Samantha

I’m looking for a job in training and development. If anyone has any connections please email me and I will also try to help you out too.

Samantha

Any advice from people who graduated with liberal arts degrees and are doing something unrelated to their major? How you got there, what if any regrets you have, etc.?

Much appreciated.

Graduated: University of Florida, 2005
Major: Bachelor of Choral Music Education
Current Position: Music Teacher and Choral Director
Technical Skills Used at Work: Audio Recording with MacBook, standard Audio equipment.

Now studying at the Art Institute in Web Design & Interactive Media. Lots to learn and a ways to go. But I’m definitely enjoying the journey. Trying to learn more about the industry and how to step into it smoothly.

For any grad that is looking to network then I’d recommend gradgathering.com.

I went to a very multicultural school, high native American population, which is a wonderful culture. I learned where I stand on certain subjects, what I believe in, how to work hard and set goals.

That said, I have seen a lot of people piss their parents or their own money away going to college too. Like most things – you get out what you put in.

PS. If you want to see the most beautiful place on earth, hit Durango Colorado in September…

The day did come when I knew I wanted to go. Did college prepare me for what I do now? Yes and no. I’m a web developer and I didn’t learn a thing about web development aside from servlets, beans, and JSPs… but that hardly teaches you what goes into making a web site.

What college did give me are various skills in working with a team, some PM experience, and most importantly, the knowledge I learned from everyone around me. I don’t mean the technical knowledge…just life knowledge. College is a great place to meet people of various backgrounds and cultures and if you embrace that, You can really learn a lot and learn a lot about yourself.

College was fairly boring to me. High School is where I learned Turbo Pascal and C++. Picking up web languages my Junior year in High School was fairly easy due to the C++ classes I had under my belt.

College was kind of a refresher for me, going over what I learned in High School and applying it to larger projects. The only thing I really gained in College was Dynamic Memory Allocation, as we never touched on that in High School.

I will say that even though my degree is in a technical/business area, it only marginally prepared me for the business and technical worlds. About 90% of what I do on the job I learned on my own. I took a lot of electives in college though (hey, I had a lot of scholarship money to burn and they wouldn’t let me apply it to a Master’s ) and the classes that helped me the most from a practical perspective were speech and education courses. They teach you how to break down concepts and explain them in terms anyone can understand, which will take you a lot farther in the “real world” than how much C++ you learned.

College is what you make of it, and you don’t make much of yourself if you stick to the same rigidly defined program that everyone else goes through. If you do that then you’ve done nothing to differentiate yourself from the other 2000 people graduating with you, which doesn’t make for a very notable career/life.

I would say that ones drive and people skills are what matters most in the real word. Ok, you gotta have skills too…

@Sara: A kid in college!! Who’s tougher than you!

@Paul: common sense, priceless!