Advice For Graduates Quotes

I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that.

Just because you don't know what you want yet, it doesn't mean that there's nothing to want.

Congratulations! Today is your day You're off to great places You're off and away You've got brains in your head You've got feet in your shoes You can steer yourself any Direction you choose You're on your own And you know what you know And you are the guy Who'll decide where you go Out there things can happen And frequently do To people as brainy And footsy as you And will you succeed? Yes you will indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed) You're off to great places Today is your day Your mountain is waiting Go, get on your way!

Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.” (Wellesly High School commencement speech, “You Are Not Special”, 6-12)

Be careful who you call crazy. Some of us think it's a compliment.

Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.” (Wellesly High School commencement speech, “You Are Not Special”, 6-12)

Although some graduating classes will have a “handful of celebrities” who move on to the national stage, he pointed out that most would find themselves “building or strengthening your communities. Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.

Authentic inspiration endows individuals with mental or spiritual energy which they are then able to transform into positive action. It can make all the difference between a man, woman, or child allowing despair to permanently paralyze any dreams they may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.

Let your only graduation be in the grave.

Popular as he was as a graduation speaker, Vonnegut never graduated from college.

It's been well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people. I have certainly seen that in my classrooms. So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should get hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: 'You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.' No one wants to hear someone say: 'I'm not good at sorting mail because the job is beneath me.' No job should be beneath us. And if you can't (or won't) sort mail, where is the proof that you can do anything?

Graduation is not the end of education.

As a West Point graduate, Grant had enjoyed an insider’s knowledge of military personnel during the war, but as a Washington outsider, he needed the valuable advice of seasoned professionals about appointments.

This solitude that you can acquire and should cultivate, this opportunity for contemplation of which you should take advantage, will be useful to you only insofar as you can substitute for those questions posed by the student for the teacher, questions posed by yourself for yourself. - Advice to a Graduation

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.' ~Albert Einstein

That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal “educational opportunities.” They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.

I adhered to this strategy right up to Mum's death, sharing experiences that I probably should have kept to myself, telling tales of drug-taking and STDs over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, graduating to infertility and marriage breakdown as I got older. There was never any condemnation from Mum, although she did gasp and shake her head sometimes. Whenever my life collapsed – which was often – I'd move back in with her, and no matter my age or what I was up to, she always put a hot-water bottle in my bed at night. [...] Mum advised, supported and steered me through my many disasters. Whether I'd said something stupid to someone at a party, made a mistake at work, fallen out with a colleague, was lonely, applying for a job, in a difficult relationship or spiked with drugs at a nightclub, she helped me make sense of the situation and find a way forward.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

The moment that boredom, or fatigue, the ennui of the passing years, overcomes the specific integrity with which you apply yourself to every problem, then you will be menaced by that over-reliance upon the susceptible positive attributes of system. - Advice to a Graduation

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students. I am often asked whether one should

Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”3

I also don't think that parents should pay for their children's graduate or law school. Helping a student with a four-year bachelor's degree is very generous, but an advanced degree should be considered a personal responsibility. That will ensure that the coursework is taken very seriously and makes the young person take ownership of their degree. and when they graduate, it's a shared accomplishment that the whole family can be proud of. But do not encourage graduate school just for graduate school's sake. Work experience is much more valuable if the decision come down to that.

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

There was no mother at our college graduations. There was no mother at our weddings. There was no mother when we sold our first books. There was no mother when our children were born. There was no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be. The same is true for

So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should be hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: "You ought to be thrilled you get a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.

It’s really condescending to tell you how young you are. It’s even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the unspeakably harrowing crap stew they’d been simmering in all of their lives. Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Walmart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen-wheeler with your pinkie finger. I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I’d never worked with youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology. I’d been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it. I wasn’t meant to let the girls know I was

The earlier you start making small changes, the more powerfully the Compound Effect works in your favor. Suppose your friend listened to Dave Ramsey’s advice and began putting $250 a month into an IRA when she got her first job after graduating from college at age twenty-three. You, on the other hand, don’t start saving until you’re forty. (Or maybe you started saving a little earlier but cleaned out your retirement account because you didn’t notice any great gains.) By the time your friend is forty, she never has to invest another dollar and will have more than a $1 million by the age of sixty-seven, growing at 8 percent interest compounded monthly. You continue to invest $250 every month until you reach sixty-seven, the normal retirement age for Social Security for those born after 1960. (That means you’re saving for twenty-seven years in contrast to her seventeen years.) When you’re ready to retire, you’ll have less than $300,000 and will have invested $27,000 more than your friend. Even though you saved for many more years and invested much more cash, you still ended up with less than a third of the money you could have had. That’s what happens when we procrastinate and neglect necessary behaviors, habits, and disciplines. Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!

Paradoxically, intensifiers like very, highly, and extremely also work like hedges. They not only fuzz up a writer’s prose but can undermine his intent. If I’m wondering who pilfered the petty cash, it’s more reassuring to hear Not Jones; he’s an honest man than Not Jones; he’s a very honest man. The reason is that unmodified adjectives and nouns tend to be interpreted categorically: honest means “completely honest,” or at least “completely honest in the way that matters here” (just as Jack drank the bottle of beer implies that he chugged down all of it, not just a sip or two). As soon as you add an intensifier, you’re turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scaled. True, you’re trying to place your subject high on the scale—say, an 8.7 out of 10—but it would have been better if the reader were not considering his relative degree of honesty in the first pace. That’s the basis for the common advice (usually misattributed to Mark Twain) to “substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be”—though today the substitution would have to be of a word stronger than damn.

You don’t want mysterious unexplained advice from someone you know has your best interests at heart and whose judgment is unerringly right and just and true. Either they’ll tell you to do what you want to do anyway, in which case you didn’t need their advice, or they’ll tell you to do the opposite, in which case you’ll have to choose between sullenly following their advice, like a little kid who has been forced to brush her teeth and go to bed at a reasonable hour, or ignoring it and grimly carrying on, all the while knowing that your course of action is guaranteed to lead you straight to pain and dismay.

Turns out, I learned a lot from not being able to go to France. Turns out, those days standing on the concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves, and- with a pair of tweezers- placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day taught me something important I couldn't have learned any other way. That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own personal "educational opportunities." They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth. They gave me faith in my own abilities. They offered me a unique view of worlds that were both exotic and familiar to me. They kept things in perspective. They pissed me off. They opened my mind to realities I didn't know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much. They put me in close contact with people who could've funded the college educations of ten thousand kids and also with people who would've rightly fallen on the floor laughing had I complained to them about how unfair it was that after I got my degree I'd have this student loan I'd be paying off until I was forty-three. They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can't buy.

You ever see that movie The Graduate?” “No, but I’ve heard of it.” “It’s a classic. Check it out some time. It takes place in the sixties or maybe the fifties. The protagonist is this college kid who has just graduated. He’s curious about how to make it in the world. This older guy, a businessman or something, has one word of advice for him – ‘plastics.’ “Plastics was the next big thing for his time, but for my time it was algorithms. All you need to know is the keyword, just one word, for your time and jump in the river of change. Let it carry you along to where we all want to go to the sea of a big bank account and all that goes with it. What’s the word for your time, Tommy? If you find out, you’re almost there." - Tommy's Exodus by Robert Hobkirk

You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduate education. I know a whole lot of people who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research, and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (i.e., graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many websites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.

The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point. It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic to religion to science. Nor did Eliot share Frazer's conclusions. In his 1913 paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual, he says that Frazer's interpretations of specific myths (the myth of the dying god is his example) are almost certainly mistaken. But Eliot did admire Frazer's erudition and his increasingly nontheoretical presentation of many angles of vision which in themselves tend to generate an overarching abstract primitive vision. In 1924, on the occasion of the publication of a condensed edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot wrote a review in which he lauded Frazer for having "extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored." Eliot argues that Frazer's importance for artists is in his exemplary withdrawal from speculation, his adoption of the absence of interpretation as a positive modus operandi.

It felt like fate when I first encountered the automated trading system that promised to transform small investments into substantial wealth over time. The marketing was aggressive, bombarding my social media feeds with images of people lounging on exotic beaches, driving fancy cars, and celebrating their newfound financial freedom. WhatsApp info:+12723328343 As a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet, I was desperate for a way out of my financial rut, and the allure of easy money was too tempting to ignore. On a whim, I decided to take the plunge. I borrowed from my meager savings and even took out a small loan to fund my excitement. The rush I felt when signing up was like nothing I had ever experienced—an intoxicating thrill, like hopping onto a rollercoaster at full speed. At first, everything seemed to be going exactly as promised. My investment seemed to grow almost overnight, doubling and tripling in value.  My skepticism began to fade, replaced by a sense of confidence and hope for the future. I even shared my success with friends and family, excitedly telling them about the platform that was going to change my life. I imagined a future free from financial worries, a life of luxury and freedom, all thanks to this “revolutionary” trading system. But soon, a familiar sense of unease began to settle in. What had been an impressive surge in profits suddenly plateaued, and I found myself facing unexpected hurdles when trying to withdraw my funds. Pop-up messages about my “account needing an upgrade” and “market tightening” explained away the issues, but the discomfort grew. Still, I convinced myself that success required patience and continued to hold out hope that the system would recover. As weeks turned into months, my investment continued to dwindle. The once-promising account balance plummeted, and each attempt to reach customer support went unanswered. The promises of easy wealth had turned into an unsettling nightmare. Email info: Adwarerecoveryspecialist@auctioneer. net Desperate for answers, I began scouring the internet for any information or advice. That’s when I stumbled across reviews of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST , a service that seemed to specialize in helping people like me recover lost funds from fraudulent platforms. I felt a glimmer of hope as I read about others who had managed to retrieve their investments with the help of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Perhaps, after all, there was still a way out of this mess. I reached out to their team, and to my relief, they were able to assist me in recovering a portion of the money I thought I had lost for good. ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST gave me the guidance and support I needed to navigate this complicated process, helping me regain control of a situation that had seemed hopeless. Their professionalism and expertise allowed me to salvage what I could, and for that, I am incredibly grateful.

Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he'd never get it. Not by his father, because his father would never have delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had really been about. Niall could never just say the thing. No, this piece of advice--You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it--was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he'd met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He'd asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics. "Come from money," the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, "You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it. Make goals." Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father's will conveniently left him a townhouse adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC. He made the goal, he went towards the goal. When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he'd had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone's throw. This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch's clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one's dangerous brother. On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them. He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes. Before that, he hadn't understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing. This was where he'd found art.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

the lesson that underlies all his work, a lesson, bluntly uttered by a character in one of his early novels, that he passed on to fans who sought his advice: “There’s only one rule I know of—Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.” Coming from a long line of German Freethinkers, Vonnegut was not a Christian, though he spoke of Jesus as “the greatest and most humane of human beings.” In a talk he gave at St. Clement Episcopal Church in New York City (“Palm Sunday”), he said: “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have had so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.

Zero Line Spender, Saver, Wealth Creator Your financial personality type determines your financial position in life. Let’s say there is a zero financial line that represents a position where you owe nothing and have nothing. Perhaps you can remember those days getting started on your own. So, let us assume you just graduated from college and you’re one of the lucky few who graduated at the zero line, you owe nothing. Pretty amazing considering that in 2013, the debt on student loans exceeded all credit card debt owed in America. But fortunately, you made it out free and clear to the zero line. You’re a “Spender” so you go to the showroom and pick one out. With your job and the car as collateral, you get a car loan and you drop below the zero line. You lifestyle gets more and more expensive and since you are a ‘Spender” you probably take on credit card debt to help finance your lifestyle desires. You are constantly working your way back to becoming a zero, financially speaking. Then, you get married and now there are two in debt working their way back to zero. Eventually, children come along, and the odds of being able to put away enough money to pay your debt and interest and live on the top side of the zero line are becoming virtually impossible. Unfortunately, many Americans live in this position with little or no chance of ever living debt free. When something comes along that requires their savings, they must deplete their funds in order to avoid paying interest and then they must start saving again for their next expense. They are constantly returning to the zero line. The money they have accumulated is compounding interest, giving them uninterrupted growth. Having access to capital allows them to negotiate more favorable loans by collateralizing against their accounts rather than depleting them. They make payments to the lending institution with dollars from their current cash flow, protecting the growth of the money they have saved and invested for their future. Saving and investing with uninterrupted compounding is an important wealth concept for moving further and further away from the zero line.

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students.

Over the years, I have repeated Eric’s advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career spreadsheets to one column: potential for growth. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to work in an industry like high tech. But within any field, there are jobs that have more potential for growth than others. Those in more established industries can look for the rocket ships within their companies—divisions or teams that are expanding. And in careers like teaching or medicine, the corollary is to seek out positions where there is high demand for those skills. For example, in my brother’s field of pediatric neurosurgery, there are some cities with too many physicians, while others have too few. My brother has always elected to work where his expertise would be in demand so he can have the greatest impact. Just

I wrote my graduation speech, extolling my fellow graduates to follow their passion, the same advice always given to, and usually ignored by, all college graduates. I told myself I was following my passion, that I wanted to do this. And I believed it. I was determined once again to show the world I was right. That I knew how to choose the life and the group that was best for me. I was sure I could be a part of the army but not owned by it, that a person could have brains and independent, innovative thoughts and still be part of a larger group that gave their life purpose, meaning, identity, and structure, even if that culture demanded uniformity. I wouldn't be a brainwashed automaton, I'd be different. I was sure I knew what I was getting into, what I was signing my life over to, and how it would play out. I was wrong.

In your post you encouraged women to be bold and be brave. Make decisions that are good for them, no matter what others may think.” Jules pursed her lips, nodding as Golden continued. “So JulesPen, what prevented you from following your own advice. “Whew, you are getting right to it,” Jemma chuckled. “Complacency, fear, denial. I became a wife and a mother before I truly became a woman. At twenty years old I had no clue what it meant to be brave or bold when deciding the next steps in my life. Even after graduating top of my class with a two year old on my hip, finishing my doctorate and establishing my own success, I was afraid to take the risk because I was afraid of failing. My parents have been married for over years. They were my roadmap, my aspiration, my muse and I didn’t want to disappoint them. The threat of being a disappointment can handicap you in ways you never imagine. Then I looked around and suddenly I was married for twenty years and had no clue who I was.

But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads. Here’s the wrinkle: it’s tough to ask weak ties for help. Although they’re the faster route to new leads, we don’t always feel comfortable reaching out to them. The lack of mutual trust between acquaintances creates a psychological barrier. But givers like Adam Rifkin have discovered a loophole. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds: the trust of strong ties coupled with the novel information of weak ties. The key is reconnecting, and it’s a major reason why givers succeed in the long run. After Rifkin created the punk rock links on the Green Day site for Spencer in 1994, Excite took off, and Rifkin went back to graduate school. They lost touch for five years. When Rifkin was moving to Silicon Valley, he dug up the old e-mail chain and drafted a note to Spencer. “You may not remember me from five years ago; I’m the guy who made the change to the Green Day website,” Rifkin wrote. “I’m starting a company and moving to Silicon Valley, and I don’t know a lot of people. Would you be willing to meet with me and offer advice?” Rifkin wasn’t being a matcher. When he originally helped Spencer, he did it with no strings attached, never intending to call in a favor. But five years later, when he needed help, he reached out with a genuine request. Spencer was glad to help, and they met up for coffee. “I still pictured him as this huge guy with a Mohawk,” Rifkin says. “When I met him in person, he hardly said any words at all. He was even more introverted than I am.” By the second meeting, Spencer was introducing Rifkin to a venture capitalist. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to reengaging with him over e-mail in 1999, which led to my company getting founded in 2000,” Rifkin recalls. “Givers get lucky.

Graduate study is an intensive education.

You can’t run away from your fears. Isn’t that what you always tell your readers?” I was an advice columnist for Vibe, a magazine about relationships and sex and urban culture. My column, called “Ask Miss Independent,” had started at a student-run publication, and I had quickly developed a following. Upon graduating, I’d taken Miss Independent to Vibe, and they offered me a weekly feature. Most of my advice was posted publicly, but I also sent private paid-for replies to those who requested it. To supplement my income, I also did occasional freelancing for women’s magazines. “I’m not running away from my fears,” I told Dane. “I’m running away from my relatives.” Ring. “Just pick it up, Ella. You always tell people to face their problems.” “Yes, but I prefer to ignore mine and let them fester.

tolerant of your teens’ misadventures, but make sure you talk to them calmly about their mistakes.         • Don’t be shocked when your teens do something stupid and then say they don’t know why. You now know why, but explain that to them—how their prefrontal lobes haven’t quite come online yet. And remember, even the smartest, most obedient, meekest kids will do something stupid before “graduating” from adolescence.         • Communicate and relate: Emphasize the positive things in your teens’ lives and encourage them to try different activities and new ways of thinking about things. Reinforce that you are there for them when they need advice.         • Social networking tools and websites are an important avenue of communication with your teens. Some parents report that their most successful and meaningful “conversations” with their teens occurred while texting back and forth with them. And if you don’t know how to text yet, ask your teenager.

And for all the progress, there is still societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a “good man” before they are all taken. I followed their advice and throughout college, I vetted every date as a potential husband (which, trust me, is a sure way to ruin a date at age nineteen).

The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.

So I took the advice of one of my graduate teachers, Dr. Anthony Amato: “When in doubt, read to them.

Take book writing: If I published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipping out your iPhone and Tweeting its praises. On the other hand, if I publish a book that says “follow your passion” is bad advice, (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word.

And when you graduate and get a job and find the one woman who finally stays - who you want to stay - she won't care that there's not a chance in hell you'll ever figure her out.

This is a very French trait. Today, if a big manufacturing company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s grandes écoles, someone who has studied business theory and maths for ten years but never actually been inside a factory. The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “in the last few years, student loan debt has hovered around the $1 trillion mark, becoming the second-largest consumer obligation after mortgages and invoking parallels with the housing bubble that precipitated the 2007–2009 recession…the proportion of the U.S. population with student loans increased from about 7 percent in 2003 to about 15 percent in 2012; in addition, over the same period, the average student loan debt for a 40-year-old borrower almost doubled, reaching a level of more than $30,000.” Grad students incur even more debt, and the salaries, especially in education, aren’t usually high enough to make that master’s degree (which is a great academic boost) a worthwhile return on investment financially. If it turns out that college isn’t for you or if problems prevent you from graduating, you can end up with lots of debt and no degree to show for it. Having hours toward college doesn’t qualify you for a job that requires a degree, so you could end up with the debt and without the necessary letters behind your name. In contrast, blue collar training requires fewer years and costs less than a college degree; in some fields, you learn on the job while being paid.

Although I loved horror, I wasn’t writing horror then. And sometime between elementary school and graduate school, my characters had transformed from young Black characters on fantastic and futuristic adventures to white characters having quiet epiphanies. I had wonderful writing teachers in college, but somehow with all of that exposure to “canon,” I had lost track of my own voice and was imitating writers whose stories were nothing like the ones hidden in my heart. I was a young Black woman raised by two civil rights activists—attorney John Due and Patricia Stephens Due—and I had grown up in the newly integrated suburbs of Miami-Dade County. I had never seen my life reflected in fiction; I felt like an imposter when I tried to write Black rural or city characters. I often wish I had discovered the writing of Octavia E. Butler sooner, but I had not. Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely. Then I discovered Mama Day by Gloria Naylor—finally, a book by a highly respected Black woman writer with metaphysical themes! Mama Day helped nudge me past my fear that I could not be a respected writer, especially as a Black writer, if I wrote about the supernatural. During this time, I also interviewed Anne Rice for my newspaper, since she was scheduled to appear at the Miami Book Fair International. I read one of the novels in her Vampire Chronicles series to prepare, and I also found an article about her in a highly respected magazine suggesting that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. My worst fear realized! During that telephone interview, I asked Rice how she responded to criticism like this and then listened carefully for her answer—not for my readers, but for me. Rice actually laughed. “That used to bother me,” she said, “but my books are taught in universities.” Then she explained that by writing about the supernatural, she was liberated to discuss big themes like life, death, and love. Touché. Between Hurricane Andrew, Mama Day, and Anne Rice’s (unwitting) advice, I wrote The Between in nine months, looking past my own fears as a writer to follow my true passions. My protagonist, Hilton James, is a Black man who lives in the suburbs. His family reminded me of my own.

Ms. Stewart, wait,” he said quietly, even though the old Marston building was empty. I turned around to face him. His eyes stared straight into mine. “You don’t have to do this,” he said gently as he reached out and took hold of my arm. “You can say no. Golkov trusts you. He would let you just walk away. You can have a normal life, graduate from Brown, have a career and a family. If you join us, things will become more complicated. You’ll have to keep this, what we do, from everyone around you, even the people you care about. Yes, there will be intrigue and excitement, but you need to understand that in committing to this cause, the good may not outweigh the dangers placed in your path.” Who does he think he is? He doesn’t even know me and what I want or need. I don’t need someone to just waltz into my life and start giving me advice like he knows what is best for me. My anger toward him returned to a boil. “Thanks for your concern, Mr. Daly,” I couldn’t help the acrid timbre that fell from my lips, “but I can take care of myself.” I shook my arm free and abruptly turned around to walk home. Deep down I knew that I had already made my decision. I didn’t need the time to think about my choice. Mr. Daly’s unsolicited advice would not sway me. I was going to become a part of an organization whose mission was secretly protecting mankind. I was going to become part of The Company.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash. I know that millions of dollars have been spent to produce this splendid graduating class, and that the main hope of your teachers was, once they got through with you, that you would no longer be superstitious. I' sorry—I have to undo that now. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead. Then it might be alright to have babies again.

Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.

When they’re told that some people or ideas are wrong, hateful, or offensive, a light bulb should go off in their heads. That is the moment their curiosity should be piqued to find out for themselves whether it is indeed a “bad” thing. Adopting an attitude of critical thinking is most crucial in learning anything. Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to.

Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don't worry, this is the only one): Take control. Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work - write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study - really, actually study - what it is you're studying. Realize that you can't include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won't. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won't pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your goals, because - and it's so easy to forget this - that's why you're here. Can't find the motivation to work today? Tough shit. It's like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it's one more day you'll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school. It's possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say "Fuck it" and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now. And get on with your stupid, stupid career.

The book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was written in 1986 by a minister, Robert Fulghum, and it’s full of simple-sounding life advice, like “share everything,” “play fair,” and “clean up after your own mess.” Chen believes that these skills—the elementary, pre-literate skills of treating other people well, acting ethically, and behaving in prosocial ways, all of which I consider “analog ethics”—are badly needed for an age in which our value will come from our ability to relate to other people. He writes: While I know that we’ll need to layer on top of that foundation a set of practical and technical know-how, I agree with [Fulghum] that a foundation rich in EQ [emotional quotient] and compassion and imagination and creativity is the perfect springboard to prepare people—the doctors with the best bedside manner, the sales reps solving my actual problems, crisis counselors who really understand when we’re in crisis—for a machine-learning powered future in which humans and algorithms are better together. Research has indicated that teaching analog ethics can be effective. One 2015 study that tracked children from kindergarten through young adulthood found that people who had developed strong prosocial, noncognitive skills—traits like positivity, empathy, and regulating one’s own emotions—were more likely to be successful as adults. Another study in 2017 found that kids who participated in “social-emotional” learning programs were more likely to graduate from college, were arrested

There's plenty of advice we can give to our youth, but to me the most important is to start now to live a healthy lifestyle. As you age, it won't matter how important, wealthy or powerful you are; you will not enjoy life unless you have your health.

When you are asking for solutions to tough problems, treat any advice you receive—especially when it is simple or optimistic—with a healthy dose of skepticism. Just because advice comes from smart people with fancy graduate degrees does not make it ethical or even likely to promote the long-term health of your organization.

I adhered to this strategy right up to Mum's death, sharing experiences that I probably should have kept to myself, telling tales of drug-taking and STDs over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, graduating to infertility and marriage breakdown as I got older. There was never any condemnation from Mum, although she did gasp and shake her head sometimes. Whenever my life collapsed – which was often – I'd move back in with her, and no matter my age or what I was up to, she always put a hot-water bottle in my bed at night. [...] Mum advised, supported and steered me through my many disasters. Whether I'd said something stupid to someone at a party, made a mistake at work, fallen out with a colleague, was lonely, applying for a job, in a difficult relationship or spiked with drugs at a nightclub, she helped me make sense of the situation and find a way forward.

We should think about alternatives to some of the very basic assumptions we’re making. The one piece of advice I give people is that if you have intuitions that what people are doing is wrong and that there could be something better, you should follow your intuitions. You’re quite likely to be wrong, but unless people follow the intuitions when they have them about how to change things radically, we’re going to get stuck. One worry is that I think the most fertile source of genuinely new ideas is graduate students being well advised in a university. They have the freedom to come up with genuinely new ideas, and they learn enough so that they’re not just repeating history, and we need to preserve that. People doing a master’s degree and then going straight into the industry aren’t going to come up with radically new ideas. I think you need to sit and think for a few years.

In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded. Terman wrote his recruits letters of recommendation for jobs and graduate school applications. He doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel, all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius.

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students. I am often asked whether one should work in the private or public sector. I always advise working in the private sector, and wish I did this before entering politics and the public sector. The private sector teaches important skills like entrepreneurship that can then be applied to any area of work later on.

Write down (actually write it with a real pen on real paper - it will be more effective that way) at least one complete sentence specifically defining what you’re looking for in each of these ten categories: Financial means - How much money/assets/property/material value do you want him to have? Willingness to spend money – Do you want someone who is thrifty or someone who throws money around like it’s no big deal? Willingness to start a family – Is he in the same place as you regarding children? If you have children, how do you want him to interact with them? Is he willing to become part of an established family? Adventurousness – Do you want a home body or someone who’ll take up a new adventure every now and then? Introvert or Extrovert - Do you have a strong preference for someone who likes to be around other people/talks freely to other people/has an outgoing, sociable personality? Height – Are there height parameters you want in a man? Weight – Do you want an athletic build or are you okay with a guy who has a little paunch? Handsomeness – No, this isn’t shallow – define what a good looking guy is to you – it’s different for everyone! Distance – Are you okay with a long distance relationship or would you rather date someone who lives closer? You know my choice! Educational level – Do you want to be with a college graduate or is it not important to you what educational level your mate has attained?

...today, a young hopeful attaches himself as a graduate student to some senior scientist and hopes to learn his trade and be rewarded by a master's degree or doctorate of philosophy bad evidence that he has done so.

... but conventional wisdom frowns upon it and is greatly opposed to young graduates continuing in the same department; lips are pursed, the evils of academic inbreeding piously rehearsed, and sentiments hardly more lofty or original than that "travel broadens the mind" are urged upon any graduate with an inclination to stay put. .... Inbreeding is often the way in which a great school of research is built up. If a graduate understands and is proud of the work going on in his department, he may do best to fall into step with people who know where they are going. A graduate student should by all means attach himself to a department doing work that has aroused his enthusiasm, admiration or respect; no good will come of merely going wherever a job offers, irrespective of the work in progress.

Isolation is disagreeable and bad for graduate students. The need to avoid it is one of the best arguments for joining some intellectually bustling concern.

After graduate students have taken their phd's they must or no account continue with their are PhD work for the remainder of their lives easy and tempting though it is to type up loose ends and wonder down attractive byways.

the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.6 It sure feels like Ms. Quindlen is giving my little internal timpani a lot of credit. What if your timpani is homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and sexist? Or can all vice simply be attributed to our love of lockstep—you know, all the bad people follow the crowd and all the good people do their own thing? And what if you follow Quindlen’s advice and reject her list of bigotries? Does that make you another lockstep loser? Can you listen to your timpani and the graduation speaker at the same time? I suppose it’s the central creed of postmodernism that you can march to the beat of your own drummer as long as it beats in time with mine.

I am also trying to apply for real jobs, and the advice everyone always gives is to network. Network! Network! Not sure what this means, because apparently my version of networking comes off as flirting.