Archive for November, 2006
2 posts for the price of 1!!
November 15, 2006Bicentennial Rebuttal
I just found a link on my WordPress Dashboard (Go WordPress! You are my favourite, due to clean minimalist design and good typeface choices.) from a site called Bicentennial Baby. Naked Finances is getting its smelly feet in one of the many doors of The Internet*.
I’ve been quoted. Mis-quoted, actually.**
The article Do What You Love… was highlighted, but the main point was a little misconstrued. Or maybe I just wasn’t clear. For the record: I do not think we should all stop attending university. Puh-leeze. I value my university education more than my library card. (And for those of you who know me, that makes it: priceless.) My strong stance stands at the entrance to liberal arts programs. I value the arts…but, to quote my favourite web comics, Shakespeare got to get paid, son.
* (Dun dun dunhhhhh.)
** {Nonetheless, thanks for noticing Naked Finances, Bicentennial Baby Editor.}
Who’s Your Rich Daddy? (Pt. I)
I have been trying to pinpoint what rubs me the wrong way about the Liberal Arts Glut (LAG, from hereon in) now presiding over higher education. Reading this account of how 5 New Yorkers spend their money refreshed my memory. Scroll down, until you get to the week-long diary of Brian, the Subsidized Grad Student.
Here is someone who could definitely benefit from a thorough reading of The Automatic Millionaire. If you don’t have the time, I’ll boil it down for you (or at least the point I took from it, from my skimming it in the quiet section of the Sunnyvale Library on Sunday). Save money automatically. How? Stop drinking $5 lattes every day. (Coined: The Latte Factor– cute. Too bad I don’t watch daytime television, I’m 2 years late on this post.) Brian seems to have learned his lesson by Sunday, when he spend $13.45 on a pound of Starbucks coffee. (Hey Brian, Costco sells 3-lb bags for $10. I bet a New York City subway/bus combination could get you there.)
Anyway, overpriced coffee is not the thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth… the phrase “subsidized grad student” is. If Brian didn’t have parents footing half the bill for his Manhattan apartment, would he be spending so frivolously? And is his MFA in creative writing ever going to make a good return on investment for his parents? I hope his parents have a very fat nest egg saved for retirement. Otherwise, they have no business softening Brian’s economic landing in the real world. Cut the damn apron strings.
From personal experience (I was 1 of 53 interviewees for a 15 hour/week unpaid internship, and 1 of 8 (that day) in line for a 40 hour/week unpaid year-long internship), I have come to realize a few things. Namely: art jobs don’t pay. Why? Because there are at least 52 people available to do the job you want, for free. How can these people afford to work for free in a city as expensive as San Francisco? Subsidizing –I mean– loving parents, I guess.
Hopefully, most of us LAGs were aware we would not become Automatic Artstar Millionaires with our art degrees, but how many of us signed on without realizing that we would need rich parents or continually inflating debt loads in order to compete with the other aspiring art job-seekers. And are these subsidized art-workers really the best people for the job?
When I was looking for the illustrious coffee-fetching unpaid internship last June, I came across handfuls of Craigslist ads, pleading with people to stop offering their creative skills for free or in trade. I can sympathize. I don’t have rich parents, and I have always worked while in school. However, I finally clued in to what those Craigslist posters were pleading for and stopped working for free. A visit to my previous place of unpaid-employ reassured me that I had been a helpful little gopher during my tenure. There are now three interns on staff, and I had been one of two.
In defending my flavour of Bachelor’s degree, I realize that my art degree has been useful. Without it, I wouldn’t have realized how many art-job hopefuls were out there. I wouldn’t have realized that I needed to start educating myself in something that people are not doing for free, something that is a bit tedious, a bit boring, and not at all cool…Finances—cue the tumbleweeds.
Summing up: an art degree, heck, any degree is a great thing to help you learn how to think. But if you want to land a job—know your market and find a niche. (Hint: the art market is flooded, move on and do it on the side—just don’t call it a hobby. No one who can explain the German expressionist movement should feel compelled to voluntarily call it a hobby.)
Next week: Who’s your Rich Daddy? Pt. II -(Aka: Robert Kiyosaki, eat my shorts)
Okay, Buh-buy.
November 10, 2006Interesting article on Yahoo! Finance homepage today (I just figured out how to make my homepage consist of multiple tabs, and thus, multiple pages, I can Google Finance AND Yahoo Finance, all in one window – Mozilla Firefox, you rock my world, er…I mean The Internet) about Buyer’s Remorse, garbage day, and why we like to buy stuff. Buy buy buy. Buh-bye. (This is how I talk myself out of buying things that I don’t need, in my best David Spade voice as in ‘Buh-bye money’.) So Laura Rowley, you are the Smartie Pants of the Day. Thanks for the great article.
