Last week, someone forwarded me a 2011 article about a former Collegewise student who’s now a computer engineer with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Two gamblers who’d found and exploited a bug in video poker machines had taken Las Vegas’s casinos for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He investigated and solved the case in a story that not only made national news, but also led to an industry-wide overhaul to patch the video poker machines’ programming.
Updates like these are always fascinating for me because I still have a crystal clear memory of this engineer as a bright but introverted seventeen-year-old high school student who showed up at our offices with only a casual interest in computers and not the faintest idea what he wanted to do with his life.
I share his story here because while his dramatic takedown of the Vegas scammers is certainly atypical, his story of how he arrived at his career is not. He used his time in college to identify an interest (computer engineering) and to pursue it to a healthy extreme. According to his LinkedIn profile, he doesn’t seem to ever have had trouble finding a job even as a fresh college graduate. And today he’s flourishing in his career.
He didn’t get here by taking a career aptitude test back in high school and then drawing an imaginary straight line to his future. He was just a smart, hardworking kid who took full advantage of opportunities college presented to him. That was enough for him to take it from there.
Some teenagers know exactly what they want to major in and what they want to do as a future career. But many more do not. I’ve always believed this uncertainty is normal, no cause for parental alarm, and not something that should be discharged prematurely by forcing a college applicant to commit to a future path.
College is a significant investment of time and money, and I don’t think any student should attend without at least considering what they want to learn and accomplish. I can’t imagine a rational person would invest as much as $150,000 on any experience with no idea at all what they hope to get out of it.
But certainty isn’t a requirement for success during or after college. Even if you have no idea where you want to go, your curiosity, work ethic, character, and grit will turn you into a future sure thing.