 What's happening guys? Today we're going to be talking about the biggest mistakes that college freshmen make. Completely original idea that no one has ever done before in the history of mankind, but you know me guys. I'm a trailblazer. I'm a maverick and this is the part of the video where I ask you to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Thank you. So jumping right into it, number 10 on the list is going to be choosing a worthless degree. Now I talk a lot about this on the channel and in fact one of my most popular videos ever is the most useless degrees with over a million views now. So I'm sure that you're shocked that this would be the first one that I talk about. Now it used to be that you could go to college and get any degree and you'd be set for life. It was basically like a golden ticket to success. Sure some degrees were going to be a little bit better than others but at the end of the day it didn't matter all that much. It's definitely not like that anymore. It's more like a debt trap than a golden ticket now for many degrees. Now you hear generic advice all the time about how to choose your major and it sounds something like follow your passions or choose something you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Now I do agree that passion should be part of the equation. You should never do something that you hate for instance. But realistically if you're going to go on average almost $40,000 in student loan debt and spend four years of your life studying you want to make sure that you're getting your money's worth. Now one thing I really like to talk about this channel is the philosophy of ikigai. And yes I know I'm pronouncing it wrong. Everyone always comments that I pronounce it wrong. Sorry I'll have the correct pronunciation pop up on the screen. Now I could do an entire video on ikigai but basically it talks about four things. What you love, what you're good at, what you can get paid for, and what the world needs. So for instance I talk about how psychology degrees are pretty overrated and for the most part you probably don't want to go into one unless you have a really good plan and you know exactly what you're doing in the future. And so psychology would be a great example of something that the world needs and it might be something that you even love. So that would fall into the category of something that is your mission. However it's very difficult to get paid to do psychology and there's over a hundred thousand people who graduate with a bachelor's every single year and a lot of them go into it thinking that they're going to be able to get a job and they can't. They have to go back to school to get at least a master's and sometimes a doctorate in order to even be able to get a job. So whenever you're thinking about what career that you should go for you should keep all of these things in mind. Sure what you love aka your passion is probably the most important out of those four things. However you probably shouldn't just ignore all of the other ones because in most cases it won't turn out well for you. And even if you think of just following your passion the average 18 year old's passion is scratching his balls and playing Call of Duty for 16 hours a day. So you're going to follow your passion and do that for the rest of your life. I hope not. That's kind of stupid. You know you need to dial it down to maybe six hours a day instead of 16. So many people are ending up deep in student loan debt and they're graduating with a degree that won't even help them get a job. In many cases getting a college degree such as the ones that I'm talking about not only will they not help you but they will actually hurt you when it comes to achieving your goals. And this kind of brings me to my next point and it's sad that we have to you know start thinking about these things at such a young age but you know you really do be like that sometimes. Number nine on the list is not knowing why you're going to college. So many people go to college because it's the thing that everyone else is doing and they're just kind of following along. Once you go to college you're set. It's time to have fun for four years and go deep in debt. Hey that rhymed. I didn't mean for that to rhyme. Now college of course has been glorified for decades in all kinds of different movies and American pies and all kinds of other stuff. It's basically a part of the American dream at this point. College and success have pretty much become synonymous at this point and if you don't go to college you're not going to be successful. That's what you hear all the time. Now obviously some of the degrees are still worthwhile. They're definitely worth your time and money but many of them aren't. Now moving down the list some of them might not be as good as they used to but if you have a really good plan going in you know exactly what career you're going for you can still make them work and then some of them are just plain bad. I mean listen if you're passionate about the subject minor in it maybe double major in it. Study in on the side you know take extra classes in it but never major in it. The truth is the main purpose for going to college is to set yourself up for a meaningful career. Sure there's other stuff to it. You're introduced to new ideas. It's fun. You learn a lot. Your brain gets expanded okay. All of that stuff maybe you find yourself and yes that is a unique experience technically. There's no other experience like college but the truth is there's many many things out there that could also be unique experiences and there's so many other ways that you could achieve all of those things that I just mentioned. You could move to a new city or a new country for four years. You could backpack the world for four years. There's so many other things that you could do with that time that would be just as meaningful as college and they probably wouldn't cost nearly as much. If you want to find enlightenment you can shave your head move to Nepal become a monk meditate for 10 hours a day. Okay I get it I'm being overly dramatic here I know but I think you get my point. College is marketed as this once in a lifetime experience where you'll find yourself and you'll solve all your problems and nothing could be further from the truth. The main purpose of college is to set yourself up for a meaningful career and everything else comes secondary to that. The other stuff is really nice don't get me wrong I had a great college experience but it's not worth going $40,000 in debt. It's sad to say this I wish it wasn't this way but because of the fact that tuition costs are so high now you have to treat college like an investment. So now the big question is what kind of career do you want to have after college and how is your major going to help you get there? Which brings me to my next biggest mistake which is not having a plan. Most people go into college not having any plan whatsoever and I tell people on this channel I think this might be the number one piece of advice that I can give you is you want to figure out what career you're going for and then reverse engineer the steps that you need to take in order to get there but of course that requires you to spend a lot of time and do a lot of research so I guess that steps optional. Now this will save you a lot of time and trouble because a lot of the time you won't need a degree in order to achieve that goal. Just as an example every single year tens of thousands of people graduate with a criminal justice degree and they think this will help them to become a police officer and in most circumstances it actually doesn't help you at all. A lot of police stations don't require you to have a degree at all and some of them require you to have a degree but having a criminal justice degree doesn't matter and it's like that for most law enforcement positions whether you think of detectives or whatever you're going for. There are a few positions out there where getting a criminal justice degree from the right program might help you but for the most part most of the people who graduate with that degree they basically wasted their time. Now this is just one example but there are many others that are like it so it's so important for you to have a plan figure out what your goal is and then reverse engineer the steps in order to get there. Figure out what profession or career or industry that you're trying to get into. Talk to people who are currently in that industry using Facebook groups LinkedIn your personal network maybe even cold calling people and like gently nicely asking them if you can ask them a few questions. You can also cold email you can check out different forums that are dedicated to different professions. Even professions that you think might be extremely well defined like nursing for instance there's probably a hundred different nursing specialties so it's still worth it for you to figure out exactly what specialty you're trying to go for. Once you know what you're going for you can ask those people really important questions like do grades matter? Should I be joining a lot of clubs? What type of clubs should I be joining? Should I be getting a job? Should I be networking? Who should I be networking with? Not only will this help you decide what degree you're going to major in but it'll help you decide what degrees might be good double majors or minors or different skills that you should learn on the side. Doing this will clarify everything for you and it'll make the whole college experience so much less stressful so much more straightforward and guess what you'll actually be able to enjoy the rest of it instead of being worried 24-7 about whether you're actually going to be able to get a job at the end of the four years. Number seven on this list is going to be optional for some people but I would say for most people watching this this is going to be a really good option. I think it's a mistake that people don't do it and that is not going to community college. Now I've talked about this before but you should either go to a really, really good school like an Ivy League or a school that's like top five for whatever major you're going into or you should just spend your first two years and go to a community college. The middle ground in my opinion isn't going to be worth it except in very rare circumstances. So basically you go to either one of the best schools or you want to go to a community college and just take the cheapest route possible. So for the small percentage of the people who watch this channel, they're geniuses, they're trying to get into Harvard or Stanford or MIT, that's great. You should definitely continue doing that. It's usually worth it for you to go to a prestigious college. It opens up a lot of doors and opportunities for you in the future but for most people I highly, highly recommend just going to community college for the first two years and then transferring to an in-state university. Community college is so much cheaper. It's around three and a half thousand dollars a year which is so much cheaper compared to public schools or private schools but on top of that I would argue community colleges actually give you a better education especially for the intro level classes and the reason for this is because at community colleges the class sizes are much smaller and so you get a lot more one-on-one time with the professors and on top of that the professor's main job is teaching. It's not researching like it would be at a lot of the different public universities. This is something a lot of people don't realize but college professors at public universities, their main job is researching and getting grants and their secondary job, the little thing that they do on the side is actually teaching people. You'll find that if you go to a university your intro level classes are going to find you in this huge auditorium with hundreds of people. Seriously there was one class that I think had almost 500 people in it and one professor teaching. You all be huddled together in an auditorium looking at a professor who is so far away that he looks like he's an aunt on the stage but that's okay because after the first few weeks no one shows up and the class is going to be pretty much empty. The truth is unless you're going to a top top level university either an Ivy League or something that's really high up when it comes to your specific major that you're going for it's not going to be worth it. The numbers show that you don't make that much more. At the end of the day a degree is a degree. Now you don't want to go to any of the scammy like for-profit colleges I've talked about those before. You want to actually go to a legitimate college go to a community college and then a in-state state university but overall your best bet is to keep your education as cheap as possible and this one kind of ties into the next one on the list which is going to an expensive college and treating your student loans like monopoly money. So many people fall into this trap of going to super expensive private colleges that make you open up your wallet and charge you much more. When the degree that you get statistically speaking is going to make you the same amount of money or very close in your entire lifetime. So the difference in what you end up paying for a private college is generally speaking from a personal finance perspective is not going to be worth the very tiny difference in what you're going to end up making. So many people treat these loans like monopoly money I mean they don't really see the money it's not in their hands but they don't realize that they are spending a ton of money and they are going to have to pay that back in the future. They'll go out eat with their friends all the time they'll spend thousands of dollars a month on food and beverages realize that you will have to pay those loans back as crazy as it sounds you can't default on those loans there's all kinds of other types of loans like business loans for instance where you can just declare bankruptcy and default on them you can't do that with student loans. You want to keep things as cheap as possible and ideally you should try to pay for college without taking any loans out at all which brings me to my next point number five on the list is going to be not pursuing as many grants and scholarships as they could have gotten now I made an entire video where I talked about different ways you can get free money for college I think it's worth it for anyone to look at this I'll pop up the cringy thumbnail right here for you all to see there are different types of scholarships grants essay competitions all kinds of different ways that you can get college paid for and most people either don't take advantage of this at all or they do but not as much as they should and I think all things being equal the main reason for this is because they start way too late I talk about this in that video that I mentioned but you should be starting to apply for these scholarships essay competitions etc at the latest in your junior year of high school this can save you thousands and thousands of dollars and honestly with the amount of work that you have to do it's really not as much work as it looks like if you're smart about how you do it like I talk about in the video you'll be making hundreds of dollars an hour for the work that you're doing which is a heck of a lot better than most of the minimum wage jobs that you could be doing at the time so it's absolutely worth your time it's easy money and you should be taking advantage of it number four on the list is going to be not working pursuing internships and networking so this is a common mistake that I see people making all the time people either don't do it at all you know they just go to school and they don't work at all they don't get any real-world experience or they do work but they're doing something that's not going to give them any experience in the career that they're going for now I already talked about this before but the biggest reason for this is because people don't really have a plan and they don't really even know why they're going to college they're just doing it because everybody else is now if you have a plan it'll be very easy for you to do what I call separating the signal from the noise and by that I mean all kinds of people waste time doing things that aren't actually going to help them achieve their goals for instance you'll see people in college who are trying to be like presidents in every single organization that they go into so they have like six different positions and they think that'll make their resume look good most of the time you know having one or two positions is great the other four are a complete waste of time and in fact they're probably going to make you look like you're one of those annoying types of people and separating the signal from the noise is basically the Pareto principle or the 80-20 principle 20% of the activities internships jobs etc are going to lead to 80% of the results and it's your job to figure out what that 20% that is going to lead to the 80% is by talking to people that are in the career that you're going for they'll be able to tell you what actually matters and what is just a complete waste of time and by the way I kind of did fall into that trap of being one of those people who joined like every organization for a while so when I make fun of people who are doing that I'm actually making fun of myself and by the way as a side benefit when you figure out the activities that actually matter they're actually going to make a difference first of all you're going to have peace of mind because you're going to know that you're doing everything possible and second of all you're going to have a heck of a lot more free time because you're not going to be constantly doing all these things that you think might help but in reality they aren't going to help you at all this means that you'll actually be able to free up some time and enjoy your college experience now number three on the list is going to be basically the exact opposite problem of what I talked about before which is doing the bare minimum so a lot of people what they do is when they first go into college they do the bare minimum they don't join any organizations they don't do anything like that and then at the last moment they realize oh my gosh I'm not going to be able to get a job and then they just you know join a ton of different clubs and they try to be as active as possible but doing the bare minimum is a big problem almost as bad as the other one so you graduate from high school which is a pretty structured environment where they basically tell you exactly what you need to do you go to college where it's not nearly as structured and you have a ton of free time that you don't know what to do with you have more freedom than ever before that's the main point for many people they don't know how to manage their time properly and so they basically end up just wasting all of that free time that they have netflix binge drinking wearing sweatpants to class procrastinating until the night before the test and then doing an all nighter everybody does this to some extent and i'm actually not saying that you shouldn't do it at all i think that uh procrastinating actually has taught me how to be much more efficient when i'm actually studying for instance i think it can actually be a good thing to learn how to study at the last moment for instance i write these scripts at the last moment half the time and so it does come in handy later in life but really you want to keep that to a minimum and overall you just want to try to get the most out of college and to be honest with you that's an entire video subject in and of itself there's a author that i really like i think he makes fantastic books his name is cal newport and there's two books in particular i think you should read by him that will really help you when it comes to college one of them is how to win at college and the other one is how to become a straight a student now to be honest with you in most situations in college it's not that important to become a straight student however what he teaches you in this book will basically be the 80 20 principle again where you're not going to be spending all that much time in order to get pretty good grades and to be honest with you i still to this day even after i've graduated college i still use some of the simple organizational time management methods that he recommended in this book absolutely fantastic book especially the how to win at college part number two on the list is going to be not learning basic personal finance skills now honestly i think that high schools across the nation it should be required classes to teach people basic personal finance skills like doing your taxes making a budget investing the importance of you know finding the right career all that sort of thing i think it should be mandatory to teach that in high schools unfortunately they don't and so that's why you're watching a youtube channel in order to learn it yourself most people when they go to college they go from an environment where your parents are making your food or the school is making your food and then all of a sudden they go to college and no one's making your food for you so what are you going to do you're going to end up eating out almost every single day i know this i fell into that trap myself and almost everybody does what i really recommend when it comes to food and cooking which is a huge part of your expenses is just to learn basic cooking skills okay basic cooking skills are going to serve you pretty much the rest of your life using a crock pot for instance is great because you can make all of the food that you need for an entire week using a crock pot all you have to do is just put everything in there put a little water in there set it right before you go to bed and when you wake up it's going to be ready it's going to be good to go then you can just individually package them and eat them throughout the entire week very easy to use very cheap and honestly it tastes pretty good as well this is just one example but there's a ton of other personal finance things that you want to learn such as budgeting saving investing all of these things are extremely important and you might be thinking as a college student you probably aren't going to have that much money to invest but to be honest with you you should start investing even if it's one dollar as early as you possibly can most people don't think about investing and retirement until they're in their 30s so the sooner you start doing this even if it's with a insignificant amount of money the better now i've talked a lot about this on this channel you know there's some apps out there that make investing unbelievably easy one of them is weeble i might put the affiliate link down in the description i do it on some of my videos you get two free stocks if you click on it worth up to 1400 dollars another one is going to be robin hood very easy to invest there's other apps out there that make it even easier like acorns for instance even if you're just investing like a couple bucks a month you're going to see it grow every single month and it's going to be an experience that is going to make you see the value of investing now the number one biggest mistake on this list is not working on skills at the end of the day the world is changing so fast right now we're you know entering into the age of automation for instance a lot of jobs around the world today either won't exist at all or they're going to be completely different than the way they look right now because of this you should really focus on learning skills that have a lot of market value basically skills that business owners and hiring managers are thirsty for they're going to be willing to hire you and pay you really well because not that many people can do the stuff that you do not only will you get paid better but you're also going to have a better quality of life because you're going to have more leverage over the businesses if they don't treat you well you'll just go to someone else that does and I say that business degrees are pretty good on this channel and they are but realistically speaking if you get a business degree and then you don't do anything else with your time in college you're going to know all the theoretical stuff about business but you're not going to have any practical skills but so what you want to do in college is you want to build those practical skills and then do some type of project which is going to be different depending on what major you're in so you can show a boss or a hiring manager that you can contribute to their business you can show this to your potential future boss and they'll be much more likely to hire you all right guys make sure to gently smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc and before you go make sure to check out my other videos right here i made them just for you