What to do during the summer before your first year of college?

Whyte Horse wrote: I think you should reconsider going to college. Everything they teach can be learned online for free now. You will have to go into massive debt to pay for it all. You won't get a job with a degree now or in the future. You have been heavily marketed to by the education industry to believe you need some piece of paper that will make you better than others. The grading system is all rigged so the rich kids get A's while you might be lucky enough to get a B for doing 10x the amount of work and being 10x as smart. Also they pack 120 students into an auditorium sized classroom so there's no possibility of individual instruction and no time for questions.

A much better alternative is to visit a hippie commune.

There is so much more to university than just what you learn in a lecture theatre. For me, whilst the academic part of my time at university was a bit of an over-priced let down, the overall university experience was definitely worth it.

I think you should reconsider going to college. Everything they teach can be learned online for free now.

Inaccurate. I'm getting a music degree, and one is not allowed to audition at many opera houses in the US without at LEAST a bachelors in voice study (and even then, the people who gets roles and significant income are the ones with masters).

It has nothing to do with the cost. It has to do with the education and networking that only happens with people in the business.

Well yeah if you can do it without debt then go for it. It IS an experience that may be worth your time, or it may not. You may get to interact with lots of intelligent people in ways you wouldn't outside college, or you may not. If you can make buddies with the kids of the owners of society then you might get favorable treatment, or you might not.

With a degree you might get considered for a job, or you might not. You may earn more than someone without a degree or you might not.

I'm going to tell you a dirty little secret: Right now, the big rage is to use unpaid interns and J-visa holders. The j-visa is a student visa given to people who come here and then when they finish school agree to work for very low wages so they can get a green card. The going rate for a grad student nuclear engineer is $10/hr. The going rate for a CS grad student is $9.50/hr. Anybody who tells you you're going to make $50k+/year is flat out lying. It'll be more like $20k. If you don't get a degree and work your way up at wal-mart for 4 years you'll be making more than a nuclear engineering grad student.

If you want to be a teacher you need to get in line behind the 10,000+ that have been laid off and are looking for jobs.

Here's a viable career option you might want to try: become a politician or other public officer. School heads get $100k+, Senators get $100k+.