I have a term that I call “Lottery Jobs”, which I define as jobs where success is loosely correlated with skill. Acting is one extreme example–we certainly know actors that aren’t very talented but make a good living and others that seem very talented but disappear. I think artist falls into the same category.
I’m not sure I would put PR work in that category. Rather I think it is a position with a low median wage but where high skill is very clearly rewarded.
Lots of types of career have a luck or lottery factor. Who you know and who you meet, the timing of being in the right place at the right time, etc.
And lots of types of work have people who are equally talented but with different luck making anywhere between bupkes and millions of dollars.
In the “writing” field there are many many bloggers these days, on all kinds of subjects including hobbies, health, politics, education, travel – you name it. A few big time names are raking money in. Most are not.
Neo, I am not sure I understand your point.
There are tens of thousands of lawyers making 50K per year working in immigration law or for a small firm with three or four other lawyers where a “big case” is a personal injury lawsuit where they may clear $100K (on contingency) once or twice a year.
I’d argue that right now the legal market is much closer to a “roll the dice” career than PR. If you make law review, OR graduate from a T-14 law school, OR you are at a top regional law school and you want to stay in the area (BC for example- punches above its weight in Boston, but very hard to get a job in Silicon Valley for example), OR you have a relative in the business willing to take you on once you graduate (so you aren’t competing with every other kid in your graduating class)… then fine, go to law school. But the typical “I’m in debt from Suffolk or Pace or Touro and passed the bar on my first try, why can’t I get a job” kid?
Save your money.
Medicine functions for sure the way you describe… except that the med schools have effectively created an artificial shortage of seats, thereby pushing out the folks who would have been bringing down the curve (they can’t get into med school at all… so we don’t know if they’d have been pulling down the income averages once they started to practice).
What does this have to do with careers in PR? Sure, work at a three person firm in Dayton Ohio and complain that you’re making $50K after ten years. But the large firms employ thousands of people in operations all over the world, and someone making 50K after ten years doesn’t exist… because they’ll have been pushed out long before that and into a field they are more suited for. After 10 years at a big firm someone is a VP on the verge of becoming an SVP. That IS the common outcome, not an outlier.
If a particular kid doesn’t want to consider a business career which combines writing and a lucrative career path- that’s fine. Go do something else. But it doesn’t mean those careers don’t exist. They do- they don’t require a graduate degree, and they don’t require being extraordinarily lucky or being hit by lightening.
They DO require geographic flexibility… something which young college grads these days seem loathe to consider.
Well. I still say you have to be a good writer to make a living exclusively from that. And organized and timely, know the fields you write about or for. And/or your audience. Maybe you want to say that’s true of many jobs.
But this thread is projecting a whole range of opps for an OP who only said, “If it were up to me, I’d want to study creative writing in college.”
No one knows if he/she’s any good, has tested his hand, or it’s just one of those vague “passions.” Why isn’t there more agreement to try a class, while also taking others, see how the first steps turn out? He’s not declaring a major, not setting this in concrete.
"Acting is perhaps an extreme example, in that results are more lopsided than they are in most jobs, and yet it has the same sort of structure that PR/advertising does. There are plenty of people interested in it (in a very lopsided supply >> demand of willing actors/writers/etc), the high-paid winners are those who can win others over in highly profitable ways, and the rest are merely a low-paid working class that generally makes a wage that is less than middle class. "
This is not even remotely true. I have worked with more advertising agencies than I can count over the years (all the big names), and to a lesser extent with PR firms. I don’t think you have, at all.
Perhaps it’s those people that get pushed out that we should consider, and where the disagreement about how lucrative a career it is comes from.
The OP did admit that he/she doesn’t really know what direction he/she would like to go with the degree, which really does sound more like a favorable disposition than a true passion. That kind of attraction to a field tends to fade with the reality of the working situation, which I think supports my position that it’s best to prepare for that reality, regardless of what major the OP eventually chooses to pursue. Favorable dispositions change with age and with reality, and it’s best to be capable of more than just what you thought your interest was upon high school graduation.
I think suzyQ7 was right that the conversation is getting to be quite circular. I guess I’ll be leaving it at that then, since the OP’s question should be more than satisfied by what we’ve gotten so far.
@mathyone If you are curious about recruiting for finance and consulting at Ivy League schools, you should read the essay “Even Artichokes have Doubts,” by Marina Keegan. Interestingly, she was an English major at Yale who was very interested in creative writing. Somehow she was still recruited by these firms.
Here’s a link to the essay that @warbrain mentions above. I found it interesting - and well written.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2011/09/30/even-artichokes-have-doubts/
Thanks for that article! I think it also sums up many of the reasons why students should focus their college experience on developing themselves and their interests, especially at elite colleges… rather than finding themselves slotted into doing what they think that they have to do, are supposed to do, or their parents expect them to do. Where does that student want to be in 10 years? 20 years? What kind of life do they want for themselves? Do they want to be that person who “will stay up until 3 a.m. seven nights a week making slides” for a partner who goes home at 5?" Is that work environment worth the signing bonus and the extra wages that person is earning over their classmate who took a job with a nonprofit and goes home every night at 6 feeling good about the contributions their agency is making toward improving others’ lives?
There isn’t one right answer for everyone… but there is a wrong answer. The wrong answer is any one that tells an 18 year old starting college that she/he needs to do study something practical and marketable … when that student is still too young to even have a clear handle on understanding themselves and their personal aspirations.
“What kind of life do they want for themselves? Do they want to be that person who “will stay up until 3 a.m. seven nights a week making slides” for a partner who goes home at 5?”
Many moons ago I was being recruited by and interviewed for a consulting job at one of the big firms. The one of the interviewers was a young woman, a few years in, who complained/bragged to me that she had tons of frequent flier miles but no time to use them given her work schedule. It definitely was not the work/life balance I wanted. I don’t regret passing one bit.
This is a strawman, and I think you know it, or at least I hope you do.
Not at all. Many people place quality of life considerations over dollar salary amounts … and many others are focused on that concept of looking for a career that is “productive”.
I guess you don’t realize it, then. The strawman is assuming that all jobs in the corporate world are unfulfilling and that jobs in non-profits automatically are.
I know some drug researchers that find their work very fulfilling, and conversely a friend who used to work in Oxfam, and his experience was not remotely positive.
You’ve mistaken my use of anecdotal examples with blanket generalizations – which I never made. I’m kind of guessing that you didn’t read the article I was quoting from?
No, I hadn’t realized that your first paragraph was mostly quoted from the article.
Interestingly, my nephew graduated from Yale the same year. Most of the discussion on class day was about the huge number of students who had no jobs lined up whatsoever by then. I’m quite sure they would have been happy in consulting or finance at the time.
My daughter graduated in 2010 and had a job lined up immediately – she actually received notice that she had been hired the day she graduated. Many of her classmates didn’t have jobs yet.
It had nothing to do with major. My daughter was a poli sci major and her first job was tied to her major --but that’s not the reason she could get a job and her French-major friend couldn’t. It’s that my daughter knew how to look for work and she had a good array of workplace skills. She didn’t rely on on campus recruiting, but she scoured the internet and job listing sites and sent out resume after resume.
I’m sure this is true of most students who find jobs, but my daughter’s observations of her classmates who weren’t able to find jobs at graduation were that most weren’t really trying. She’d talk to them and it would turn out that they had maybe applied for 2 or 3 jobs while she had applied for 30. My DD had a reason to be motivated – I’m on the west coast and she’s on the east coast, and I had made it clear that there would be no money coming from me to pay for a NY apartment. Because DD attended an elite college, many of her classmates came from more privileged backgrounds – and they just didn’t have quite the same sense of urgency or the sort of pounding the pavement, job hunting experience my daughter had gained in high school.
Maybe the problem with some of those unemployed Yale grads is that they didn’t know how to look beyond the consulting/finance jobs that were promoted by on campus recruiters-- certainly I would assume that any student who would have been “happy” to take one of those jobs had applied, but hadn’t made the cut. There is no competitive advantage to apply to the same jobs that all one’s classmates are applying to, talking with the same interviewers – the recruiters aren’t on campus to hire everyone, they are there to cherry pick to pick the cream of the crop.
Congrats to your daughter for her initiative and drive. As for the Yale class of 2012 that I heard didn’t have jobs by class day, I have no doubt that most of them eventually found good jobs.
But we must step back and realize that a degree from an Ivy, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, or even a Berkeley is a powerful signal to employers that says these are very bright people who can probably succeed at whatever is thrown at them. So in that sense you are right.
But once you drop out of the top 50 schools, that degree is not such a strong signal anymore. At that point a student has a specified major and possibly an internship or two. Switching into something completely different becomes much harder.
There are all kinds of straw men (straw people?) in this thread. Some accuse others of arguing that the OP should study nothing else but creative writing. If anyone actually said that, I’d love to see the post identified. My strong impression is that the recommendation that the OP NOT study creative writing alone is universal. And by the same token, I am not certain anyone has said that the OP should not waste a single one of his precious credit hours studying creative writing if he wants to. Even those arguing most strongly for an employable major haven’t been saying that no one should ever take a creative writing elective. (Heck, lots of them probably think it’s an easy way to get an A to pad your GPA for professional school applications.)
Lots of us have been saying that every major at Princeton and other elite colleges is an employable major. No one besides those ridiculing that idea has suggested that every major makes it equally easy to find employment, that all jobs pay equally high compensation, or that employers don’t look for evidence that a candidate has some interest in the work they do beyond wanting to be paid a lot to do it.
Students who care intensely about (a) having a job nailed down more than a semester before they graduate from college, and (b) getting the maximum compensation possible their first year out of college will certainly want to pursue a major, or at the least significant coursework, that involves a lot of applied math and some knowledge of substantive fields with demonstrated commercial importance, as well as obtaining an internship in the field. But not every student needs, wants, or will be able to get one of those jobs. If a recent graduate can support him- or herself, service his or her loans, and start a meaningful career, it really doesn’t matter much long-term whether the graduate got a job guarantee in October or in June, or whether the graduate lives alone in a luxury apartment in a doorman building or shares a house in a funky neighborhood with five others.
" If a recent graduate can support him- or herself, service his or her loans, and start a meaningful career" - This is the main goal of the college education and any parent would like to see some kind of plan in regard to achieving this goal. Freshman may not have a detailed plan, it may be vague, nonetheless, it should be some kind of plan with possible “alternative” options. Utilizing the superior writing skills may be a part of this plan as the great writing skills are helpful in many fields if not all.
Just an update: I ended up committing to Penn (Wharton) and will be pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics with a concentration in Operations & Informations Management.
Thanks to everyone who replied–I’ll take each comment into consideration in the future when selecting my courses and possibly double majoring with college of arts and sciences. Preferably, I don’t want to do grad school but it might become a reality if I can’t get a job right away (I also don’t want to rack up more debt sigh).