Doing what you love vs what makes money?

Parents Forum
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@mathyone thought I’d throw in my 2 cents, re: pursuing fiction writing on top of a day job, which may also help OP if they’re leaning towards that avenue. I am one of those novelists who can’t have a creative–or emotionally draining–day job. My last job, at a non-profit, was an intense job where eventually I burned out, and I accomplished zero substantive creative output while I was there. I switched to a marketing job where maybe only 10% of my work involves “creativity” and I have work/life balance… and I’ve written three novels in three years and now have a literary agent. Every writer is different, but my recommendation is to get a day job in something interesting but that one isn’t overly passionate about–save the majority of your passion for writing, outside of work. Of course, some people manage it: many people work in publishing, an intense/passion fueled, underpaid industry (where you work lots of unpaid over time!) and also write their own books; I’m just not sure I could. It’s also good to hang onto that job as long as possible–even if you get a 6 figure deal, it’s very difficult to support yourself writing books.

This dovetails into my advice for OP: you should major in something that interests you; bonus if you love it. Your job post graduation is then to figure out how to support yourself (ie: make money) whilst doing something close to what you love/makes you happy. It might end up being your job/career, but it might also be what you do outside of work. Either one is OK. It sounds like doing creative writing at Princeton is the right choice for you, though if you are leaning in the direction of “I want to be a novelist” you may be better served by majoring in something else (like a social science/humanity) and minoring in creative writing. As someone else mentioned, for writers, it’s all about life experience, coupled with a LOT of reading and a LOT of writing… and just doing these three things (living/reading/writing) over and over for years until you find your voice/the right stories. FWIW, I majored in journalism (and have had to “unlearn” a few journalistic writing techniques in order to write better fiction!) and minored in German. The German minor (and related traveling experience) has bled into my writing in interesting ways. So has watching a lot of TV LOL. YMMV.

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It seems that Princeton itself recognized the major issue I was talking about (that you can’t be a writer that only writes) and addressed it. Major props on their part for doing this - a lot of schools would let students figure that out for themselves.

(and OR is definitely a business degree, and a very good one at that)

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Thank you guys so much for all the advice–definitely going to read through every post!

I still have not committed to Princeton. I am wondering if business is the way I want to go (in which case, Wharton at UPenn might be a better option). I attended both the Princeton Preview and Quaker Days and both seemed great.

I have a lot of interests but in this weird (paradoxical) way I also want to zone in and focus on one thing… I’m just not sure what that one thing is.

Any advice?

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Even if you want to go into business, I would still get a liberal arts education from Princeton vs Wharton. You can get a job in finance or consulting from Princeton as easily as from Wharton. By going to Princeton, you could possibly double major in math/science and creative writing, then decide later what profession you want to go into.

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@NeoDymium , My brother graduated (from a state, directional university) as an english major who was “a writer that only writes”. His first job was copy editor for a medical journal. Nowadays he is a highly successful pharmaceutical advertising writer. He started out as “a writer who only writes” and learned his specialty on the job. I think you underestimate how people can adapt.

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Princeton is a fast-track-to-Wall-Street-and-consulting school. So it should be perfectly fine if you go there and major in anything your want (but some math/statistics/economics/ORFE course work probably would help even if you major in something else).

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[sigh] @oldfort : As many people have noted, Princeton does not have double majors. Or joint majors. Or design-your-own interdisciplinary majors. It’s a philosophical decision, and they stick by it. Even if you somehow get permission to write a creative thesis for your chemistry major, it’s a chemistry thesis, not a creative writing thesis. (I believe most of the creative thesis writers are English or Comp Lit majors, where permission to write a creative thesis is effectively automatic.)

OP: You are obviously a pretty successful student. Have a little confidence in yourself! You are not going to have trouble figuring out how to be a productive person in society. You don’t have to go to Wharton to make yourself focus on something your parents will approve. (On the other hand, if you do decide to go to Wharton, Penn also has a pretty good writing program through Kelly Writers House.)

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Princeton does have general ed requirements:

See: https://www.princeton.edu/ua/sections/11/

It really isn’t possible to get a degree from Princeton and only have coursework in one’s selected major. Brown maybe,… but not Princeton.

Most of the OP’s coursework in the coming year is going to be geared to meeting the distribution requirements.

And there is a fairly high likelihood that somewhere along the line, some of those courses which have nothing whatsoever to do with creative writing or business are going to shape the OP’s perspective and goals in ways that cannot be predicted now. That’s one of the advantages of core or general ed requirements --they expose students to ideas and areas of study that weren’t even on the student’s radar coming in.

Some of the discussion on this thread reminds me of parents who scramble to get their kids admitted to an elite pre-school on the assumption that is the path to Ivy League admission.

Only the irony here is that the OP has the coveted Ivy acceptance letter in hand, and now people are telling him that’s not good enough… now he’s supposed to major in something that gives him marketable workplace skills.

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People who think there must be a direct line from your major to your career are the people who think college is just a very expensive trade school with a big library. There are schools like that and people like that. Please don’t be one of those people. Princeton certainly isn’t one of those schools.

You have the opportunity to get a superb liberal arts education. You can use it to pursue any kind of career, even one not directly related to your major. Admittedly, grad school may be required.

I was a government major at Wesleyan with a concentration in political theory (the very philosophical, theoretical, not even vaguely practical side of studying government). I ended up a tax lawyer.

My husband was a CS major at Columbia. He got his MBA and works on the financial side of advertising, nothing to do with computers.

My best friend was a religious studies major at Bryn Mawr and ended up a litigator.

Most of the premeds I knew in college had typical pre-med majors, but one woman majored in French literature and went to an excellent medical school.

I have friend who majored in I don’t know what at UCSB, got an MA in international relations from Columbia and eventually ended up in international insurance regulation, of all things.

You see the theme here? Yes, there may be a direct and obvious line from your major to your first career (common wisdom these days says that people your age will likely have several different careers over their lifetimes). But there doesn’t have to be.

Unless you’re madly, passionately fascinated by and committed to the idea of studying business, go to Princeton, study the subject that really deeply excited and interests you, the one where you love your classes and take advantage of the career center to help you figure out how you are going to translate your skills, interests and talents (which will encompass more than just what you learn in your major) into your first job.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want to earn a good living. There’s a great deal to be said for a financially comfortable and secure life and I’m very glad I have one. I’m just saying that you don’t have to figure out right now what you want to be doing at 25 or 45, that studying what you love and are good at will help you figure out what you want to work at and that a top-notch liberal arts education is an excellent starting place for wherever you decide you want to go.

Good luck.

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@rienrah Would he have been worse off having known more about medicine and medical writing from the outset? I highly doubt it.

I could give you plenty of counterexamples of people I know who had a rather difficult time being given the opportunity to “learn everything on the job.” Besides, neglecting the science curriculum in favor of being “just a writer” is precisely the kind of anti-intellectualism that most of those who are trying to advocate a “liberal arts education” are trying to oppose.

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@NeoDymium Nowhere did I suggest neglecting science, but an English major is unlikely to encounter courses in medicine or medical writing. Maybe I missed something upthread, but I didn’t get the impression that the OP was trying to avoid taking science courses (nor did my brother).

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@rienrah
Perhaps you didn’t state it directly, but I can say that many who would read your post would very much take it to mean that “it is ok to be just ‘a writer who only writes’” when that just isn’t true in general. That’s because while it is true that you can (and should) learn on the job, the only way that you DO learn on the job is if you choose to. And a lot of whether or not you choose to learn depends on whether or not you have a solid base in that topic a priori. That’s perhaps what people mean by “learning how to learn” if you like that expression.

I’ve also heard the expression, “no one brushes up on their partial differential equations.” It’s of course not strictly true - I’ve had to do that quite a lot in the past because it did actually come up. Perhaps a more accurate, though much less elegant, statement would be, “very few people have the motivation and talent to pick up an advanced topic without having been introduced to it before.” Math and science are those kinds of topics for the humanities-inclined, and language and mechanical grammar are for the STEM-inclined. Even particularly gifted students don’t really know in their late teens what kind of knowledge they will need to acquire in the future, unless they just happen to be uncharacteristically proactive.

So yes, you can “learn on the job” and pick up fields that are a far cry from where you originally started. But when you limit your formal exposure to the kinds of topics that are difficult to pick up outside of school (“partial differential equations” is a perfect example of this) you will very likely just never pick them up in the first place - not in any depth that matters, at any rate. There is a very good reason why patent law schools favor people with STEM degrees who have familiarity with the science and engineering that goes into those problems. Further, what you choose not to learn has a very consistent habit of being exclusionary - you don’t learn valuable but difficult topic X in school, so X-based work is closed to you, but then so is Y which is based on X, and then so is Z which is actually very useful to you but you can’t do Z because you didn’t learn Y because you didn’t learn X.

Mind you, the same is true in reverse, that you can’t be an “engineer who only does engineering” or a “lawyer who only knows law.” You have to be proactive and cross-disciplinary in all fields. Though I don’t talk about those very often because it’s not like anyone makes jokes about engineers or lawyers working in fast food for their entire lives.

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I thought the quote about college not being trade school was interesting. Isn’t the point of college to prepare you for a job?

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I think it would be more fair to say that the point of college is to prepare you for a career. The difference is subtle but quite important.

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No. The point of college is to create an educated populace to help sustain and feed a democratic society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/09/college-is-not-a-commodity-stop-treating-it-like-one/

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Unreformed English major speaking, who graduated last century, though not by much: I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

I majored in English at a regional LAC, because I couldn’t think what else I wanted to study. I hated math in high school, but am very analytic (and was perhaps unwisely advised by the math dept head when I went in to talk about my dismay with math - I was the only person in my class to have tested into a substantially higher level class, but did not have the interest to pursue math studies. However, the class I signed up for was driving me insane with inanity… I was advised to ‘stick with it.’)

I’ve worked in various capacities & industries, but currently do workforce management and short term planning for a health insurance company. I write for me, what I want, when I want. The beauty of my education was that I developed critical thinking, teamwork, and writing skills that - coupled with a broad LAC education - have allowed me to support myself & my family. It’s about taking what you know, applying it in new and innovative ways, and never stopping learning. Am I wildly successful and making gazillions of dollars? No. Am I a self-sufficient single parent, doing what I can to help my kids achieve? Hell yeah.

I think OP is going to be okay, regardless of declared major.

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@NeoDymium I do agree with much of your response, but my brother didn’t have any base of medical knowledge prior to starting his first job. He picked that up by reading the scholarly articles he was employed to edit. So, his writing ability plus the med overview gained on that job set him up for better employment. As you say, he “chose to learn”, as any intelligent, ambitious person would do. (But it is true that he could never land a job writing about partial differential equations, that door is forever closed!)

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[sigh]@JHS, just because one couldn’t double major at Princeton, it doesn’t mean one couldn’t major in English and take many math, econ, or science courses to show aptitude or interes. I never just look at an applicant’s major, I always look at a new graduate’s course load. That’s why I told my kids to list some of their courses on their resumes when they were applying for jobs. D1 was in her U’s A&S school, but she took few finance courses at the business school to show she had aptitude for finance. She still got a job in finance even though she didn’t minor or had a third majored in business.

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I agree with that completely, @oldfort . I was responding to your post where you said " [ b]y going to Princeton, you could possibly double major in math/science and creative writing, then decide later what profession you want to go into." You can’t do that. You can take a variety of courses in different fields.

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No.

The point is to get an education.

Very few undergraduate degrees are career oriented, especially not at elite level colleges, with only a few exceptions such as engineering. Someone who is looking for career-prep as an undergrad might be better off to attend a community college or local state u. that does offer career-focused majors, such as nursing or accounting.

You aren’t going to find those sorts of majors at an elite college. The education at a school like Princeton (or any other Ivy or equivalent) is meant to provide a strong foundation, with the assumption that a majority of grads will go onto graduate school – law, medicine, MBA, etc.

Anyone expecting a career-oriented education at an elite college will be frustrated, because course work in any subject tends to focus much more on theory than practical applications.

If the OP decides on Wharton rather than Princeton, then the coursework will be more career oriented…and at the same time potentially more limiting, given that the OP is not a absolutely certain of wanting a business major.