December 01, 2004
While waiting for takeoff I was thumbing through a magazine when I noticed an article that was listing the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ professions over the next five years. My eyes probably stopped as they have a few times before whenever they have long articles helping young people to find what they want to do with their lives. I used to buy those ‘best colleges’ reports and just look over the majors looking for something to catch my eye – I guess I was hoping that I would find something that was a nice fit and wouldn’t waste much more of my time:
‘University of Virginia’
‘Undecided’
Average Starting Salary: 65,000
Most of those magazines give you advice based on the fact that you are making your decision of what to do everyday of your life only on the amount of money that you can make over the next five years – like you get all the way to college and then just study the landscape to see where to go for the next forty years. It is, and was, such bullshit that I got so disgusted that I had to order a drink from the stewardess, but she couldn’t give it to me until after takeoff, and since I was in the back of ‘Economy’, the prospects weren’t so good.