3 posts tagged “social media”

Communing with Fidel

This appeared originally in The American Conservative

On Havana’s malecón, the seawall that parallels the shore, the waves roll in and hit the sudden obstacle, sending towering explosions of bright white spray far into the air, occasionally soaking the unwary pedestrian. Across the highway that follows the malecón is a cheap open-air restaurant, the DiMar. A steady breeze from the sea pours across the tables. A tolerable shrimp cocktail, topped with mayonnaise, costs a few bucks. On a couple of evenings I drank a beer there, watching Cuba go by. It wasn’t what I had expected.

http://fredoneverything.net/index.html 

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November 30, 2007

Declaring a “Life Major”  by Jeff Pulver

It has always been amazing to me how at a young age, just about everyone who attends university in the United States has to pick a major and make it their core focus for the time they spend at university. How does anyone at 18 or 20 know what it is that they really want to do for the rest of their lives?

How does anyone know what they really want to do when they are in school, and how do they know that they will really like / enjoy the profession they have chosen once they get their degree and enter the work force? It isn’t as if many of us are given the chance to be an apprentice and then make a decision for the kind of work we want to do based on our own life’s experiences. Maybe if parent, family friend or close relative is in that line of work, we know better what is involved, but never the details. Generally speaking we need make that decision based on our own idealist perspective on what the profession might offer us, but how many of really did know what we were doing? For many of us it was a quick decision to make, and once made, it cast us in our own job / professional boxes for the duration of the time we spend at school and for years thereafter.

Yes, the decision of what to major on for someone’s undergraduate studies is an easier one to answer if the plan is to go onto law school or medical school or business school or any number of other schools where one is getting a Masters and/or PhD... Still the decision to know what to major in should be a lot harder to make than what it is. Every decision we make has it’s on set of consequences, both intentional and unintentional and what happens next in our lives when we enter the work force is influenced by the decision we made at a young age.

Deciding on your first job when you leave university also can have a profound effect on the way you chart your future success. Of course to get there, chances are you were reduced to being an electronic document where you indicated your grades and accomplishments and maybe your life’s goals and desires. You were no longer the “you” that your friends knew, the “you” reflected by your social network, the “you” your professors knew. In the end, you got reduced down to being a number which got scored and compared against and eventually, you got notified about the opportunity to interview for the job you thought you were interested in.

Once you get that job, be in accounting, law, investment banking, it is expected that you have to “put in your time”, “pay your dues” and then after hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours of what can feel like meaningless work, you are given a chance to apply your brains and something that you actually learned in university. And while this is an extreme case, and everyone’s mileage will vary, it is something that does happen to a number of people.

http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/007693.html