| | A lot of my friends are full-time students living on campus, with no jobs. They dedicate 100 percent of their resources toward two goals: earning their degree in business and building their resumes.
A degree and a good resume do open a lot of doors. But they only have validity within a certain context: the context of reaching out to the anonymous, like bait on a fishing line. You're fishing for someone richer and more powerful than you to discover an unfilled position in a big company, and sift through a pile of resumes. If you're lucky, he'll find yours, and decide to interview you
On the other hand, I still maintain a job in the working world. I've had about a dozen different jobs in my life, some of them paid pretty well. And not one of them required a resume or a degree. It was all through connections, knowing people who need things done, and knowing how to execute what they need executed.
I figured out long ago I don't want to work for someone else. I refuse to be a labor input on someone else's production possibility curve. Managers are always looking to squeeze as much as they can from their resources. That's not a good place to be.
A better place to be is somewhere where your resume isn't what got you in the door. Where you're not starting from scratch with people you've never met.
Why then, am I still in school? Why am I jumping through all these sheepskin-chasing hoops and building my resume? Well, I've had a lot of jobs where if I knew then what I know now, I would have handled the situation quite differently. Now that Economics has taught me to understand incentives, and statistics is teaching me how to estimate the world, I can allocate my time better, and optimize my skill set. I am in school to better myself, to learn more. I'm not here to chase a sheepskin and build my resume. I'm not in the market to get exploited. I don't need to go fishing for "connections." I just need to learn to understand the way the world works with greater clarity, and how to asses and solve problems. I want to learn to administrate an enterprise around an idea.
I am not here to be indoctrinated, dolled up, reduced to two pages of experience and crammed into a cubicle somewhere in the private sector.
I'll work for myself, I'll even work for other people if they pay me well enough. I've decided whaty I want my Business Card to say:
Ryan Brandys
Mercenary Executive
Pay me and I'll get it done.
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| | Posted 2/24/2007 12:18 AM - 162 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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