If a young person asks me what they should do for a living, I would recommend learning to do horseshoeing or airplane mechanics for small, personal planes.
Both of these fields put you in contact with people who have money.
Many farriers are drunks and do a sloppy job. The good farriers are happy with their work.
Few if any people in the profession are fully aware of the potential of what they do.
People who own horses are seldom on the welfare rolls. If you do a good job for them, they might just see you as somebody they should listen to, somebody their friends would like to know about.
People who own small airplanes are also seldom seen on welfare rolls.
In fact, is you find someone who is able to buy an airplane from his welfare money, that is somebody you could learn a LOT from about personal economy.
My point is that executive assistantships and other routine white-collar methods of advancement are hard to come by. A person who can fix a plane or take care of a horse will never have any problem earning a living.
And if you want to go on from there with your contacts with rich people who learn to trust you, you will be a very unusual person.
#1 by Elizabeth on 12/17/2005 - 3:12 pm
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out that I haven’t gotten my hands on
yet. It’s about the problems faced by people trying to get ahead
by the routine white collar methods. It sounds LONG overdue. I wasted
a LOT of years trying to get ahead by making nice and following
the rules. Believe me, there are VERY few four-year degrees that
will get you a good job. Most of those are in Education and Nursing.
(And nurses are employable with a two-year degree.)
At long last, I am getting a Master’s degree. I am trying my
best to get into a doctoral program. Aside from the intellectual
challenges involved, having a Ph.D. gets you unbelievable credibility.
(I’m not planning on going into college teaching in my field:
the job market for that isn’t good right now.)I can do other things
with a Ph.D. in my field.
#2 by Elizabeth on 12/17/2005 - 3:17 pm
Farriers don’t just bend a little metal and make horseshoes.
The trained ones actually can make orthopedic shoes for
horses. (I had a relative who got trained in this.)Horses
are usually pets — and I think we’ve all been exposed to
the booming market in pet stuff. And they eat money as well
as grass and feed.
There are a lot of good tech colleges out there. Some programs,
especially nursing, can have _huge_ waiting lists or
very, very high admittance standards.
I was all set to try for a tech school program when I got
into grad school. The GRE (SAT for grad school) got changed
and I did very well on the new version….