Author: Curt Doolittle

ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS

Don’t pay college tuition for trade school education. Get a major in something that is the maximum extent of your abilities, and then minor in or take basic courses in your trade.

In this case I’m referring to a young relative of mine that I love who is too smart for the career she has targeted. I would suggest that if you are a woman and can handle the nursing curriculum then whether or not you choose to be a nurse you can always downgrade if you can’t hack the program. If you do hack it, the entire healthcare field is open to you. Furthermore you can get an advanced degree such as Nurse Practitioner, and and within this generation, nurses will approach doctor salaries. NP is a great career for a smart woman who wants to participate in care-taking fields.

I will also put out that when you are a young woman you are probably very ignorant about the world, and certainly too ignorant of the world to know in high school what career you should follow. And to make matters worse, you also have raging hormones in your body making you extremely sensitive to care-taking stimuli. By the time you are in your late twenties to mid thirties these hormones will decline in influence and you will care very much more that you are working with people who think about the world the way that you do, and are interesting than you will about care taking of yet another of the same problems that you have seen a thousand times. You can let your hormonal influences in youth determine your mid and late life circumstances, but if you do you will end up as one of the many unsatisfied people in the world who dreams of being what else she could have been.

In general if you want to have the most fulfilling life, you should always try to operate at the limits of your ability, and associate with people at that same limit. You will constantly make each other better. If you associate with people who have 95-105 IQ’s they are ‘normal’, but if you associate with people 105-115, it’s a very different world you will live in. For example, in the medical field, doctors are usually above 125, and often much higher, while almost all workers in medical administration and service are below 100. If you want to know why doctors act the way they do it’s because it’s very frustrating to talk to people more than 15 points different from you. You don’t see it usually in your education system, but as you mature, you rapidly understand that at 15 points is a standard deviation, and that our social classes (if not our economic classes) are structured by IQ, and that it is much more rewarding for you to work with the people at the top of your spectrum rather than with people below it.

Next, in the same vein, when you are young, and female (with lower dominance than males) the idea of managing people is harder to imagine than doing a job that does not require a lot of collaboration. But if you are smart, then the only rewarding job as you mature is that which requires a lot of collaboration. If you are smart enough that bad customer service, organizational disorder and inefficiency bother you, and wise enough to understand that people must do things differently because they are each equipped differently, then it is wise to look at careers with management responsibility.

If you don’t like what this says to you then I am sorry for you – because life will teach you this lesson even if you do not want to learn it. Associate with the best people you can. That means the people who constantly challenge you to improve yourself. You will make them better and they will make you better.

The opposite is also true. If you associate with people less able than you are, in a career that is less challenging than you are capable of, you will be both socially and occupationally bored, and constantly frustrated by what you see as pervasive incompetence and error. And you will rapidly find yourself a prisoner of that little world in which you have walled yourself.

Money is not everything. Once you make over 60K, happiness does not improve – you just buy more expensive houses, cars, clothes, and ‘stuff’. But this is a misleading statistic. Because once you make over say, 90K, the quality of people you associate with on a daily basis increases dramatically. Fulfillment in life comes from your family, your friends, but the people you spend the most time with are those at your work. So just as you would be careful with friends, careful selecting a mate, it is wise to be careful selecting a line of work where you are with people who fulfill you rather than frustrate you.

If you are smart – smart enough to graduate in the upper 10 or 20% of your class, make sure that you are not consigning yourself to your parent’s social class, and the kinds of careers that are easily understood among your family, friends and associates. If you live in NYC or SF you are more aware of the many careers available. If you live in a small town somewhere rural you are not. It helps to read help wanted advertisements in big cities if you want to understand the world. Employment offers are the map of the world as it is. Whatever people tell you is largely mythology.

So my advice to everyone at every level of ability is to shoot for the most complex degree in one of the most complex fields with the greatest quantitative demands that you can handle. And to consider trade school your last option. You can always switch from harder degree to less hard degree. But if you work hard you will not. But if you are going to pay that much money for an education, do not pay for trade school expecting a college education. It’s a recipe for debt and an unsatisfying life.

Affections.

Curt