Okay, I understand it’s self-centered to ask for personal help from strangers, but I’m completely lost. I need to start making decisions on what I’m doing after high school, and I don’t know what major or school I should go to, and if the name or location of the college matters for what I’m doing.
I love writing. Scripts for shows, poetry, and most of all songs. I understand I need a back-up plan, but at the same time I don’t want to put my dreams of being able to share my music and writings with the world on hold.
I have a mid 30’s ACT and a 3.9 GPA with 7 AP classes along with a bunch of ECs (this info provided so if you have any advice on school choice you know what kind of competitiveness I fit into)
If there’s anyone out there who’s gone through something similar or has advice in general I would love to hear it. I’m really lost, and it might be beneficial to get an outside opinion. Thank you so much for your time.
Well, there are many ways to share your writing with the world: you can write for fun, you can blog on the side for money while you work something else, and you can write for a living. And even if you write for a living, there are many different ways to do that: you can write technical manuals, textbooks, websites, commercial scripts, reports, white papers…there are many, many jobs that require good writing skills. Writing creatively for money is only one of them, and as you probably know, that’s difficult to break into and really make enough money to support yourself on.
My advice is that you have to combine the practical and the passion. Think about what you like to do…and then think about who’s going to pay you to do it and what kind of opportunities there are out there for it. For example, you love to write songs. An obvious path from that is songwriter. But who hires songwriters? Big music labels, for sure. But there are also advertising firms that might contract a songwriter. Think about the path. Do some Internet research and see who has those jobs and how they got there. A lot of times you can get a feel for what a market in a certain area is like by doing some Internet research.