<p>So we're all giving out advice, but I'm sure we're occasionally give out some clunkers - and sometimes that won't be obvious for years. What the worst advice anyone ever gave you about your college or career? Something that sounded good at the time, to your untrained ears, but now just gnaws at you?</p>
<p>Love my dad, but these two still burn:</p>
<p>"Don't worry about your grades, just get the piece of paper. Everyone needs engineers."</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>"Your high test scores don't mean anything. You're going to State Tech. All schools teach the same thing anyway."</p>
<p>Possibly more the case when your father was entering the labor force than when you were. Remember, back then there was less grade inflation, so a 2.5 GPA was considered perfectly respectable.</p>
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<p>Actually, for engineering, ABET accreditation narrows the difference between a “top” school and a less selective one, which is why less selective schools have high transfer-out rates from engineering majors (many students at less selective schools cannot handle the rigor of an engineering major). Yes, there are reasons to choose a more selective school, but your father’s claim is not completely far out.</p>
<p>I worked at Target (like a wall mart) in high school. My manager their repeatedly said college was a waste of time & money. She said if I skipped college I could be a manager within 3 or 4 years. </p>
<p>Actually this was the best advice I ever got because I knew instantly I didn’t want to be like her.</p>
<p>Husband’s father via his wife “Your father (an engineer) is very disappointed in you leaving the tech world at age 40 to become JUST an elementary school teacher”. </p>
<p>Amazing.</p>
<p>I couldn’t have been prouder of my H for making that decision. 12 years of teaching many lower SES 4th graders was, in my opinion, the most honorable, selfless, and noble thing he could have ever done with his career.</p>
<p>Needless to say, my F-I-L and I do not see eye-to-eye on many issues…sigh…</p>
<p>When I was a junior in high school my guidance counselor told me that given my gpa and work habits, she wouldn’t recommend college, but a “career” track (our school had a branc new job development center at the time and they were pushing it hard to kids they thought would not go to college). I wasn’t interested in the career tracks my high school offered so I just absorbed her advice as “don’t worry about college, cause you’re not going”.</p>
<p>I was in all honors/ap classes, and I kept doing honors/ap through my senior year, but I had a very unstable home life, poor attendance, and I never did homework. I worked 30-40 hours a week in addition to school. I’d get out of school at 2:25, be at work by 3, work until 9, and by then I was too tired to even consider homework. I left home between my junior and senior year to live with my then boyfriend. I got through my senior year by attending exactly the number of days I had to and doing just enough work to get a C or higher. I never took the ACT, never took the SAT, and I got married two months after I graduated.</p>
<p>Three years after I graduated I decided to go back to school, and took the ACT. I scored a 32 composite, 34 math, 32 reading, 30 science. My final cumulative GPA in high school was 2.9. My family income, at the time I graduated high school, was less than $20,000 a year. I could have easily gone on to college right out of high school. Not a top college, to be sure, but I could have gone.</p>
<p>I just wonder what might have changed if my counselor had instead encouraged me to look forward to college and helped me understand what I needed to do to get there, or if I’d had one adult in my life to guide me.</p>
<p>Note that these appear to be based on things that are partially true or true in some situations or depending on the context, but are not necessarily fully or universally true. I.e. they are overreaching beyond their applicability.</p>
<p>In general, beware of statements that make claims applicable to all situations, since there are often exceptions, sometimes in the majority of situations.</p>
<p>People keep asking my D in HS why she wants to be “just” a teacher. People keep trying to steer her away from HBCU’s. Luckily she knows better than to let people derail her.</p>
<p>It wasn’t advice exactly, but a placement agency once told me I was “unemployable” because I was “only” a writer.</p>
<p>From the single college counselor for my public high school graduating class of 400: </p>
<p>“You’re a small town kid. You’ll hate Boston, your grades will suffer and you’ll get eaten alive at huge school like that.”</p>
<p>Graduated top of my class, loved every minute, went on to get a master’s and law degree from Ivy universities. I’ve lived in big cities ever since.</p>
<p>My dad when I got a job with the consulting firm Andersen Consulting in my early 20s. </p>
<p>“Andersen is a great company to work for, but that consulting stuff sounds kind of fly by night. You should see if you can work your way over to the Arthur Andersen audit side.”</p>
<p>Ahem. The consulting side spun off and became the current consulting behemoth Accenture, and although I have not worked there in many years I have had a very successful career as a “fly by night consultant”. And all those audit partners and employees? Flushed away in the Enron scandal.</p>
<p>When I talked about going into medicine, my dad said: “I know that you, with your bad luck would end up in prison for hurting a patient. I don’t want to visit you in prison. I beg you to choose a career, where you would have a limited ability to harm someone”.</p>
<p>“If you really want it to happen, the money will be there when you need it.” High school guidance counselor.</p>
<p>With the benefit of hindsight the best advice I could have gotten was not to pursue a four year degree at all, but with how desperate I was to have one at the time it would have been criminal to discourage me. Nobody had any way of knowing it would change.</p>