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Pojaco
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travel is always a great idea if you haven't done much already - seeing new countries is usually fairly life-changing. otherwise, you could always have a crack at hitting an interesting job with the degree you've got - an english degree will never get you straight into the gates of a well-paying firm but it's not utterly useless, and it's probably worth a month or two of applications to see if anything good pops up. there's a lot of online editorial stuff cropping up that you might squeeze yourself into, or you could have a go at copywriting, get into the publishing biz as an editorial assistant - whatever. as long as you position your degree as personally vital in whatever cover-letter you send out, and speak like you're more than equipped to do the job, you might be surprised at what you can wrangle up
it worked for me. after two years of travel and a handful of jobs, i came back to uni with huge momentum and burned through a master of arts like it was a second kindergarden. it just meant i had time to work out exactly what it was i wanted to do, and why
Just look at your post--"I've also considered library science, culinary school, and design school." You are literally all over the map. Instead of racking up student loan debt, pick the career path that interests you most and find an entry level job. That way you can find out if you really even like that career path.
My wife did interviews with a lot of applicants at her last job, and I can tell you first hand that when your resume reads English undergrad, XYZ graduate degree, zero work experience, it doesn't look that great. The number of times my wife went off about some applicant who had some sort of wacky graduate degree and no work experience, and was applying for some sort of management position...please do yourself a favor and don't be that person!
I don't know how people pay to travel often, I always feel like I'm broke. I can't stand my job much longer though, I think I'll probably be finished there in mid-August. What kind of traveling can be done with around six grand in weak US dollars?
the nicaragua opportunity sounds fantastic. don't worry about it - do it! travelling is always worthwhile and if you have any support on the other end to make it easier it's all the more worthwhile
No. Just, no. I know you like playing with computers, lots of us do. I went to school with the first real cohort of the Nintendo Generation. They all loved playing video games and playing with computers. They got a very rude awakening when they found out that working with computers wasn't nearly as fun as playing with them, and in fact the two weren't all that similar.
The whole first year of a CS curriculum is math and programming, which you indicated that you don't do or enjoy. Both are hard. You also said that you didn't want a job sitting in a cubicle all day. Sadly, CS jobs have an abundance of cubicles. Unless you're lucky or you're a very top person in your field, you're on the express train to Cubeifornia.
As others pointed out above, you're all over the map. You've already used up four years of your life getting a Bachelors degree that you're not actually planning to use, and now you're in a hurry to get back into graduate school for yet another expensive degree that you're not sure you want. Bad start.
You need to do some stuff to figure out what you want to do with your life, instead of just going through the motions, or else you're going to have some real trouble later when you realize you've committed to something that you really didn't feel like doing.
You've listed at least six careers so far that you're interested in: law, sociology, computer science, librarian, design (of what?) and cooking. You have a degree, now is the time to use it to get in the door with some organizations that actually do these things and figure out which of them you want to do. My suggestion: rank-order these from "most likely to be happy doing this" to "least likely to be happy doing this." Then, go find a job you're qualified for in a firm that does that thing. For example:
Law: Legal secretaries make decent money and get to see the legal process from the inside. You'll get to work with attorneys and paralegals.
Sociology: I have no idea what 'sociologists' do all day, but I'm sure they have a use for a person with an English degree.
Computer Science: Get a job as a tech writer. Tech writers are very valuable and the world needs more of them.
Librarian: Get a job as a library assistant or work the circ desk.
Design: Get a job as a (whatever) design assistant.
Cooking: Get a job in a higher-end restaurant.
Any of these jobs should be able to match or beat that $13 an hour you're making now. $13 an hour - that's $26,000 a year full-time, is not a well-paying job. In Southern California, it's an especially not-well-paying job. It might be fine while you're still living at home with the folks, but eventually you're going to have to move out and start taking care of yourself. Bills add up, and eventually you're going to need to start saving for retirement. It's good you've nestled away a small cash reserve, but grad school will probably eat that up pretty fast. The longer you wait to decide what it is you want to do for a living, the worse position you'll be in.
Try one of these jobs for 3-6 months. If you decide you can't stand it, leave and go to the next job down the list. Keep going until you find yourself saying "hey, I wouldn't mind doing this for 10 or 15 years." THEN decide whether you need to go for more schooling. Maybe you'll surprise yourself and find out that you don't really want to be a lawyer, but you'd love being a paralegal.
I'm skeptical about traveling as an option for starting your life. Yes indeed, some people travel and it helps them "find themselves" and it convinces them they want to work for Greenpeace or delousing orphans or whatever. Seems suspiciously like escapism and more dawdling to me. Here's a good way to decide whether going to Nicaragua is a good idea: if you are honestly going to find out whether a particular profession is going to be good or bad for you, then go. At the end of that trip, you should either have found your calling or found one or more jobs that you WERE interested in doing, but aren't anymore. If you're going just to go and "experience" stuff, forget it.
you're kidding, right? there are a lot of people who've come back from extended travel enriched and enlightened without turning into a bloody hippy. it may not usually be a direct path to an apt career but what it provides on a personal level is much more than that.
what it does is it gives you time away from your current context, so that when you return you're better able to identify the parts of your life that you love and the parts you can do without. it's a perspective shift, and one which indubitably leads to new friends and fine adventures
that said, opportunities can pop up while travelling, and they're rarely as stereotypically 'hippy' as joining the peace corps and retooling prosthetic hooves for disaster struck tapirs. a lot of people i know have discovered trades that they're really interested in while overseas, and every city has its own market dynamic, so you might find a potential path and entry-level experience at a job you'd have no chance of in your own home town. translation and teaching are good ones, for example
basically i reckon if you're uncertain about where to go, travel is the best way to get certain, even if the place you end up going was just down the street in the first place
* About the don't be an Ugly American if you travel part: you have to realize that these countries are NOT America, and you can't hold them up to American standards. They aren't better or worse, just different, with different lifestyles, ideas, and ways of thinking. Those are the cool things that you're going out to explore, so just keep an open mind and try to see how other cultures work.
Also,
This. I wasn't looking for a translating job when I went to China, but after a while of just mentioning the interest to a friend (who is an author), they got in contact with their publishing company and got me a job doing it. The great thing is I can do it online, and they send funds directly to my bank.
As far as the Peace Corps go, if you took out loans for college, consider it. They pay off up to 75% of your loans after four years of service, or 15% for one (and during the time you serve, no interest needs to be paid on the loans). That might not be a lot of money as far as an annual salary, but they also give you enough to live in whatever country you go to, you can get language training, you can help people, they give you $6000 as a "relocation fee" when you get back to the states (regardless of if you went for 1 year or 4 years), and you also get priority when picking a job. There is actually a law saying that if someone has slightly better qualifications than you and is applying for the job, the company HAS to pick you, because you went into the Peace Corps.
One last option is the Fullbright Scholarship. I think you might have to apply when you are a graduating senior, but you should be able to apply after you graduate as well (not 100% sure on this). You write a proposal stating what you want to research, and why it would benefit people to research this, then you go abroad and research it for two years. During those two years, your life is paid for by the Scholarship organization, and at the end of two years, you write your thesis paper. I've heard that it's easy to get, and it'd be like grad school except you actually do all the research yourself, and you go abroad, maybe study a new language (they'll pay for an interpreter or language classes) while doing it. It's another option to check out, I guess.
I'm also going to second bsjezz regarding DrFryLock's post. Especially the part about, That's what life should be about, yeah? I mean, it depends on your outlook, but I know I don't want to look back when I'm 70 and say, "wow, that's nice, I just realized I did the exact same thing over and over again for about 50 years, I better get started on actually enjoying life." But, if you want a stable, unchanging life, then go for it. Just go down the list and pick a "career" that you wouldn't mind doing for 20+ years, and just keep with that, get your "life points" and call it good. Then, when you're retired, you might have enough money to go traveling, but you might also be that sort of person that only says that when they retire, they want to go traveling, and ends up just sitting on the couch in a retirement home.
TL;DR -- Look online and check out traveling, check out Peace Corps, check out the Fullbright Scholarship, think about the idea of a stable, unchanging life; consider which one interests you more, then DO it.
Join the Peace Corps yourself! Join Teach for America or Americorps. Teach English abroad in Korea or China. If I wasn't doing my masters this is what I would be doing instead.
I graduated from college two years ago, and I work for a law firm. I'm actually a paralegal, you can often get these positions if you have a college degree. The trouble comes in with the lack of experience.
When, and if, you search for jobs in the legal field, knowing what titles to search can really help. As far as support staff (non-attorneys) within a law firm, there are secretaries, paralegals, file clerks, case clerks, and probably one or two others depending upon the firm.
Case clerk would be great for a first job at a BIG firm, you'd work closely with paralegals, and often you'd become a junior paralegal fairly quickly with an undergrad degree.
If you can get a job as a legal secretary, cool, don't let the name "secretary" fool you, you've still got some decent responsibility. Oh, and the titles "paralegal" and "legal assistant" are often interchangable. Some firms only hire paralegals that are grads of accredited programs, but often that means that they did a two year associates to specifically be a paralegal, and in my opinion, is worth a lot less than 4 years of full-time college in terms of education and social skills.
PM/responsd here with any more questions.
Since you've heard enough about the travel/wait to go to school/law options, I'll toot the library's horn here. It's a fairly easy degree to earn, can be fast (did mine in three consecutive semesters), and depending on the program it can be relatively cheap. A possible downside is that without a second master's degree, you'll almost certainly end up working in a public library; I don't see that as being a problem, because that's what I am and what I love, but some people long for the hallowed halls of academia.
There's plenty of reasons that being a librarian is an excellent job:
1. You get to connect people to information, which if you're already inclined to be a know-it-all is a dream come true. That part of the job means that you have to know a little bit about everything and also that you'll constantly be learning new things.
2. You'll get to help people each and every day. Whether it's helping someone fill out a job application, create an e-mail address, find a social service that they need, or just helping a kid find the books he needs for his summer reading list, you're always helping people.
3. The degree means that you start at the higher levels of pay and also promotional opportunities. Someone suggested in an earlier post working as an library assistent and that's good to get your feet wet, but librarians rule and run the library and that's what you'll end up wanting to be.
4. You get to shape the collection, which means picking which books, movies, and music your people have access to. If you're inclined to be a missionary of high culture, or of the latest smutty time-waster, it's a great fit.
5. It's an opportunity to participate in the of the great democratic institutions in our country. A place where anyone can come in and get free, fair, unbiased, unfettered access to information and entertainment ought warm the cockles of the hardest heart.
In conclusion, be a librarian! Public libraries rule! USA! USA! USA!
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I found this, and as a person considering a B.A. in English I understand the confusion of what to do with yourself after college. I am considering going the Public Relations route (even though my school offers a PR degree that focuses solely on PR, but I want to work on my grammar and sentence structure instead of how to look pretty) and it can be fun. With PR you can also attach yourself to things you're interested in. PR with video game companies or computer companies or catering companies or law firms. It's a way of getting involved with something you enjoy without really doing the programming or court cases.
At least this is my take on it, someone please feel free to correct me.
People see degrees in English as very limiting but the reality is that you can pretty much do what ever you want. You can even go on to Med School if you wanted to. It's a key to the world, you just have to find the right key hole.
Movie theater manager (pre-existing job, got promoted)
Newspaper editor
Office manager
Copy editor
Real estate appraiser
So basically, don't sell your degree short. You'd be surprised what you can do with it. Also, what Frylock said.
Granted, it's not the same kind of math that a lot of people hate. You won't see, say, calculus used outside of specific areas. But there is still a lot of math. I, personally, like that sort of math, but it is there.
This ^.
Seriously.
As for traveling... I think what Frylock was trying to say is that you mustn't overestimate what it will do. Traveling will make you a better, more rounded person, but it's not going to help you decide what career path to choose if your current ideas are so divergent.
I would say everyone would gain something from traveling/living in a foreign country for a year, but it's not going to help the OP right now, and the money for it isn't going to come out of thin air either. A good plan would be to head down the jobs list, find something you enjoy and use the money you save going down the jobs list to use for traveling. Use the time away to solidify in your mind what you want to do and where you want to do it, and then move on when you get back.
After doing that for a while, I've moved on to a much bigger company that publishes textbooks. We're one of the biggest textbook publishers in the country. Just to get in here, I took the position of editorial assistant, which is half secretary and half "editorial." That was 2.5 years ago. I'm still waiting for an opportunity here to move up.
That said I do see a future here - I will someday be a developmental editor and I plan to work here the rest of my career. The job is menial most days and it's an endless cycle of planning books, making books, and then starting over.
Still, I get to sit in my air-conditioned cubicle all day, listen to my iPod, do most of my communication through e-mail, not be bothered much, pretty much do what I want online, and then go home after exactly 8 hours and then not think about my job until the next morning. That appeals to me, but I can see how it wouldn't to others.
I am lucky enough to have a BA in English and actually have a job that uses skills I learned in school. But it wasn't easy to get this job and there aren't a lot of other choices where I live.
Actually when I think about it, I don't use many of the things I learned in college. I could have done this job with no college at all. But having the degree is what even gets you an interview in the first place.
Also, I don't know a whole lot about librarians but I remember hearing that they need a TON of education. Is that true?
Mayhaps you should read the whole thread dude. That question is totally handled.
I have to wonder how true that is. I just graduated with a BA in English and I'm starting grad school for library science in september, immediately after graduation. It's not because I don't know what I want to do; I decided two years ago that this is what I want to do, and I worked my ass off to get the grades to get into the best library science program in the province. Why would an employer assume that I just did it for shits and giggles, rather than assuming I was very dedicated and sure of myself?
XBL |Steam | PSN | last.fm
* Graduate degrees seem to be an American thing so far as I can tell.
This thread has put forth some interesting ideas.
I used to be a Comp. Sci. major and was very good at it but very bored with it - I did not want to program for the rest of my life.
Though I still tend to regret my decision as to what I changed my major to. It's hard out there for a liberal arts major.
In case any of you liberal arts types don't believe him, this is 100% true. It's not easy for anyone. My gf thinks my degree lets me saunter into any job I want that's tangential to CS, but it simply doesn't.