Risk

To me college is an investment. While I may have fun at college, make friends, and sometimes ignore classes. I am at college first and foremost to get a degree. There is ample evidence that a college degree will result in larger earnings throughout my life, and that it is a smart investment. I choose my major (economics) with this mindset. I wanted a major that I enjoyed, but I also wanted a major that I would be able to profit from throughout my life. This mindset also impacted what I did over the summer. I have taken summer school three out of my four summers, to be able to allow to me graduate this semester. I also worked at the same company for every one of those summers to build relationships. I have been lucky enough to be able to graduate without any debit. I say all of this to demonstrate that the last four years of my life has been to reduce income risk. I invested the last four years of my life into college as a way to try to improve my future. To achieve this, I have made the majority of my choice’s in that time in service of that goal.

Yesterday, Thursday, I accepted an invitation to work for the Peace Corps. I will leave in late May 2018 where I will teach secondary math in Ghana, for the Peace Corps, over 27 months. I will be trained over the course of the first three months. While I work for the Peace Corps I will be forced to work in situations that I have never experienced before, as a result of this I have no doubt that I will grow and learn. After talking to people who have already finished their service in the Peace Corps, and reading up on it. I think my time in the Peace Corps as another way to reduce my income risk. I will be able to do that while being able to help people, do something different, and face challenges that I have never had before.  This does leave me with a bit of a problem. I graduate college after this semester, in December. This means that I will have five months to do something. I am currently trying to decide what I want to do with that time. I have spent the last two days, trying to answer the prompt for myself.

In the beginning of this post I talk about how I see college as an investment. While I think that this is true I also think that it is important to note getting a degree does not guarantee anything. I have two friends that graduated college recently. Both of whom graduated (mathematics and economics) without a job line up and they both spent months looking for a job. After a year of looking and working as a paralegal the mathematics major moved to Indianapolis to work for an insurance company. While the economics major is working as a bartender, he is still looking for a job in his major. I have friends that went to college and have great jobs or no jobs. I also have friends that did not go to college who have great jobs or no jobs. My take away from all of that is that no matter how prepared you are, and no matter how many decisions I make to minimize risk it will always be there.  After seeing friends survive, thrive, and fail on the job market the biggest take away is the necessity of adapting. In my experience, the people who have the hardest time getting a job are the people who have the most specific requirements. If I will only take a job if it pays a million dollars and is in Champaign Urbana I am not going to get a job.  While if my only requirement for a job is that it pays minimum wage, I will probably find a job in a week or two.


I think that fluidity of thought is also an important ability in economics. The models that economists deal with in economics assumes rational thought. People do not always act rationally. This means that if I want anything I learn, in economics, to be transferable I must be able to extrapolate what is the point of the model.  

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 21, 2017 at 12:08 PM

    Just to play devil's advocate on your first paragraph, do you have any friends from high school who opted not to go to college? Might it be that you went to college because that is what most everyone else did? I will observe that for me the choice was which college, not whether I'd attend college or not. Likewise, on major, I went through several of those - first physics, them pre-med, then math. In none of those cases was what came after college important. It was whether it fit me at the time. Does economics fit you? What factors are indicators of that?

    Regarding your choice to join the Peace Corps, I applaud the decision. But I am less sure that considering income risk is a good way to frame the issues. A different way to think about matters might be about considering our social conscience and social responsibility and doing things to benefit others because those things need to be done. Sometime later in the semester I had planned on talking about doing volunteer work outside of the paying job, so you can express your social responsibility that way. In effect, the Peace Corps delays you starting your work career and makes your entire life revolve around the social responsibility activity for the next two years. While I agree that you well learning invaluable things from the experience, the reason you do it is not for the learning it will provide. You do it for the social need it will fulfill.

    There are many variables that impact how students do in the job market after graduation. Which college they graduated from matters. How they performed in college matters. How they went about pursuing their job search matters. You penultimate paragraph made it seem as if you felt college itself might not matter at all. Of course it does. But college itself doesn't eliminate all the risk. Indeed to manage many risk there are typically many different little decisions that must be made to accompany the bid decisions. One should not assume that the big decision itself is sufficient.

    I also have a question about the summer school thing. Did you do that locally where you live? And at what cost? Does going to summer school for three summers in a row save you cash-wise relative to paying for an additional semester of tuition? I think the U of I is pretty pricey in the summer, so doing it that way might not be an economical choice.

    Regarding your time between graduation and entering the Peace Corps, I responded to your email about that. You can follow up with if you want.

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  2. John Maynard Keynes Econ 490 fall 2017October 23, 2017 at 7:28 PM

    I have had a few friends from high school go into trade school, or simply started working. But, I will agree that apart of my decision to go to college was because it was the norm. If I remember correctly my logic was that it is the norm because of the benefits. I see the two as a chicken and the egg situation.

    I started college Undeclared, for the 3 semesters I shopped around trying to find a major that I enjoyed. I like the subject matter of Economics and what you can do with it. I choose it for a combination of its potential uses latter in my life as well as for my enjoyment of what you can do with economics. I took summer school at a community college near Chicago. Which means that I did end up spending less than if i took another semester of college at U of I.

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  3. Francis Edgeworth Econ 490 Fall 2017October 26, 2017 at 10:53 PM

    Congratulations on the Peace Corps! There have been many successful people who have started their careers from the Peace Corps. I believe the job market in that sense is brutal. You can work hard for 4 years in college but still not have the job you desire, or a job at all. I know in many STEM majors, people who do not communicate effectively are given the lower end of positions. Even though they are immensely talented in coding alone. Best of luck!

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