Make the Connections Now to Avoid Heartache Later
October 10, 2009 | Lisa Kilian
Your most valuable asset– your peers!
It is easy, upon entering college, to think only about yourself. Now that doesn’t mean you’re selfish, it simply means that you are now alone in the world (for the most part) and must take care of yourself. The closer you get to that graduation finish line, the more you realize that you don’t know anything about the real world…the real world, as in taxes, credit scores, finances, life planning, etc. Unless of course, you’re a finance major, in which case you may know nothing about preparing healthy meals or taking care of someone that is sick.
The point is that we all have strengths and weaknesses in what we do and do not know. And while your strengths will come in handy, those weaknesses will always come to bite you in the butt.
College is one of those wonderful places where you can actively watch a social survival of the fittest. Everywhere students are taking advantage of each other. They search out the smartest classmates for their study groups, the fittest athletes as their trainers and exercise partners, the funniest individuals for their party partners. Every day you take advantage of someone else and someone else takes advantage of you. We live to use people and we use people to live. It’s a simple part of nature so please don’t hang your head in shame. This kind of activity will take place throughout your entire life.
Now, let’s get back to the thinking only of yourself thing. You need to survive i.e., learn how taxes work, how to make money, how to cook, how to not fall for a scam, how to balance your checkbook, how to lower your debt and so on and so forth. In other words, you need some serious life skills. Well, you could live and learn by falling for some scams, cooking some bad meals and ruining your credit with debt before you figure out how to not do those things. Or you could capitalize on the fact that you have tons of students around you, each with different mistakes they have made and each with different strengths.
When it comes to learning the ins and outs of real life, tap into your thousands of peers for guidance. There are tons of students out there that have already fallen for scams, ruined their credit and made some awful meals. And they have all learned from it. More importantly, there are students out there that know things you don’t know simply because of their area of study. If you need to fix your finances, find a finance student to help you. If you need to improve your math score on the GRE, find a mathematics major to help you. Get a culinary arts student to teach you the basics of cooking…or at least how to make a grilled cheese without burning it.
Sure, you could learn all of these things on your own. But using your fellow students will not only help you learn, but it will strengthen their abilities as well. You know you’ve mastered a subject when you can teach it to someone else. So really, you’re doing these people a favor by taking advantage of these abilities! Think of it that way if that helps you sleep at night.
I’ll give my own experience as an example: I am currently self-employed. I knew that I had to go out and register my name as a business and I knew that I would be able to get a lot of tax credits because of it. However, I had no idea what credits I could get, how to file my taxes or how much I would eventually owe. My mother scared me to death one day by informing me that as a sole proprietor, roughly 25% of every paycheck I get needs to be set aside for taxes. Well, if I take 25% out of every paycheck, that leaves me with… well not enough to pay the bills. So I panicked, especially when I found out how expensive a CPA can be. Luckily, a friend from high school had recently graduated college with a degree in finance and was working with a very highly-esteemed tax company, calculating taxes for people like me. He is now my personal “CPA” and I pay him 40 bucks and my famous ginger cookies.
Moral of the story: Get to know a wide range of people while you can. After all, these people around you are supposed to be the bright minds of the future…and they need experience and money. They can get these things from you! And you can get a low-cost professional for whatever you need to know and you can get one with a personal touch.
