How to Advise : Folks Applying for College

 Currently chatting with organisers at a college fair I volunteered for. I was assigned to talk about "life after college", but I requested a review, because I wasn't sure that my experiences of life after college would be relevant to most pre-college students.

First, 

I established that I would follow orders from the organisers on where they thought I should be deployed, if at all.

Second, 

I listed the subjects I would be most interested to provide counsel on : 

• 1. it may be a poor strategy to "figure out what to do after college, during college" as colleges are generally not designed to help with that
• 2. it may be an optimal strategy to "do work/research first, then apply to college with financial aid in your mid-20s" instead of "immediately after high-school/pre-u"
• 3. it may be a poor strategy to "pick courses, and/or majors, and/or schools" without first "acquiring a survey of career paths with max/min compensation stats, both in MY & US" 

Third,

I elaborated on why my account of "life after college" might not be relevant to the audience. Here's what I said ( lightly edited ) :

"""

Roughly the nature of ethics ("what should one do about XYZ") a.k.a. strategic management, roughly follows the dependency :

Values ⬅️ goals ⬅️ strategy ⬅️ tactics

So if the [ left side ] is different, the [ middle and right sides ] are different. Someone with [ rare left sides X ] may not have relevant experience for people whose [ left sides are Y ], etc. 

In my case my career has been constructed with some [ unusual assumptions and hence operations ], for example :

• - i am ok with minimum wage employment, in Malaysia, till the day i die
• - i do not purchase health insurance, relying on public health, and am ok with personal expiry at any time
• - i do not seek to be viewed as a moral person
• - i did not find that college was the best use of resources for the purposes of ( points 1, 2, 3, above ): despite getting a basically free ride, I ended up doing most of my own study in the library and on the internet, outside of classes, which continue to this day

All of this will contrast starkly with a large chunk of your expected audience :

• - students who want to be viewed as respectable / interesting / admirable people
• - students who want to be viewed as employable / investible / middleclass people
• - students with strong aversions to being unloved, being poor, being sick, and being short of life in general
• - students who seek to work within institutional pathways for academia, research, and development 
• - parents who are of the same mindset ( less important but present )
• - employers who depend on such students to fill their labour supply chains

My experience and values are mainly from the point of view of someone who trivialises many of the things others value. So it may not be appropriate for me to be seen giving advice to folks who have normal expectations about what the right values and goals are, for an ordinary ladderclimber. 😂

"""