Ms. Williams, MVHS guidance counselor, puts on Career Day every year. Regular people in the workforce come in and talk to our students.
My 12th grade SUPA class had the pleasure of meeting a robotics engineer from Amazon. Nia came in and proceeded to explain how the high school to college to Master’s Degree can work. Choosing a field of study, changing course when necessary, and working hard can work. Our students get told all sorts of nonsense about how the system is rigged because of (fill in the blank trendy -ism buzzword).
Nia not only demolished that destructive philosophy, she was also living proof how how a great attitude, perseverance, solid parenting, and work can lead to a life of abundance. Remember, “work” is the only 4 letter word we are NOT allowed to use these days.
In the podcast I talked about Praxis, the internship / work program that has recently gone through some changes. It is one of the most important links in my eBook “16 Ways to Jumpstart Your Disaffected Teen”.
Our Career Day visitor reminded us that the entrepreneurial, no college way is only ONE way to do it. There are many paths to take, including the classic way via High School and College.
Below is the transcript for today’s podcast - a Career Day Master Class:
We had a visitor come in on career day and it was a very interesting session because Nia came in to visit our class, 12th graders, and she is a robotics engineer with Amazon. And so she was talking and came right out, oh, out of the seat, and was intellectually honest the entire time because she stated early that she knows that Amazon's been in the news with some negative news recently and she said it's really not all that bad. And that was the end of the issue right there.That was the complete handling of the subject and no one said anything. And she continued on with a wonderful presentation about her robotics engineering career. And I bring this up because I was also listening to a podcast by Tom Woods, I'll link to it, about Praxis.
Praxis just got bought by Libertas Institute and it's a perfect fit and they're going to handle the idea of Praxis. Now Praxis is in the 16 Ways to Redirect and Jumpstart Your Phone Addicted Disaffected Teenager bundle. Praxis is one of the main parts of that ebook because Praxis does something very unique.It takes students who know that they would be wasting money on college, they don't really know what they want to do, and Praxis takes them and sets them up with a pretty intense internship slash job program.
So a Praxis person goes into Praxis, starts working right away, and they vet the person and they match the candidate with the company and they start working right away. And what happens is the monetary and financial delta is off the charts because, conservatively, a student going to college would incur between 10 and 20 grand a year in debt.
Oftentimes it's more, but let's be conservative. That's 40 to 80 grand a year in debt. So the college student finishes with 40 to 80 thousand dollars in debt.Meanwhile the Praxis student, and I'm being conservative here, is going to be making 50 grand a year. And so over four years that's 200 grand money in and they don't have the 40 to 80 grand, let's say 40 grand, money out or owed in college debt, which you cannot expunge but with intense circumstances. Just don't get rid of your college debt.So that's a 240,000, that's a quarter million dollar financial swing and Praxis caters to the students and families who are plugged into that ethos.
Which is why I included it in my monumental and world-shaking 16 ways bundle. Nia came in and gave a master class in if you're going to go to college, go to the right college, go into the right field of study and match up with the best possible employer.And when that works, and there are certain fields where college is a requirement, it can work out very well.
People often get hyped on this work for yourself, be an entrepreneur, don't have a boss, sit on the deck chair by the pool on your laptop and make money. Yeah okay, right.If it were that easy, millions more people would do it. I know millions of people try it, but it's tough. We run a small daycare and my wife and I, and it's really difficult to make money.Making money is hard and demands a lot of time and we have not hit it big yet. So I'll just leave that there because the flip side of the be an entrepreneur, be your own boss, is if it doesn't work what are you going to do? Where's your income coming from?
Nia comes in and she's a robotics engineer at Amazon and she walked the class through her schooling journey and she went to public high school in Mount Vernon at Thornton High School and then went to two universities. One for bachelor's degree and then another master's degree and then she was looking at architecture slash engineering from the beginning.So she not only went to university, she had an idea of what to do and guess what? She's in the STEM field where a university degree is baked into the cake. One cannot become an engineer or architect in the United States without the requirements of degrees and licenses.
The correctness of that is another conversation, but that's the game that we are in and oftentimes it is a plus because people study carefully.They come out of those programs qualified and the buildings don't fall down and bridge cables don't snap. So she got the degrees and she went into architecture originally and was not into it. She said it did not work for her.She was not happy there so she slid over to engineering and she went on the electrical slash coding path where she got into the connection of those types of engineering for robots and she liked it.
Turns out she was good at it. So she went all the way and got the master's degree and got a job right out of college and she was extremely blunt and refreshingly honest because she said, Nia is a black woman, late 20s, and she came out and said “I know I'm not a DEI hire because I have the skill.I have the receipts. I can do what is necessary and I have the background to prove it”. And the results over the years now more than prove that she's a capable, viable, quality employee at Amazon working on robots that work in the warehouses that get the material for all the deliveries from the various Amazon warehouses. And that's the kind of refreshing honesty that we often don't get in the schooling world where we get kind of political jargon.
We get people who are not skilled in what they teach. We get people who read the news, the corporate news, and they take those things they read and they push them onto impressionable teenagers and that's just a recipe for failure. So Nia did the opposite of that.She's in the field working as we speak, making money, and getting things done. And she took the college path which it's interesting for me to talk about because I don't usually talk about the university path because people are forced to take classes like “intersectionalism and the Inca faiths and the connection to today's transgender community”.
And I say things like that not because I'm trying to be funny, although I hope you laugh, but I say that because you can learn about those topics for free.You don't need to learn about how racism has caused inequities in history. You don't need to pay for that. You can learn those things for free.And there's a lot of interesting history out there. Most of it isn't done these days at the universities. You have ossified, dried-out ferrets teaching you stuff that they learned in the 70s and the 80s and they're preaching their political foolishness and their outdated historical stuff to teenagers.And you are paying for that and that's not ever what I advocate for.
In Nia's case, she went into the university with a plan in a field that requires it and effectively taught me and the seniors in the class, she didn't word it this way, but that we are going back to the old ways of education. And in the old ways you had your lawyers and your doctors and your engineers going through specialized schooling for those fields.And it makes sense.
However, if you were going into other fields, you don't need that special schooling because nobody cares. What do I mean by that? Many of the adults in your life, you'd be shocked at what their degrees are in versus what they do for a living.You also might be surprised to hear that nobody, myself included, has ever asked me, where did I go to college? What did I major in? And what was my GPA? Not only that, you hear about a lot of today's top-level movers and shakers.
I know nobody likes Elon Musk now. They did five years ago when he was a ESG green energy electric car god in the progressive, liberal, predominantly white corporate press.They loved Elon Musk. Well, now that he's staying up there at the top of the pyramid, they don't like him. So anyway, so you can gauge the principles of your friend on vapid and intellectually bereft slave book.You can do that on your own. You don't need me to walk you through how to do that. But somebody like Musk, do you know what his degree is in? Does he even have one? How about the people who have founded all the major fast-food chains? None of them have college degrees.Or Hollywood is the test case.
Nobody in Hollywood has a college diploma. And the line goes on and on and on, particularly in IT.And here's another thing that Nia mentioned to us that was extremely valuable.
I asked her two questions. I said, should our students be intimidated by the math that is necessary for an engineering degree? And she said no.She said she thought about it and you know she had the same reservations that a lot of students have about mathematics. But she said no, it worked out. You know, you put in the time and have confidence and faith in yourself and you can get through it.And then I asked her if, because she talked about coding, if you were to study and master one coding language first, which one would it be? And her answer was pretty quick. She said Python. Now I know Python is a coding language.I know it's popular. But now we had an electrical coding engineer from Amazon, robotics division, telling us that Python is the way to go.
There are other programming languages that she mentioned, but they're older and more anachronistic.So Python is a necessary and probably the best language to study if you're into coding. Which leads me to my last point, which is you can learn Python starting today. You know, people think I'm always tooting my own horn, which I am.And my favorite subject is myself, which it is. And in 16 ways, the places to learn coding are in that book.
This is stuff that's been out for years and years and years.If you have a precocious or even just interested teenager in coding, you can learn coding for free or a very, very low price. You don't need to go to a university campus major in computer science to learn coding. You can do those things, but you can hit the ground running at worst with a solid base in coding.
But here's the thing about the IT world. Those college degrees aren't really that valuable when it comes to working in that world. It's a mixed bag.Some places don't even ask for it. They want you to be a coding wizard and do the coding that's required in the languages that they use, and then you start working as a coder. So this is the thing where Nia's presentation really opened up a lot of eyes and it put a lot of sunlight onto what the world is like for somebody in the United States in their late 20s talking about the world in which we live and the society in which we reside.
This is the balancing act that's necessary for all of us. What is the value of a university education? What are the majors that are necessary and the job markets that you reach when you're done? What are they like? And how do you go about it? And her example was, and I'll say it again, a master class in how to do it right. And one of the things that I and my colleagues try to do is say, here are successful real-world examples.
Follow those examples to the best of your abilities and don't be afraid to put in the work. Because if you're, well, if you're watching your phone all the time looking at nonsense, you're going to get very good at that. If you're practicing viable things for the future all the time, you're going to get good at that too and you'll have much more success.
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