Study Hacks

The Person or the Pedigree?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports the results of a major compensation survey. The clear conclusion was that students who attend selective schools make more money than those who do not. Specifically, they found that an Ivy League graduate will enjoy a median starting salary 32% higher than that of other liberal arts graduates.

(Interestingly, after this initial advantage, the rate of salary growth remains constant over time. Ten years after graduation, for example, Ivy Leaguers’ salary advantage over other students remains at 34%.)

In terms of which schools reported the highest earnings, I was quite pleased to discover that graduates from my alma mater, Dartmouth College, have the highest median income: $134,000 10 years after graduation.

Suck it Harvard.

These results, however, belie a more significant question: do Ivy League students make more money because of the school or because of their talent? That is, would a student who could get into Dartmouth make the same salary even if he attended somewhere less selective? Or is the pedigree more important than the person?

The Most (Mis-)Cited Study Ever.

The standard answer is that the person trumps pedigree. For example, consider this article from the Brookings Institute, written by Gregg Easterbrook, a visiting scholar and contributor to The Atlantic Monthly.

The piece is titled “Who Needs Harvard?” It starts with the standard admissions-season reporter condescension — “winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success…” — then throws in the requisite contrarian idea:

But what if the basis for all this stress and disappointment—the idea that getting into an elite college makes a big difference in life—is wrong? What if it turns out that going to the “highest ranked” school hardly matters at all?

Easterbrook proceeds to break out the big guns: a 1998 study by Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger, of the Mellon Foundation and Princeton, respectively. The study is titled “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College,” and as Easterbrook gleefully exclaims: “[it drops] a bomb on the notion of elite-college attendance as essential to success.”

He continues:

Krueger and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy, “moderately selective” school. It turned out that such students had, on average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges.”

Question answered! Right? Busting your ass to get into Harvard is for losers. Real talented people will find success regardless of whether they engage in the chaotic admissions-related activities that reporters like Easterbrook find so objectionable.

But is this true? Or did the reporter read only what he wanted to read…

Fun with Statistics

As the Half-Sigma blog puts it, the Dale and Krueger report is “possibly the most mis-cited study ever.”

I agree.

I recently re-read the report, and I came away with the exact opposite conclusion as Gregg Easterbrook. In my opinion, Easterbrook clearly cherry-picked the results to support the answer he wanted to find.

The statistic he cites has to do with students who got accepted both to schools with high average SAT scores and those with low average SAT scores, and then chose to attend schools with the low scores. As the researchers note, however: “the average SAT score is a crude measure of the quality of one’s peer group.” By contrast, when they analyzed the selectivity of the college — i.e., position in the Barron’s College Guide rankings — Dale and Kruger found:

Men who attended the most competitive colleges earn 23 percent more than men who attended very competitive colleges, other variables in the equation being equal.

Remember, this is a regression analysis. This means that the researchers are looking at students who were accepted at both highly ranked and less highly ranked schools, and then found that those who chose to attend the higher ranked schools earned significantly more than those who chose the lower ranked schools. The researchers argue that ranking is a better indicator of selectivity than average SAT score as it better captures society’s common understanding of the school’s prestige.

In other words, Gregg Easterbrook is wrong. He cherry-picked a value that the researchers themselves labeled an outlier, and ignored their main findings.

The New York Times Gets it Wrong Too

Easterbrook is not alone. In 2006, the New York Times published an article titled: “Off the Beaten Path.” Once again, it opens with the standard admissions-season reporter condescension: “If you live and die by status, if the name Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Penn must hang etched in sheepskin on your wall, then read no further.”

(Ouch! You really called us out on our foolishness! You’re so clever Mr. New York Times reporter!)

The article then cites — you guessed it! — Dale and Krueger, noting:

A 1999 study by Alan B. Krueger of Princeton and Stacy Dale of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation found that students who were admitted to both selective and moderately selective colleges earned the same no matter which they attended.

This is 100% wrong! It’s clear that they’re just aping Easterbrook’s bad reporting without even bothering to read the original study. (The term “moderately selective” is used by Easterbrook, in the actual study, however, the range used was “most competitive “highly competitive,” and “very competitive;” the word “moderate” does not appear on the scale.)

Lest you think that the reporters merely missed a minor conclusion hidden in the middle of the study, let me quote the abstract — yes, the abstract, the very first paragraph of the report, the can’t-miss summary of its main finding. It states:

[The] rating of school selectivity and the tuition charged by the school are significantly related to the students’ subsequent earnings.

How do we get from that to the NYT’s conclusion that “students who were admitted to both selective and moderately selective colleges earned the same no matter which they attended?”

Whether We Like it Or Not…

I don’t know why reporters sometimes seem so desperate to discount the value of wanting to attend a top college. I’d like to think that it’s born of good intentions — helping to relieve the stress of the college-bound masses. But I get the impression — from the haughty tone of these articles — that it has more to do with the reporters thumbing their noses at what they deem to be annoying behavior by parents who live in their elite Manhattan or D.C. neighborhoods.

You know my thoughts on this issue. It’s not my role to judge your ambitions. Instead, I focus on helping you pursue your educational goals — whatever they are — in a sustainable manner. To me, the big problem with admissions season stress is not that so many students want to go to Harvard, but that they think joining 10 clubs is the key to doing so.

It helps no one to ignore data that we don’t like. We should start with the truth — regardless of what it says — and then work forward from there.

(Hat tip to Half Sigma for first bringing this topic to my attention; photo credit goes to bdjsb7)

The Drone Army

Self-help blogger Steve Pavlina recently published an article titled: What If You Have Many Different Interests and Cannot Commit to Any of Them? Among the many ideas in this piece (several of which I agree with), were the following arguments:

• “The notion that you have to commit to a single trade for life (or even for a decade or two) makes sense if you want to live like an industrial worker drone.”
• “Hmmm… for some reason the people that said I should specialize got a lot quieter when my eclectic interests started paying off financially.”
• “The next time someone tells you to settle down and pick just one thing for your career, your college major, or your source of income, I recommend you reply as follows: ‘I appreciate your concern, but since I don’t share your dream of becoming a prized poodle, I must reject your advice as being utterly stupid.’”

The basic message lurking here — that traditional, long-term career paths are for unoriginal, unhappy drones — has been gaining ground in the self-development blogging community. I guess this is not surprising, there’s something appealingly contrarian about the message. Think Different! Make your own path!

But is it right?

Good Intentions Pushed Too Far

Arguments like those above are born of good intentions. They aim to prevent arbitrary social conventions from pushing people into career paths they don’t like. The problem, however, is that these arguments often go too far. Instead of making the point that there are other options out there, they begin to demonize the traditional options as always being bad. Instead of freeing people to make their own judgments, they slander an entire direction as being for “drones” or “prized poodles.”

The Reality of Careers

Here’s my experience with young people entering the work world. For many, a so-called “traditional” career path is probably the best fit. Not because they are somehow damaged or unoriginal, but because for their particular set of interests and talents, a traditional path comes closest to giving them what they need to be happy.

For example, the following are all traditional career paths that match up with someone I personally know who is really engaged and happy with their life:

• Journalist: The adrenaline of scoring the big scoop and the excitement of jumping from story to story is addictive to some. The quickest route here is a good college, lots of writing for the best possible student publications, journalism school, then working yourself up at a professional venue.
• Professor: Everyone had at least one college professor who seemed to just absolutely love his life. The path here is as traditional as it gets.
• Technology Entrepreneur: Stupid consumer web businesses started by 19-year-old college dropouts capture our imagination, but the vast majority of successful tech companies are started by engineers who innovated some new and needed technology. They are either professors, grad students (like the Google guys), or product team managers at an existing tech company. All require a long-term, traditional path.
• Management Consultant: Some people love this lifestyle: see the world, never stick with one project for too long, work with brilliant people. The path here requires top schools and top grades.
• Teacher: If you want to make a career of teaching, you’ll want a Masters of Education from the best school possible. If you want to do Teach for America, you better be one of the top students at your school; their recruitment is more competitive than most investment banks!

There are, of course, hundreds of other examples of traditional career paths that yielded, for some people, a rich, fulfilling life. On the other hand, there are also hundreds of stories of people trying to construct “alternative lifestyles,” who end up spinning their wheels for years, unhappy, bored and aloof until finally they figure out what fits their real interests and they end up buckling down, working hard, and constructing a life — though not always a Tim Ferriss wonderland — that they respect. The point being that there is no answer that is automatically good or bad.

How to Decide What’s Best For You

The decision of what to do with your life after college remains complicated. My advice is to start with the desired lifestyle, then work backwards. That is, visualize the feel of your ideal lifestyle, then decide what specific near future path will move you closest.

The key to a lifestyle-centric approach is to take nothing off the table in advance. Don’t let bloggers who are self-satisfied with their microbusinesses, or serial entrepreneurs with a fear of ties, try to convince you that some options are only for losers.

Do you really believe that everyone would be best off be making their living off of blog advertisements, eBook sales, and paid product reviews? Think about it for a moment. There is just no way that such a highly specific, somewhat unusual career path is some general cure-all for post-grad ennui — no matter how strongly we rant against “societal expectations” and the “liberating” power of “lifestyle design.”

What fits your talents might be different than what fits that talents of Steve Pavlina. Or it might not. The point is that only you know that answer. Don’t let anyone else try to convince you otherwise.

(Photo by Meditatejack)

Note to Readers: I’m hitting the road this afternoon for a four-day trip. Because of this, I’m posting Friday’s article one day early so that you’ll get a full three pieces this week. Please excuse me if I’m slow to moderate comments or answer e-mails in the near future, my computer access will be limited. Enjoy your weekend!

Med School Mania

Students looking to medical school are often some of the most overworked, overstressed students on campus. It has become accepted wisdom that going pre-med is one of the toughest academic paths you can follow.

But does it have to be this way?

Over the past few months, I’ve heard from a variety of students who have recently gone through the med school admissions process. I also had the privilege of talking with someone who could offer an insider view of how the admissions decisions are made at an elite medical institution (which will remain nameless). In this article, I have two goals. First, I want to draw from these conversations to identify the factors that really matter for med school admissions. Second, I want to discuss how to design a low stress schedule that still maximizes these key areas.

Following the standard Study Hacks approach, my goal is not to offer hidden shortcuts, but, instead, to help you eliminate the waste and inefficiency that makes what could be a reasonable journey unnecessarily hard.

What Matters for Med School

To the best of my understanding, the following factors are what matter for a med school admissions decision:

1. Where you went to school.
2. Your G.P.A.
3. Your MCAT score.
4. Evidence that you have a real interest in medicine and a good understanding of what the lifestyle entails.

That’s it. Keep this in mind: med school is not college. The admission decisions do not come down to who has the more extravagant (and punishing) collection of extracurricular activities and the hardest possible combination of majors. For most schools, if you have high grades and MCATs, and a solid collection of relevant activities, you’ll get in. A big goal of this article will be to free you from the degenerate mindset that if you’re not suffering on your way toward med school then you’re doing something wrong.

How to Accomplish these Goal with a Minimum of Stress

The happiest med-school bound students I’ve met, have followed, more or less, the following advice:

1. Major in whatever you want. Just make sure you also take the required pre-med courses.
2. Spread out your pre-med courses to avoid killer terms.
3. Don’t participate in any time-consuming extracurricular activities during the school year. Just do light things that you find fun and that relax you without eating up your time. (Worry not, we’ll return to when you can do extracurriculars in points 6 and 7.)
4. Make your courses your main focus. If you find yourself working late the night before exams, you have too much on your plate. Cut back on activities and spread out hard courses more to keep your schedules more manageable.
5. Definitely do not double-major in biology or chemistry and something else hard. This will make avoiding killer semesters almost impossible. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to avoid majoring in biology or chemistry all together. For someone who is not naturally drawn to these subjects, taking the required pre-med courses is easier than taking the required pre-med courses plus all the other courses needed for those particular majors. A lot of pre-med types feel like they are so supposed to have punishing course loads. This is not true. Go out of your way to avoid it.
6. Every summer, focus on something that exposes you to the real world practice of medicine. This is perhaps the most important point underpinning this low-stress philosophy: isolate med school related extracurriculars to the summers. The resulting stress reduction is intense without reducing your impressiveness.
7. If you’re competing for spots in the best possible med schools — those in which all applicants have top GPA’s and MCATs, here’s the secret to making your extracurricular pop: organize your own program. Often this entails taking an experience from earlier summers than adapting it somewhere new. For example, perhaps you intern at a clinic one summer, then the next summer you organize a similar internship program at a different clinic. Another insider tip: consider a senior thesis on a topic involving community-level health issues. This provides the rationale — and makes it easier to find student funds — to launch a pilot program or gather firsthand experience. Under no circumstances, however, should you try to pile up a large quantity of vaguely related extracurriculars during your school year. I know this is your instinct. I know this is what you think got you into college. But med school is not college! Such an approach will saturate your schedule in stress, and it still won’t provide more impact four summers of focused, medicine-related, self-initiated work.
8. Start studying for the MCAT very early. Get to the point that you can score high without breaking a sweat. These are really important. Much more so then the things that cause pre-meds the most stress (i.e., too many majors, too hard course loads, too many unnecessary extracurriculars.) Take advantage of this reality by putting your focus here, where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Why This Works

This approach generates what has been identified to me as the ideal med school applicant: someone with high grades, high MCAT scores, and a solid collection of relevant medical activities. The key, however, is that you can accomplish these goals without having to have your semesters overflow with multiple hard courses and demanding activities. Or so I hypothesize…

As usual, I conclude by turning things over to you guys — the real experts. What are your insider tips for finding a relaxed path into med school?

(photo by Okky Pyykko)

Microsoft Doesn’t Care About Clubs

In college, I spent a lot of time writing. I started as a humor columnist for the student newspaper and a staff writer for the campus humor magazine – the venerable Dartmouth Jack’O Lantern, whose previous staff members include Dr. Seuss (Dartmouth class of ’25). I eventually worked myself up to become editor-in-chief.

My senior year, a few months after reaching the apex of college humor writing career, I interviewed for a competitive project manager position at Microsoft. After surviving the resume screen and two rounds of interviews at Dartmouth, I was flown out to Redmond, where I went through six more rounds of interviewing.

Guess how many times my impressive, time-consuming extracurricular activity was discussed?

Zero times.

I didn’t mind, because I didn’t expect it to be mentioned. I had worked on the Jacko because, from an early age, I had an unhealthy obsession with the tradition of Ivy League humor magazines. I wrote for the Jacko because I loved it. It had no effect on my job hunting.

A Dangerous Idea

This article proposes a dangerous idea: Outside of a few exceptions, college extracurriculars are of minor importance to your efforts to find a job after graduation. There is no benefit to be gained by suffering through an overwhelming load of activities at the college level.

Below, I briefly explain, to the best of my understanding, the role activities play in the job hunting process. I’ll then cover graduate and professional school admissions, and conclude with a recommendation for how to better integrate extracurriculars into your college life.

How to Get Hired

For many jobs, the hiring process proceeds as follows:

1. Your grades, where you went to school, and to a lesser extent, your major, are used to decide whether or not you’re someone they might want to hire.
2. If you pass the above screen, you’ll be interviewed. If the job is in finance, consulting, or is at a famous tech firm like Microsoft or Google, there will be a formal series of interviews to test your ability to think on your feet. If it’s a smaller firm, the interview will be more informal. The goal is to see if you can express yourself well, seem like a good person, understand their business, and, in general, are not a jerk.
3. A hiring decision is made.

What role do activities play in the above? A minor one.

As mentioned in my story, the mega-firms don’t care. They’ll rely on their own battery of brutal interrogations to test your mettle. For other companies, your activities, at best, add a little bit of personality color. It’s nice, but not nearly as important as your grades, where you went to school, and your interview performance.

For example, it helps to have done something outside of classes, as the absence of any activities will make you seem boring and anti-social. It might also give you a bit of a boost to have a leadership role in a club, because this shows that you can manage people. Google, I’ve heard, likes people who did something quirky, because they think this makes their workplace more innovative.

But there are minor nudges: like having a good handshake, or making good small talk at the beginning of an interview. The key point is that having a huge slate of demanding activities — unlike, for example, when applying to college — does not make this nudge stronger.

(Certainly, there are some exceptions. If you want to be a journalist, it matters that you work yourself up to an editorial position in your campus paper. This is tough. Similarly, if you’re at Harvard, and want to write for The Simpsons, put your focus on the Lampoon. But I’ll assume if you’re going for one of these types of jobs you already know what you need to do.)

Other Factors that Count

Other factors, of course, are also important to get hired. Many industries like to see relevant work experience. If you want to be a banker, for example, it’s important that you try to intern in the field during your summer breaks. Similarly, if you want to work in development, intern at your college’s development office.

And to be honest, a large number of you will likely find your first job either through a personal connection or a previous internship with the company. Again, your activities don’t enter the equation.

Graduate and Professional Schools

What about graduate school? As we’ve discussed before, all that matters for graduate school is that you did research. The professors who make the decisions don’t care about non-research related activities. I was at MIT for a year before my advisor figured out I had written a book.

For medical school, you do need to prove that you know what medicine is really about, and you are not just applying because your mom likes the idea of a doctor in the family. This means some sort of involvement in medicine-related fields — be it research, internships, or volunteering. Many applicants do this during their summers.

For law school, it’s all about having high enough grades and LSAT scores.

The Implications

Remember this mantra: college is not high school. There are no admissions officers in your future who are going to pour over your extracurricular activities and come up with a subjective score that will determine whether or not you get to move on to the next stage. What you do outside of your classes will play only a minor role in landing a job after graduation. And doing lots of hard things will probably not add an appreciable advantage over doing one or two things you really liked.

My advice:

1. Join a small number of activities that interest you and that surround you with interesting people.
2. Don’t do a large number of activities.
3. If you ever feel stressed or overwhelmed by extracurricular obligations: cut back! Their is no reason for activities to cause you hardship. Their main purpose is a source of happiness for you.

This lesson is tough for some to swallow. The lingering impact of the college admissions process is hard to shake. But you must. It’s okay not to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to actually have free time. It’s okay to simplify and try a life that’s a little more zen. Your future bosses simply don’t care about that extra volunteer gig you are trying to squeeze into your schedule. So let it go. Make your extracurriculars, as tough as this may be, about you — not some vague plan for what you want to achieve down the road.

I’m interested in your thoughts? Are you a college student that feels overwhelmed with activities? If so, why do you think you are doing so much?

Greetings from Annapolis

You may have noticed there was no Friday blog post. I’m still on the road and have limited computer access. I still wanted, however, to leave you a brief note. Yesterday I was roaming a Barnes & Noble, and, naturally, I gravitated to the graduation table to check out the latest crop of student advice guides. I discovered that no fewer than four new books were centered on the following idea: the key to being happy after college is to identify your passion then go do something that fulfills it.

Here’s my problem with this concept:

• Passion is generated by extended exposure to something that becomes an important part of your life. It’s not some magic score assigned to each job that describes, with great accuracy, how happy you’ll immediately become if you follow that path. (In reality, it’s really just a fancy word for general occupational fulfillment.)
• As a recent graduate, you have not yet been exposed to any job long enough for you to know what might fit well with you and lead, down the road, to the type of general fulfillment people dub passion.
• How, then, are you, as a newly minted graduate, supposed to identify a passion?
• Conclusion: Passion-centric career planning reduces to well-intentioned guess-work — typically based on some rough — and highly limited — idea about what types of jobs seem like they should be passion-inducing.

Herein lies the advantage of lifestyle-centric planning: It gets you started down the right path without requiring you to have an expert-level knowledge of a large number of potential careers. It also relieves you of the stress of trying to identify some magical perfect job that will maximize this fuzzy metric. And finally, guess what? If you’re living a lifestyle you really like, pretty soon you might just start to describe yourself as “passionate.”

Some Advice for the Road

I’m leaving this afternoon to attend a college graduation: my second in three weeks. As you might imagine, graduating is on my mind, and, I would guess, on many of your minds as well. To celebrate the season I thought I would turn my attention to some advice for finding your way after college.

I want to share with you the unique law I use to guide my life. It’s a twist on the standard graduation inducements, but it seems, from my limited experience, to work the best of the various strategies I’ve watched my peers try on for size in their first years out of college.

The advice goes like this:

Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.

That’s it. Notice, I’m not talking about “avoiding taking yourself to seriously” or “always finding ways to give back.” I didn’t mention “the importance of a sense or humor” or why you need to “follow your passion, not money.” These are all reasonable words of wisdom, but they don’t necessarily direct you to a life that you’re happy to live.

My advice does.

Defining Lifestyle

What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle:

• How much control do I have over my schedule?
• What’s the intensity level of my job?
• What’s the importance of what I do?
• What’s the prestige level?
• What type of work?
• Where do I live?
• What’s my social life like?
• What’s my work life balance?
• What’s my family like?
• How do other people think of me?
• What am I known for?

Using these types of questions to guide you, construct an image in your mind about the ideal future you. Notice, specific jobs don’t need to enter the equation. They can if they help you visualize, but they aren’t necessary. Add little details. Really get a sense for what this lifestyle would feel like. If the image makes you happy and gets you excited about the possibilities for your future, then you’ve hit on a good match.

Example Lifestyles

There exists an infinite variety of possible lifestyles. Here are just a few examples:

• The Power Broker: You live in a big city in a nice apartment. You climbed the ladder fast in a difficult business. You wield power. You’re good at what you do. You’re well respected. Your job is intense but you are super-organized so it doesn’t drive you crazy. You’re surrounded by good, loyal friends, and when you have fun, you have fun hard.
• The Serial Entrepreneur: You live in a nice San Francisco townhouse. You’ve started several businesses. Some more successful than others. You tend to alternate between an intense year or two growing a business followed by some extended time off for intense relaxation. You’ve got a network of good friends across the country and a bar down the street that you visit every Friday night to catch-up with your closest buddies. You use your off time to develop extreme hobbies and indulge in grand, hopelessly ambitious and wildly fun projects.
• The Virtual Voyager: You live in your dream house in a cozy community-oriented town, surrounded by natural beauty. You work virtually for several technology companies; setting your own hours. Three or four light days a week is enough to take care of your expenses. You and your family spend a lot of time outdoors, barbecuing with the neighbors, and, in general, enjoying small town life. You travel a lot for the sheer adventure of it.

Working Backwards

Once you’ve developed a detailed, visceral sense for your ideal lifestyle, use this image to guide your early career decisions. It’s a rough guide, to be sure, but it can still prove surprisingly useful.

Imagine, for example, that you’re faced with two options as graduation approaches. One is an elite project manager position at Microsoft and the other is acceptance to some good computer science graduate schools. Both are interesting and challenging. What do you choose? The power broker would go for the Microsoft position. The serial entrepreneur, on the other hand, would go for grad school — a perfect place to develop her first marketable technology.

The Power of Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning

Starting with a dream lifestyle — as oppose to a dream job — opens up more creativity. When thinking only about jobs, you’ll find yourself considering the same artificially-narrow menu of options troubled over by most talented college grads (banking, consulting, law, non-profit…) A lifestyle, on the other hand, provides much more flexibility — letting you discover potential paths previously hidden from your planning process.

The main advantage, however, is that, in the end, the whole point of worrying about your career is because you want to feel good about your life. By cutting to the bottom-line — what would make me feel best? — and then working backward from this answer, you are maximizing your odds that you’ll actually get somewhere worth going.

As with any graduation season advice, take this with a grain of salt. This is what I have seen work, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that will. It can’t hurt, however, to take a moment to ask yourself: what lifestyle would suit me best?

You might be surprised where the answer leads you.

Disruptive Thinkers is a semi-regular series that features interesting people with interesting ideas about college, achievement, or life in general.

How to Become Good

Marty Nemko is good at becoming good. As he outlined in a recent blog post, when he set his sights on becoming a career coach he eventually logged over 2800 clients. When he decided to parlay this expertise into writing, he landed a career columnist gig first for the San Francisco Chronicle, then the Los Angeles Times, then transformed this into a contributing editor slot at U.S. News & World Report. He wanted to learn the art of rose hybridizing, now three of his varieties are sold nationwide. He wanted to try playwriting and won the “Roar of the Crowd” award for the best Bay Area entertainment of the week. His first screenplay caused a stir. He has a radio show.

And the list continues…

To use Study Hacks parlance, Marty is a finisher. He doesn’t just tackle projects that pique his interest, but he also manages that rarest of the rare skills: to consistently push them into the elite strata of noteworthy accomplishment. Fascinated by his approach, I asked Marty to share some of his famously unconventional advice on how to become good at becoming good.

What do most people get wrong when they set out to become good?

The average person isn’t smart enough to tackle lots of things, yet they try and thus become dilettantes. They need focus, unrelenting focus — until the world has provided sufficient signs that it is interested or not interested in that person’s focus.

What’s the role of talent versus strategy in becoming good?

Strategy is absolutely necessary….but insufficient. Talent and drive (or luck — damn those lucky people) are required.

Many people who focus on something for a long time can get pretty skilled, but have a hard time making that transition to the big-time. How does one make that final push from amateur to expert?

Become an amazing and relentless marketer. That skills is usually orthogonal to (the less accurate term is “incompatible with”) becoming expert at something, yet it is critical, alas, especially in this society where the stupid public responds to marketing hype more than to excellence. Why else would dishonest idiots like Oprah be more beloved than, for example, Christopher Hitchens on the Left or Larry Kudlow on the right..

What advice would you give a young college student looking to make a name for himself in something?

Forget passion unless it’s a rare one. Too many other people will be passionate about it, eviscerating your chances of “making a name for yourself.” Don’t be a lemming. Make a name for yourself in some pursuit that top people rarely pursue: Be the most amazing undertaker, industrial acid broker, advocate for the most under-served and worthy kids (in my opinion: intellectually gifted boys in elementary school.) Even if the field seems mundane, you will feel more rewarded and better about your life being a vanguard in a dull field than a soldier in a “cool” one.

[For more on Marty, check out his popular website, which includes, among other content, his new blog and a collection of his most popular articles on life, goals, work and achievement.]

Jon Dismisses Grades

Yesterday, Jon Morrow wrote a guest post on the Brazen Careerist blog. It was titled: Why I Regret Getting Straight-A’s in College. It subsequently got picked up by Life Hacker, and, as you might imagine, has since been making the rounds.

In light of my experience with this issue, I want to offer a rebuttal. I don’t agree with Jon. But I do like his post. It is well-reasoned and rational — a perfect starting place for a polite, insightful debate.

Five Reasons Why Jon Regrets Getting Straight-A’s

Jon lists five main reasons why he regrets getting straight-A’s in college:

1. “No one has ever asked about my GPA.“
2. “I didn’t sleep.“
3. “I’ve forgotten 95% of it.“
4. “I didn’t have time for people.”
5. “Work experience is more valuable.”

For the sake of concision we can combine (2) and (4), as they both describe the same problem: good grades require too much study time. And we can also combine (1) and (5), as they both tackle the question of what matters when applying for a job. With these combinations complete, we can now tackle the main arguments in turn:

Argument #1: Employers Don’t Care About Your GPA

Jon argues:

I interviewed with lots of companies, received a total of 14 job offers after graduation, and none of the companies asked about [my GPA].

Grades are rarely discussed in job interviews. Does this mean they don’t matter? Of course not! Grades play a crucial rule in the hidden first step of the interview process: the resume screen.

When an organization has a competitive entry level position open, they are going to receive resumes from more candidates than they have time to interview. Accordingly, they perform a quick triage. Their focus: where you went to school, your grades, and, if relevant, work experience. If your grades are low, you will probably get tossed aside without ever being granted an interview.

The reason employers don’t bring up your grades in an interview is because there is no need. They already know your GPA. It’s a big reason why they agreed to interview you. Now it’s time to move beyond your marks and convince them you have the other skills necessary to be a good hire.

This reality does not just apply to investment banks and consulting firms. Almost any company that is hiring an entry level position needs some method of triage. This includes non-profit organizations. Do you want to save the world? Or join Teach for America? You better have a good GPA. These do-gooder firms are notorious for screening entry-level resumes on grades. (They get a lot of applicants, they can afford to choose the best.)

In short: a mediocre GPA will close a lot a entry level doors. Unless you are definite that you want a job in an industry that does not care at all about GPA (for example, the freelance writing gig mentioned by Jon in the post), you should think twice before drastically narrowing your options with a low average.

Argument #2: Getting Straight-A’s Devours Your Free Time

Jon argues:

Unless you’re a super genius, getting 37 A’s is hard work…I had lots of opportunities to build a huge network. But I didn’t have time.

This is an argument I hear frequently. It’s 100% false. It pops up so often because it is built upon the deceptively appealing logical fallacy of the false dichotomy. Jon implicitly assumes the following choice:

1. Work 60-100 hours a week and score straight A’s.
2. Work much less and score mainly B’s.

Faced with this choice, (2) is the obvious way to go. Working 100 hours a week in college would be terrible! But this dichotomy assumes that grades are mainly a function of how many hours you spend. As loyal Study Hacks readers know, this is false. Your grades are a combination of: how you study, your energy when you study, and time spent. Smart strategies for the first two can keep the third really small.

Case in point: I studied much less than most people I knew in college, but my GPA was higher than Jon’s, who, as he describes, was “obsessed” with getting an A+ on every assignment. Most students who e-mail me success stories, emphasize not just that their grades are higher, but that they are studying much less now that they’ve cleaned up their habits. The real choice is:

1. Study with bad habits for 60 – 100 hours a week and get A’s.
2. Study with good habits for much less time and get A’s.
3. Study with bad habits for much less time and get B’s.

Faced with this more accurate choice, (2) becomes the best option. What Jon really regrets is having terrible study habits that ate up all his time. The goal of getting good grades is not to blame. Focus on being efficient to solve the problem.

Argument #3: I’ve Forgotten 95% of It

Jon argues:

I majored in English Literature and minored in Communication Theory…I spent all my time reading classic literature and memorizing vague, pseudoscientific communication theories. Neither are useful at all, and I’ve forgotten at least 95% of it.

College is not vocational school. Its mission is rooted in enlightenment thinking: By being exposed to great minds you become a better citizen of the world. True, you will probably never need to explicitly discuss much of what you read from the Western Canon. But there is a reason why we have been studying these books for the last 300 years. They equip you to tackle life. They add nuance to your understanding of ethics and morality. They complicate your view of the human condition. They change your reception of the signal of life experience from black and white to HD.

The same holds true for social science and physical sciences. You might not use a specific communication theory, but you have learned to view information flow in a more critical, nuanced light. Do you really think 18-year-old Jon is equally equipped to tackle life as 22-year-old college graduate Jon? Or did four years of exposure to the detailed thinking of smart minds perhaps facilitate some mental maturing — even if you didn’t agree with everything you learned.

In the end, however, I’m not qualified to provide a great defense for the liberal arts. For this, I should defer to those that have done so with informed eloquence.

Conclusion

I appreciate Jon’s thoughtful essay. We differ because of the following three observations that I hold to be true:

1. For a large number of entry-level jobs, your GPA does matter.
2. Getting good grades does not require you to work more than most students.
3. Their There is a value to learning things that you don’t have immediate practical use for.

If you agree with these observations, then you fall into my pro-grades camp. If you believe them flawed, Jon’s conclusion will seem more rational. Either way, it’s nice to have the opportunity to engage in well-reasoned debate on the topic.

What are your thoughts? Do you regret trying to score good grades?