10 Things I Didn't Learn in College

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I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards.

Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.

1. How to Program – I spent $100,000 of my own money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs. Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend with a new feeling of gratefulness – we were going to break up once I moved. I knew it.

In other words, like was going to be great. My mom even told me, “you’re going to shine at your new job.”

Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment – I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.” And what’s worse is that I was in a cluster of cubicles so everyone around me could here that whisper also.

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So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. If you’ve never been in an AT&T complex it’s like being a stormtrooper learning how to go to the bathroom in the Death Star where, inconceivably, in six Star Wars movies there are no evidence of any bathrooms. Seriously, you couldn’t find a bathroom in these places. They were mammoth but if you turn down a random corner then, Voila! – there might be an arts & crafts show. The next corner would have a display of patents, like “how to eliminate static on a phone line – 1947?. But I did finally learn how to program.

I know this because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at the same place I used to work at. “Man,” he says, “they still use your code.” And I was like, “really?” “Yeah,” he said, “because its like spaghetti and nobody can figure out how to modify it or even replace it.”

So, everything I dedicated my academic career to was flushed down the toilet. The last time I programmed a computer was 1999. It didn’t work. So I gave up. Goodbye C++. I hope I never see you and your “objects” again.

2. How to Be Betrayed. A girlfriend about 20 years ago wrote in her diary. “I wish James would just die. That would make this so much easier. Whenever I kiss him I’m thinking of X”. Where X was a good friend of mine. Of course I put up with it. We went out for several more months. It’s just a diary, right? She didn’t really mean it! I mean, c’mon. Who would think about someone else when kissing my beautiful face? I confronted her of course. She said, “why would you read through my personal items?” Which was true! Why would I? Don’t have I have any personal items through my own I could read through? Or a good book, for instance, to take up my time and educate myself? Kiss, kiss, kiss.

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Why can’t they have a good college course called BETRAYAL 101. I can teach it. Topics we will cover: Betrayal by a business partner, betrayal by investors, betrayal by a girlfriend (I’d bring in a special lecturer to talk about betrayal by men, kind of like how Gwynneth Paltrow does it in Glee), betrayal by children (since they cleverly push the boundaries right at the limit of betrayal and you have to know when to recognize that they’ve stepped over the line, betrayal by friends/family (note to all the friends/family that think I am talking about them, I AM NOT – this is a serious academic proposal about what needs to be taught in college) – you help them, then get betrayed – how to deal with that?

Then there are the more subtle issues on betrayal – self-sabotage. How you can make enough money to live forever and then repeatedly find yourself in soup kitchens, licking envelopes, attending 12 step meetings, taking medications, and finally reaching some sort of spiritual recognition that it all doesn’t matter until the next time you sink even lower. This might be in BETRAYAL 201. Or graduate level studies. I don’t know. Maybe the Department of Defense needs to give me a grant to work on this since that’s who funds much of our education.

3. Oh shoot, I was going to put Self-Sabotage into a third category and not make it a sub-category of How to Be Betrayed. Hmmm, how do I write myself out of this conundrum. College, after all, does teach one how to put ideas into a cohesive “report” that is handed in and graded. Did I form my thesis, argue it correctly, conclude correctly, not diverge into things like “Kim Kardashian will never be the betrayer, only the betrayed. But this brings me to: Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing.

And what is good writing? It’s not an opinion. Or a rant. Or a thesis with logical steps, a deep cavern underneath, beautiful horizons and mountaintops at the top. Its blood. Its Carrie-style blood. Where everyone has been fooling you until that exact moment when n0w, with the psychic power of the written word, you spray pig blood everywhere, at everyone, and most of all you are covered in blood yourself, the same blood that pushed you and your placenta out of your mother’s womb, pushed and shot out with you until just the act of writing itself is a birth, a separation between the old you and the new you – the you that can no longer take the words back, the words that now must live and breathe and mature and either make something of themsleves in life, or remain one of the little blips that reminds us of how small we really are in an infinite universe. [See also, 33 Unusual Tips to Be a Better Writer]

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4. Dinner Parties. How come i never learned about dinner parties in college. Sure, there were parties among other people who looked like me and talked like me and thought like me – other college students of my age and rough background. But Dinner Parties as an adult are a whole new beast. There are drinks and snacks beforehand where small talk has to disguise itself as big talk and then there’s the parts where you KNOW that everyone is equally worried about what people think about them but that still doesn’t help at those moments when you talk and you wonder what did people think of ME? Nobody cares, you tell yourself, intellectually raffling through pages of self-help blogs in your mind that told you that nobody gives **** about you.

But still, why don’t we have a class where there’s Dinner Party after Dinner Party and you learn how to talk at the right moments, say smart things, be quiet at the right moments, learn to excuse yourself during the mingling so you can drift from person to person. Learn how to interrupt a conversation without being rude. Learn how to thank the host so you can be invited to the next party. And so on. Which brings me to: