<p>To the OP, I’ve calmed down a bit from my earlier rant.</p>
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<p>It’s not clear to me you made mistakes. You got your degree from a great school. You didn’t drop out before you finished, you got your education and that is something you will always have. It’s worth something, believe me.</p>
<p>If you want to end hunger in Africa join the Peace Corp, as other posters have suggested. The only one stopping you from doing that is you. You’re still young, you’re not married, you don’t have kids. Believe me walking away from a job becomes a lot harder once you have kids and a mortgage.</p>
<p>If you don’t want to do something as dramatic as the Peace Corp but you do want to switch jobs use the career services at NU. If they are any good they’ll be able to help. Use the alumni network from NU to land interviews. You won’t get anywhere sending out resumes in the mail.</p>
<p>If you need to make changes then just do it.</p>
<p>OP’s expectations about the probable result of a degree from a Top 20 school are not very different from those of hundreds of posters on this Board…</p>
<p>I wish the moderator could change the title of this thread to Top 20 in lieu of Northwestern, and make it a sticky.</p>
I don’t think the OP is a ■■■■■. I think he is disillusioned which is understandable, but is trying to blame everyone else for his troubles which is not. Sure he writes he owns his decisions and made his choices, but coming thru every post is a sense of “I was a victim; they promised me the world and look how it turned out”. I don’t write this with rancor; a lot of kids feel the same way. Part of it is the human tendency to hear what we want to hear. I don’t think NU says everyone will be a success and a leader, although I’m also sure they don’t go to a lot of trouble to squelch such thinking. And colleges certainly feed it with glossy brochures bragging about how well their grads are doing (who thank the college for the wonderful prep that got them started).</p>
<p>HS kids by and large have no idea how people get jobs, get promoted, or for that matter have little idea of the adult workplace other than what adults they know do and some obvious ones such as doctor, lawyer, etc. They convince themselves thru groupthink that going to a “top” school will open doors the rest of their life, the story the OP evidently heard. And having leapt all the hurdles to get into a top school, they are bitter when the expected results don’t materialize.</p>
<p>Becoming a success requires taking ownership of your life, which is scary on two counts. First, you might blow it. Second, nobody at NU or almost any other college is really telling you what you need to do. They try to some extent with the career center, a faculty advisor, etc. but its still up to each person to ask the right questions and put the plan together. </p>
<p>I see the OP’s posting as not just a warning, but a cry for help. So here’s what I suggest. Get the book “What Color is My Parachute” and follow it. You’ll think about what it is that you want to do, identify people doing it, and talk to them not for getting a job but for getting advice on how to get into the field. Use the NU career center, alumni connections, etc. but with a positive attitude. If you feel cheated by NU its going to come thru, if you approach it with the sense “now that I know where I want to go I am using NU to help me get there” it will go much better.</p>
<p>OP, here are three examples of NU alums who are making a difference, whether on the local level or the international level. You can google them and see how they’ve used their NU degrees.</p>
<p>Laura Hoemeke. Worked for the Peace Corps, for Africare, for USAID/Benin’s family health program and as West and Central Africa regional director for IntraHealth.</p>
<p>Alice Shirey. Orchard Hill Church, Iowa. Minister.</p>
<p>Arden Campbell. Foreign missionary to Hungary (taught high school English, co-led an international Christian fellowship with a team of students and missionaries)</p>
<p>Granted, two of these are explicitly Christian in nature and that may or may not be your cup of tea, but you see my point. These are just three that I happen to know personally; I am sure there are many more. Go to the alumni center and grab an alumni magazine, whether for WCAS or for the university as a whole. Read the back section which provides updates on what alums do. Make some phone calls. NU’s reach is SO far beyond the traditional work-for-a-big-company-in-finance, but you need to take the first step. Good luck to you.</p>
<p>Why would you have “reason to be”? Read this and internalize it. Because it’s true.</p>
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<p>Dimsum, you have no idea of the adult workplace. You think that your school is going to magically open doors and you are going to float through them and everyone will bow to you because you went to HYPSM. It’s so not true. You haven’t a clue. At all.</p>
<p>Be voracious in your job hunt if you’re serious about looking for something different. You have a well-regarded degree and several internships behind you, so in every way that college can realistically be expected to prepare you for the workforce, it has. So stop complaining that you haven’t gotten results from your broad, presumably unfocused (1000+ apps?!) job search and (ab)use every resource you have–connections from internships, NW alumni network, hell, Harvard’s alumni network through your roommate. </p>
<p>If you are relentless in your search for a personally fulfilling career, I imagine you’ll find it. But you’re going to have to buckle down and be ready to hold a dreary job while you search for what you want. That may be your consulting job; that may be a barista at Starbucks. Just make sure to keep everything in perspective. Until you find that perfect career, you will have a job. Know that that’s all it is, work your arse off 9-5, and have fun when you’re not working. Don’t let yourself be consumed with misery because life isn’t rainbows and unicorns. After all, there are very happy people working in humanitarian/public policy arenas even as the unemployment rate rises–and some of those people are NW grads like yourself.</p>
<p>I WAS IN CONTROL. I BLAME MYSELF. BUT I DON’T THINK I HAD TO FAIL AS MISERABLY AS I HAVE. </p>
<p>I THINK THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE IN THE SAME POSITION I WAS IN AND I JUST WANT THEM TO HAVE SOME HELP PLANNING THEIR LIFE. IF YOU HAVE BETTER ADVICE OR TIPS, PLEASE POST THEM. SERIOUSLY.</p>
<p>I understand that I am lucky to be born into the life I am. I just feel like I’m actually not prepared for a challenging job. I know I’m a timid, whiny little brat, but I believe that I could’ve gotten a more relevant education to what I’m interested in, made more connections to my careers of interest, and started effecting real change when I was 20, not when I’ll be 27.</p>
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<li> There is no way on earth I blame Northwestern. They are well-meaning, they operate in a dysfunctional environment, and they do the best they can within the rules of the game.</li>
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<p>All I wish is that I better understood what I was getting myself into when I was 18. That’s it. The choice was mine. But I was a kid. I was impressionable and arrogant. I knew it, but I assumed everything would fall into place. That may be true for most NU grads, but I want to help the ones it’s not true for.</p>
<p>But you haven’t failed. You got your degree.</p>
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<p>You don’t plan a whole life, most of it just happens.</p>
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<p>Do it now. Go to the NU career office and start tapping into the NU alumni network. That is what they are there for and they owe you. Only NU alumni can avail themselves of this resource.</p>
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<p>Who says that it still won’t.</p>
<p>You are in a much better position than you think you are. I know people who dropped out of school without their degree, they are the ones who really made a mistake. With no degree they didn’t have all the resources and credentials that graduates from NU have.</p>
<p>Actually, that makes me feel better about my situation. But what you have to understand is that I think I was capable of doing more with my life up to this point.</p>
<p>Nothing dramatic–I just wish I’d been mature about my decision instead of taking the highest ranked school and then ignoring networking and job skills.</p>
<p>Also: I reject the notion that you shouldn’t research potential career paths and educational programs because you can’t be entirely certain that your interests/perception won’t change.</p>
<p>You can’t plan a life perfectly, but you can find out, for example, what exactly you learn in an undergraduate political science class at a school vs. what you learn in an undergraduate statistics class, right?</p>
<p>I’ve never seen much point in bemoaning decisions I made when I was younger, and more ignorant.</p>
<p>I’ve had jobs that I hated from the first day, and jobs that were satisfying for years before they became a poor fit. I kept looking until I found a job I liked better. At one point early in my career, I had to start a business to get the kind of job I was looking for. </p>
<p>Things are tougher during recessions, of course, but if you’re fortunate enough to live a long life, you’ll have to make it through many recessions.</p>
<p>You’ll never have more options than you have this very moment. The range of realistic options narrows over the years, until you’re down to this: shall I take one more breath, or not?</p>
<p>True: I will probably never have more options than I have now.</p>
<p>False: I maximized my potential so far.</p>
<p>This thread is not about me. It’s about giving useful advice to people who have yet to enroll in college. I could really care less about my own success. What I’m worried about is that the same cycle I and many of my friends went through is going to repeat itself forever, wasting precious years of our world’s youth.</p>
<p>I have friends who never liked a single class, played video games all day, and are unemployed. They were straight A students in high school. Are we really so sure that there’s nothing we can do to avert this problem?</p>
<p>The title of the post is “What a Northwestern grad would do differently,” not “Please Help Me Turn My Life Around and Let’s Not Try to Come Up with Useful Advice for Kids Who Are still in High School because Everyone Knows that It’s Impossible for anyone to Figure Out What School Matches their Career and Academic Interest Best Until They Have Graduated at which point It’s Too Late… so screw 'em!”</p>
<p>I’ll ask one more time:</p>
<p>DO YOU AGREE WITH MY INITIAL TIPS ON RESEARCHING SCHOOL CHOICES? </p>
<p>DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE ADVICE ON SCHOOL SELECTION FOR PROSPECTIVE UNDERGRADUATES?</p>
<p>WHICH SCHOOLS HAVE THE BEST TEACHERS AND COMMUNICATORS AND HANDS-ON EXPERIENTIAL PROGRAMS AND IN WHICH MAJORS DO THEY HAVE THEM? DOES THAT MATTER?</p>
<p>Your questions combined with the title of the thread imply that Northwestern is somehow duplicitous in your situation, they are not. There are plenty of Northwestern grads doing fine, wonderful society altering things. </p>
<p>OP, college is a time where students receive a well-rounded, liberal arts education and explore a wide variety of interests. If you wanted to save the world, you should have followed your passion instead of pursuing the money/prestige route. NU offers so many interdisciplinary majors and is one of the top leaders in producing Fulbright scholars. Why didn’t you take advantage of these opportunities??</p>
<p>I am a proud NU alum who majored in a “social change” field and am pursuing a dual-master’s degree related to helping people and promoting social change. Many “education/social change” fields also require at least a master’s degree for advancement.</p>
<p>You should also feel grateful that you have a job in this economy. Many college graduates would love to have your position. Northwestern isn’t the problem – you made a poor decision and don’t want to acknowledge it. Blaming someone else is wrong.</p>
<p>I BLAME MYSELF. I’VE SAID THIS SEVERAL TIMES NOW. I DID NOT DO MY HOMEWORK ON WHAT COLLEGES AND CAREERS ARE ACTUALLY LIKE. </p>
<p>The only way this advice could be irrelevant is if nobody else was obsessed with getting into a prestigious school to the detriment of not learning what they wanted to learn. Is that your contention?</p>
<p>If not, then ANSWER MY ORIGINAL QUESTION: WHAT SHOULD PROSPECTIVE UNDERGRADUATES DO TO ENSURE THAT THEY ARE SELECTING THE RIGHT SCHOOL? IS MY ADVICE RELEVANT?</p>