Success in Higher Education: Small Colleges vs Big Universities

The Wall Street Journal had a pretty good article today about the current state of higher education.  You can see it here (hopefully): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304177104577307580650834716.html

This article does a good job of mixing statistics (30% of US adults have four-year degrees, which lags behind 14 other countries) with concrete anecdotes about young people that have or haven't gone to college.

I'm a big proponent of education.  As long as you're smart about what you're getting into, I think that the time, money, and effort invested in education will always benefit you. The article does a good job of describing the situation.  In this blog I like to offer ideas on how to improve the situation. 

From my own experience, I saw that there are substantial pros and cons to what kind of school a person attends.  I've written previous posts about how to choose what to study.  In this post I want to focus on WHERE to study.

Big vs Little

Let's simplify the problem a little by dividing school choices into two

The danger of micromanagement

A pretty cool job

We MADE this! This went on a race car we built.

Halfway through my sophomore year as a mechanical engineering student, I got a pretty cool job as a lab assistant in the college machine tool shop.  I got to wear the coveralls and walk around with an oil can to make sure that the mills and lathes were maintained.  Since it was a school machine shop, I didn't do much manufacturing of my own, but spent a lot of time helping other students make parts for school projects.


The grownup
The only grownup on staff was a long-time employee of the college:  Ken Forster.  He wore his thin hair slicked to the side and had a full mustache.  Ken was as much a fixture in that shop as any of the machinery.  The decades of expertise that he provided to the students could not have been replaced by any number of books on machining.  For good or for bad, that shop was his baby.

Ken had his way of doing things.  All of it was based on experience... HIS experience.  When we calculated the proper speeds at which to run the mill,

Instagram and the golden goose

Something about golden eggs
I remember something about a fairy tale about someone that had a goose that laid golden eggs.  The details are fuzzy, but I think that the owner of the goose eventually got greedy and killed the goose to get all the eggs at once.  Obviously, that didn't work for them.

By now you should have heard that Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars.  A billion dollars.  Try and imagine that number.  Sheesh.  That's one-thousand millions.  That would be enough to build forty world-class indoor skateparks... in EVERY STATE IN THE U.S. (I only need ONE!)

A lot has been said about whether Facebook overpaid for Instagram.  I don't really care.  It's their money, and they can spend it however they want.  I wasn't an Instagram user, so I don't care about this rebel alliance getting bought by the evil empire.  I don't plan on building a career in mergers & acquisitions, so I don't care to make a case study about what you can get for a billion dollars (unless we're talking about skateparks.) What I DO care about is the lesson that we can take from Instagram about patiently

Extra hours in a day

What would you do with an extra 19 hours each week?  If you could get 19 additional hours every week tax free, and with no additional aging what would you be able to accomplish?  Would you read more?  Exercise more?  Spend more time cooking? Pick up a new hobby? Volunteer?


How do you feel about television?  Take a hard look at how much time you spend watching "programming."  Is it worth it?  Do you love it?  Are you becoming the person you want to be while watching?

Do you have a realistic idea of how much time you spend watching television?  Last June, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released a study on how people spend their time throughout  the day.  The average American over the age of fourteen spends 2.7 hours EACH DAY watching TV.  Is that okay?  That's nearly 19 hours each week.  Let me ask again: Do you love it?  Is television worth

Money Money Money: Part 1

(Edit: After reading this again, it feels really negative or arrogant. I'm not sure why. I've tried to be as realistic as possible to give some guidance to people starting out in their careers.  I promise I'm a really nice person.
Also, I SERIOUSLY don't want to hear ANYONE complain about this post by saying that  money isn't everything and shouldn't be the only factor when choosing a career.  No one believes that more than me.  Read ANY OTHER post in this blog for discussions on finding your passions or working your strengths.  THIS post is about money.  Once again, I promise that I'm a really nice person.)

( I recommend opening this link in a separate tab to set the mood for this post...)

Having "The Talk"

A lot of parents have a hard time talking with their kids about money.  It's another one of those awkward conversations that parents mean to have, but the time never seems right.  They put it off until their child is old enough, but by then, they figure that the kid has probably heard it all from their friends anyway.

School won't teach you how to make money either.  This is something I don't understand, because teachers don't seem too bothered when teaching much more awkward subjects in Sophomore Health class.

There is a lot I don't know about money, but there are a few simple things that I do know.  I'm going to go in depth on one of these ideas here and save

...How did you get discovered?

My cousin Devin makes his living as a videographer. He travels the world making entertaining videos, most of which are destined ultimately for YouTube.  He doesn't charge admission for people to watch them.  He gives away all of his secrets in the video descriptions.  He makes behind-the-scenes videos to demonstrate his processes in depth.  He responds personally to comments and questions on facebook and YouTube.
His rope swing video is one of my favorites (and has nearly 10 million views after less than two months.)

Most of the comments are positive, some are amazingly negative, but there was one comment

Career Advice from Hunger Games

I was pretty surprised at how much I liked seeing the Hunger Games.  I admit that I had pretty low expectations for a movie based on a book written for teenagers.  I expected wooden acting and few surprises.  I was impressed with how developed the different locations were, although I admit I'm less excited for the future knowing now that we'll all end up as flamboyant ravers.

Once Haymitch came out of his (somewhat cliche) drunken state, his first piece of advice to the young protagonist was remarkably insightful.  "Make people LIKE you." That's good advice to all of us.

I've written before about the importance of relationships with other people and how maintaining the trust of other people is critical to persuading people, but not a lot is ever said about how to actually get people to like you in the first place.  I want to outline two things

Something I tried

So, in keeping with my theme for this last year of trying new things, I finally tried something that took a year of effort.

I'll skip the whole story about how difficult it was to organize and how stressful it has made the last month and jump right to the satisfying end: I organized a group of five other business owners and local professionals to give an hour-long presentation at a nearby high school.  Having seen from the teenagers at my church that high-school students are given pretty poor career advice ("Do what you love" and not much else,) I have started a crusade to transfer career advice from those that hold it

How I'll grow my business

It's that sticky place for small businesses. It's that point where the owner has plenty of work to keep him/her busy, but he/she isn't quite ready to bring on more help.  The business is reactionary.  The appointment calendar is booked for the near-term, but beyond the next month or the next quarter or the next contract, business is uncertain.

This is such a common problem for small business owners that I want to share what my strategy is for getting a company to the next stage. 

To give the context, I just started with a small company called Epimedia that does contract work for other companies. Epimedia writes software that makes hardware work. I am now one of four full-time employees of the company.  All of the contracts up to now have come from word-of-mouth. Every year has seen more revenue than the previous year, but the work can be exhausting as we continuously work at our maximum capacity.  We enjoy the luxury of high enough revenues that I can focus some attention on proactively finding new business.  The following is an outline of what I plan to do to find new business:

0. Be sincere
As I mentioned in

Relationship-Based Sales for Non Sales People

Everyone in every role needs to sell.  Even if just getting coworkers, friends or spouses to compromise with your ideas, you can benefit from some simple sales techniques.

I never intended to be a sales person.  I was so annoyed by the mall kiosk sales people that trick their potential customers that I used to even doubt the value of sales people at all.  Sales people were (in my mind) people that sought commissions at the expense of everyone else.  Though I still think that some sales people take that approach, I've very much enjoyed the last three years that I have spent as a sales person.  I want to share some basic insights that have universal application even to people that aren't paid on commission. Similar to my topic from a previous post, the best opportunities go to those that are comfortable talking with others and

Walking away from "Good"

It's been official for a couple of weeks now, although the paper work was just put in place last Friday. The announcement was made to the team this morning, and the job posting will likely hit LinkedIn this afternoon. Let me know if you know anyone that would be a good Tektronix account manager in New Mexico because I'm quitting my job.

I'll be joining a couple of friends at Epimedia.  At this point there are four of us full time with a couple of contract programmers.  We write software to control hardware.  

I've alluded in my blog posts to the fact that