Hi guys,
My passion since I was 10 was to work at Pixar/Disney and help make movies. Fortunately, since I knew what I wanted to do at such a young age I started learning software and filmmaking very early. By the time I graduated high school I was creating content that meets the wants of major studios like Pixar. Well now I’ve actually been offered a position and I’m very excited. Is there really any point in attending if I have already secured my dream entry job?
This is a tough call. Does your career path sans a college degree still provide you with a living that you would be happy with? If you were go to college, how expensive would that be (this questions is tough to answer until you have already applied and been accepted, or at least run some NFC calculators)?
Also, remember that college is more than just preparing you technically for your career. It also is a growing experience and an excellent opportunity to learn new things and meet new people (expanding both your social and professional networks).
No you don’t need to go to college, if you do, Pixar will most likely send you on there dime.
Will your job wait for you? Or is this an opportunity unlikely to recur?
Is the former poster correct that Pixar will pay?
The actual offer you have been given makes it a much tougher question than my initial gut response to your title’s question, which was an emphatic yes, before reading about your job offer. I am a big believer in the value of a liberal arts education in and of itself.
I think college is a very special experience, intellectually and socially. But if you take the job, you always can take some college classes at night just for fun, and you will grow personally and socially through the job instead of through college. Will you miss out on something? Yes. But I suppose that can be said of every major decision you will make throughout life. You pick the best path at the time and then discover new paths along the way.
So do what feels right to you and enjoy either pathway!
College will always be there. It may get a little harder to complete it as you get older and acquire responsibilities, but lots of people complete bachelor’s degrees with families and full-time jobs. As technology marches on, it’ll only get easier to do that.
However, you don’t get offered a job at Pixar every day!
My opinion is that you should take the job! If you work there for 2 or 3 or 10 years and decide later that you want or need a BA to move up or move around in the industry, then you can do that later.
College is, indeed, a growing experience. But there are many ways to grow, and literally billions of people worldwide move from adolescence into adulthood without going to college because they can’t afford to. Even speaking from a U.S./Western world perspective, a relatively small proportion of middle to upper-middle-class people count college as a part of their early formative experiences - and only an even smaller proportion of that include living on campus in residence halls as part of that framework. There are many ways to become an adult, so to speak.
So I’d think of it less as missing out on something and more as trading one kind of experience for another one.