Class of 2013: Don't Sweat Your First Job

When I went to college in the 1970’s, like the vast majority of students at the time, I believed that the college experience would allow me to explore what really interested me. Each year for the last 40 years UCLA polls incoming freshmen aspirations, attitudes and expectations. The UCLA polls indicate that for decades, like me in the 1970’s, a student’s primary goal was to find a meaningful philosophy of life and secondarily to get a good job.
As the economy worsened in the 2000’s there has been a dramatic shift in college student’s attitudes. Students are clearly now placing a premium on getting a good first job.

In the 2012 survey “to make more money” surpassed “to gain a general education and appreciation of ideas”.
I graduated from two Liberal Arts colleges, St Catherine University and the University of St. Thomas. I loved math when I went to college and intended to be a math major. I took an elective programming class and found my real passion. We didn’t have a Computer Science major, but I took every Computer Science class that was offered. Since I had no idea what I would actually do after graduation, I packed in a second major in Business Administration, Management. I found ‘what interested me’.
I was fortunate (and relieved, given my student loans) to get a well-paying job on graduation. My first job was as a systems analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. I held this job for a little over a year before I resigned to start my software company, Open Systems.
Given the shift in attitudes of both students and parents, there will likely be way too much focus on this first job. I quit my first job and went from a great salary to almost zero. But I now had a really great job and the one I really wanted; an entrepreneur. While it looks on paper like my liberal arts education specifically prepared me for my long career in software, it did more than

that. It helped me develop critical-thinking skills, problem solving skills and the love of new ideas. I developed a life-long seduction to learning. And as a venture capitalist for 24 years, my career has become the business of ‘new ideas’.
As graduates of liberal arts colleges, while the majors that you have chosen may have an initial impact on how much money you make in your first job; the learned skills of critical thinking, problem solving and openness to new ideas as a life-long learner can lead you successfully through a long term career path.
Never before have so many learning tools been at your fingertips. I speak with many young graduates of St. Thomas and other liberal arts colleges. I was one of the few, if only girls, in many of my college math and computer science classes. I am always trying to encourage college girls to at least take a few programming classes.
But even today while about 57 percent of bachelor's degrees go to women, the percentage of computer science degrees earned by women is in the low double-digits. I’m elated to see many of these recent graduates flock to organizations like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It and Black Girls Code. These great organizations and the many on-line learning classes are zeroing in on the gender gap in technology with programs that give women and girls, who graduated as life-long learners, technical training and fun support networks.
While many will look at your first job as determining the value of your college education, like venture capital investing, the internal rate of return of your education will be over time.
Adapted from my commencement address in the Spring of 2001 at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. What had begun as a significant economic slowdown at the beginning of 2001 became an almost unraveling of the US economy as the events unfolded after September 11 and the following years.
Photo courtesy Ann Winblad

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