​Long-time readers of this blog will know that I periodically work remotely so I can combine my work as a college counselor with my love of being in faraway places. Currently, I’m spending time in Sicily, eating pistachio gelato and  revising essays in the middle of an 18th century library. One of my favorite parts of working while traveling is meeting other digital nomads, many of whom spend the entire year abroad.
 
When I first started traveling and working remotely, I assumed that all the people I would meet would work as computer programmers. But I quickly learned that remote working is truly the next wave, and a wide range of jobs can be done from a distance. It also became clear to me that the digital nomad community frequently overlaps with the gig economy.  
 
The “gig economy” refers to the increase in people working either part-time or as freelancers. Last year, the Department of Labor estimated that 35% of US workers are independent contractors and that number is only expected to go up.
 
Like most things, the gig economy has positives and negatives. Proponents of this type of working point to the freedom and flexibility they have. They set their own hours and only take on projects that they choose. Satisfied gig workers claim that this flexibility allows them to more carefully cultivate a brand and do work that really matters to them.
 
But there are also downsides. Many gig workers do hourly and piecemeal jobs like driving for Lyft and Uber or shopping for groceries for Instacart. Critics say that these kinds of jobs rarely provide adequate compensation and move the burden of financial risk onto the individual workers rather than on the large corporation. And independent contractors generally don’t receive health insurance or retirement benefits, making it difficult for them to save money plan for the future.
 
Many experts believe the gig economy is here to stay, for better or worse. Fortunately, the way to thrive in a gig economy is not that different from the way to thrive professionally in general. Successful and happy freelancers point to a need for flexibility in both their types of work and in their roles on a given project. They also emphasize the value of finding work you feel enthusiastic about, whether for the creative satisfaction you get from it or for the lifestyle that work enables you to have. The only certainty is that the way we work will continue to change, and the best way to prepare for that is to stay engaged and adaptable. 

​Because I live in the Bay Area, near Silicon Valley, a lot of the students I work with have dreams of becoming entrepreneurs. Even if they don’t have a specific idea for a business they want to start, they know exactly what this career path will look like. Influenced by the Mark Zuckerbergs and Steve Jobses of the tech world, they picture themselves as wildly successful 20-somethings, working crazy hours and rolling in VC funding. The co-founder might change, the product might change, the hip and cool neighborhood where you’ll buy your first house might change, but one thing stays the same: your youth. There’s just something about massive success at such a young age that feels more impressive.
 
But there’s nothing about success that requires youth. In fact, inexperience might even work against you in some cases (ahem, Elizabeth Holmes). And the idea that you should give up if you haven’t found success by a certain point, is a little shortsighted. The premise of this blog is that it’s totally okay to not know exactly what you want to do with your life by the time you graduate high school; the other side of that coin is that not all success comes right away.
 
To illustrate that point, I looked up a few stories of people who found success in the second or even third act of their lives. The first story that caught my attention was about Peter Mark Roget, probably an unfamiliar name until you pair it with the word “thesaurus.” Roget’s Thesaurus was a staple of college student bookshelves before the internet, and it is the product of a hobby turned late-in-life career. Roget struggled with depression throughout his life and, as a way of managing his depression, liked to make lists. In particular, he liked to make and organize lists of words. After retiring at age 61 from his first career as a doctor, he devoted the last 30 years of his life to this thesaurus. Roget’s thesaurus was first published in 1852 when he was 73 years old, and it has been continuously in print ever since.
 
Another story that I was more familiar with is Martha Stewart’s evolution into the business mogul she is today. Stewart dabbled in modeling while in college and then spent some time working on Wall Street before starting her own catering business. When her husband’s company hired her to cater one of their events, she met the head of a publishing group who suggested that Martha write a cookbook. That first book, Entertaining, launched Stewart’s career, eventually growing into a magazine, a television show, and her own housewares line. Today, the name Martha Stewart is synonymous with high quality and good taste, but none of that happened until Stewart was in her 40s.  
 
Both Stewart and Roget found sensational success in the second half of their lives. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t doing anything before that - they had jobs and they were good at them. But the thing that would make them internationally celebrated took a little longer to develop. For both of them, their success was a product of the years they had each spent developing their skills and knowledge in that field. And it was only after that period of development that they were able to achieve such success.
 
As a culture, we tend to highlight the prodigies more than the diligent craftsmen, the hares instead of the tortoises. But there are people who find success in every decade of life. Ultimately, it’s not about when you succeed or even whether you receive acclaim at all. The important thing is that you do the work you care about as well as you can. The one thing that wunderkinds and late bloomers (and middle-bloomers for that matter) have in common is that they work hard to produce something extraordinary, which is something everyone can do. 

About this same time last year, I shared a post with some of my favorite commencement speeches of the year. I love commencement speeches for two reasons: first, they’re super inspiring. Even when you’ve heard dozens of them, there’s something energizing about having someone cheer you on and tell you that you’re capable of amazing things. And this is true whether you’re just graduating or, like me, several years out.
 
Second, graduation speeches are a lot like college essays. The mediocre ones traffic in clichés and generalities – can we all officially agree that Robert Frost did not have graduations in mind when he wrote “The Road Less Traveled”? But the great ones say something specific and personal that slides a new lens over the experience of graduating, making you feel like the very first group of people to charge out into the world and try to make it better.
 
Because my sister graduated this year, I had the pleasure of seeing Stacey Abrams speak at her commencement. Abrams did an incredible job balancing earnest inspiration, humor, and a call to action.  We all left the event with a collective urge to donate money somewhere or sign up for something. She started her speech with a story she had shared in her book, Lead from the Outside, about going through a bad breakup in college and feeling anxious about what she should do next. She said:
 
“I began to type out all the things I intended to accomplish for the next 40 years. I wanted to be mayor of Atlanta. I wanted to be somewhere near Oprah. I wanted to be a writer. And I knew that the way I could get those things done was to write it down. And over the last 20 years, I have tended my spreadsheet like Gollum tends his precious. I have looked at it and cultivated it, I have made changes and edits, I’ve erased things and ignored others, and along the way, I realized I had no idea what I was talking about. Because, you see, I made a plan for my life, but what I was trying to do was prepare to succeed. […] You don’t have to plan your life the way I did, but in the process, we have to prepare to succeed. And we do that by knowing what we believe, knowing what we want, and knowing that sometimes it might not work.”
 
I really appreciated this message in a commencement speech, an event that lends itself to the question, “So, what are you going to do next?” Although the premise of this blog series is that it’s totally okay not to have your whole life planned out by the time you’re 17, I strongly believe you have to have interests, ambitions, visions for yourself. Abrams fully acknowledges that, in many ways, she had no idea what she was going to end up doing. But she had a picture in her mind of how things might unfold, hopefully leading to a close, personal friendship with Oprah. And those ideas gave her the energy to start moving, to start doing things. The key is then to hold those visions loosely and allow for those unexpected happenings that, in hindsight, make all the difference.
 
The best part about this advice is that it’s really one-size-fits-all. It’s perfect for new college grads, but it’s also the same advice I give the high school students I work with. And it’s honestly the same thing I’ve heard from bosses and mentors and even from myself as I’ve built my career. Have ideas, make a plan, but be open to changes along the way. And if it’s worked this well for Stacey Abrams, a woman who is no stranger to the unexpected, then there’s every reason to believe it’ll work for you.  

​Yesterday, I met with a new student who is getting ready to apply to college this fall. Like many of my students, she was uncertain where she wanted to apply, so we spent the majority of our meeting discussing the variables that are more or less important to her in a college right now.
 
Because she seemed most excited about colleges with lots of spirit and thriving Greek life, I recommended some of the big, public, Southern schools, places like University of Georgia and Florida State. Her voice notably perked up when we started chatting about the idea of living in a big house with her sorority sisters, and getting to participate in hundred-year-old traditions. But she also seemed hesitant about actually applying to these schools.
 
When I asked her about it, she explained that she loved living in California and knew that she wanted to live in California long-term, and she worried that spending four years in South Carolina or Alabama would make it harder for her to come back home. My first reaction was to share my own story of growing up in the Bay Area and spending my college years in Chicago, of coming home before leaving for grad school in Boston, of coming back and putting down long-term roots in California. But my story is just one anecdote, and it made me curious to see what the data said.
 
A 2018 study by the Wall Street Journal and Emsi digs into the data about where students go to college and where they move after graduation, and comes up with a few big takeaways. First, 61% of community college graduates stay within 50 miles of their school after graduation compared to 40% of state university alums, but state university grads tend to stay within state lines. Students who graduate from elite schools (it’s unclear how they define “elite”) move, on average, 700 miles from their alma mater, typically to large, coastal cities. And unsurprisingly, students who do their coursework primarily online are the most likely to live 500 or more miles away from their university.
 
So yes, there is some evidence that people stay close to where they went to college, but more so for community college students than any other group. And there is definitely evidence that state and regional universities have gotten increasingly good at developing relationships with local companies to strengthen internship and job opportunities for their graduates. San Jose State University here in the Bay Area is an excellent example of this, connecting their graduates to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. In fact, there are more SJSU graduates working at Apple than from any other university, including Stanford and Berkeley. So there is something to be said for going to college in the place you’d like to eventually work.
 
But there are also a lot of benefits to leaving home for college, like meeting people who are different from you, or getting to experience a part of the country or world that you’ve always been curious about but aren’t sure you want to commit to permanently. And you may find that you feel at home in this new place, or that being away from home is easier than you anticipated.
 
All of which is to say that where you want to end up eventually can play a role in your college search, but it doesn’t have to. And you may find that where you want to live changes over time, and going to college away from home could give you the chance to evolve. I’m generally of the view that it’s good to try new things, and I’d rather keep doors open than close them. But as with everything in applying to college, it’s a personal choice that you get to make. And as with everything in life, there’s a lot of time to change your mind and try something different. 

After spending last weekend in DC, I did what any good college counselor would do and turned my vacation into a work trip and took the Amtrak from Washington, DC to Philadelphia. While in Philadelphia, I visited University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Drexel University. I was impressed by all three and will definitely be adding them to my students’ college lists in the future, but one aspect of Drexel really caught my attention: the co-op program.
 
Drexel describes co-op or cooperative education as “a program that balances classroom theory with periods of practical, hands-on experience prior to graduation. Through the co-op program, students are able to alternate academic study with full-time employment, gaining practical experience in their field of study.” Essentially students take six months off of school to work full-time in their chosen fields either locally in Philadelphia or in another state or even country. Students can do this one to three times during their bachelor’s degree with a variety of companies or with the same organization.
 
As I’ve talked about before in this series, I am a firm believer that where you go to college does not matter; it’s what you do there that makes the biggest impact. College internships can be an excellent addition to your resume and a great way to acquire skills that will make your more competitive on the job market (although, there are good arguments for the stance that unpaid internships are exploitative and classist). One of the things I hear over and over again from my interviewees is how valuable their college internships were in helping them figure out what they wanted to do after graduation and in making connections with people in their fields. And a co-op program is like a college internship kicked up a notch.
 
Drexel boasts that the companies their students co-op with have been vetted to ensure that students will get the chance to do more than make photocopies and fetch coffee. And students repeatedly shared how clarifying it was to get to experience a job they were considering before even committing to a major. For many students, this just solidified their interest in finance or programming or music and helped them articulate what areas of the field they were most excited about. And other students were able to efficiently come to the realization that the career they thought they wanted to pursue wasn’t actually the right fit for them.
 
A co-op program is not for everyone, but for students who are eager to hit the ground running, this can be a great option. And every job you have will help you identify the things that are important to you in a career and the things you want to avoid in the future. If you’re intrigued by this kind of program, check out Drexel and other similar colleges, like Northeastern University, University of Cincinnati, and Elon University. Whether or not you know what you want to do professionally, sometimes the best way to figure it out is just to try it.