use and write different programs to meet the demands of the company. My father spends almost half his time in training for new positions to understand what it is that his clients want. The same will most likely be true for me. Just having a job will have the side effect of increasing my capital. As far as lessening spend goes, I am already rather frugal when it comes to money, so there is nothing I can really think to do
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