When I graduated from college, I was supposedly going to graduate school in history. But I kept writing entrance essays about why I wanted to tell stories about people and history is a good way to do that. And finally, my professor who had stood by me for four years, getting undergraduate research grants for me to study mass movements in colonial America, said, Forget it. You dont want to be a historian.</p>
<p>What she really meant was, Im not pulling strings to get you into Yale.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>I took the GRE and scored in the bottom 20th percentile in quantitative reasoning, which got me into an English masters program.</p>
<p>It took me a year and a half and $15,000 in loans to realize this degree would never get me a job.</p>
<p>I tried to date a few professors, but they were already adept at judging whether or not a grad student was too messed up.</p>
<p>Now Im going to tell you what I did to make things come together in my career.</p>
<p>First, I stopped doing work that wasnt going to lead to a job. I got a C in Victorian Literature, a D in Film and Literature, an A in modern literature only because I plagiarized from the New York Times Book Review.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I taught myself HTML before people knew what the Internet was. I presented a paper at the Dartmouth Technology Conference while my fellow English grad students were writing novels.</p>
<p>I left grad school a month before it ended. I just left. Went back to Los Angles.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>I took the GRE and scored in the bottom 20th percentile in quantitative reasoning, which got me into an English masters program.</p>
<p>It took me a year and a half and $15,000 in loans to realize this degree would never get me a job.</p>
<p>I tried to date a few professors, but they were already adept at judging whether or not a grad student was too messed up.</p>
<p>Now Im going to tell you what I did to make things come together in my career.</p>
<p>First, I stopped doing work that wasnt going to lead to a job. I got a C in Victorian Literature, a D in Film and Literature, an A in modern literature only because I plagiarized from the New York Times Book Review.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I taught myself HTML before people knew what the Internet was. I presented a paper at the Dartmouth Technology Conference while my fellow English grad students were writing novels.</p>
<p>I left grad school a month before it ended. I just left. Went back to Los Angles.