What the guidance counselor didn't tell me

Did you ever go to a guidance counselor in highschool? Maybe in college? Usually they were called advisors in my college because they were there to advise about your future rather than counsel you to fix what happened in your past. They were there to make sure you were on the right track (or some other kind of track) to your dreams (or at least getting a paper that says you graduated).

I know one thing for sure: getting a bachelors in business administration from Dixie got me to KU law school . . . other than that, it was basically a waste of time. Yeah, I spent 120 credit hours in classes getting a degree, but it should be called a business recipe rather than a degree. I had a pinch of accounting, a dash of economics, a dollop of statistics and finance, one-half cup of management, and a pint of marketing. Everything else I know about finance and business came from 5 years of working with small business owners. Did my degree help me be a better employee? Maybe. But it wasn't because I learned about business, it was because I learned how to deal with people, particularly snotty people, and I was required (well, sort of) to practice reading, writing, and understanding.

It kind of hurts my ego, or my feelings, to think about how I got duped in to doing a general business degree. Law school doesn't require any prerequisites. I could actually have done something useful. Accounting, web design, database engineering, photography, auto mechanics, electrical engineering, or even music. Yeah, I could have majored in guitar performance (I don't play the guitar at all) and still have gotten into law school. At least I'd be able to play cool songs for my wife and kids. It's not like I can tell my kids bed-time stories about marketing. (I could if I wanted to be lame).

Now now, fellow business majors, I get that business has its uses. The subject is important . . . I'm just saying that my degree was worthless, but the diploma wasn't.

So what should anyone do about it? Well this is what counselors should tell freshmen:

"Hi. I don't know anything. All I can really do is guess about what you should do. Maybe you're cut out for something, maybe your not. Maybe you'd be good at something but you'd hate it. I can tell you what degree would be the easiest, and I can tell you which degree holders make the most money. But I can't tell you whether or not that has anything to do with the degree, or if its more to do with the students who choose that degree. If you don't know what you want to do, then, at this point, you should probably just take classes that you think you can get A grades in. And maybe you should try to take classes where you might have some desire to do the reading. Oh, and heres a checklist of classes we make everyone take. We know you won't retain the information, but it's important to keep up appearances. Feel free to come in any time, but just remember, we make everything up."