I don’t know what I want to do, but I know how I want to do it.
My fifth (and hopefully final) year of school is starting in a month, so I am supposed to be thinking about what I want to do when I get out now. I would hardly consider myself a trailblazer, but when it comes to finding work, I’ve never liked the way everyone else I know at school goes about it. The idea of shuffling around at a career fair in a tie and standing in line to hand some recruiter my resume to put on top of a stack of resumes from classmates doesn’t seem very creative or an effective use of my time (or the recruiters, for that matter). That’s no way to distinguish yourself, doing the same thing as everyone else, and isn’t distinguishing yourself what finding a job is supposed to be?
Maybe they already know exactly what they want to do, or they’re happy to work for the same companies that everyone else works for; if that’s what trips their trigger, that’s cool. As my academic career has gone forward, I have found that I have less of an idea of what I want to do for a living, instead of focusing and specializing, I am being introduced to new opportunities every day. Some days, I think it would be neat to be some sort of writer, other days a coder, a web developer, some sort of sysadmin, who knows?
One of the things that reading sites like Brazen Careerist and getting to know all of the people at Conjunctured and Austin Jelly has really made me think about is not what I want to do, but how I want to do it. I envy the independence and freedom that they can work with and the costs that you have to bear as a freelancer don’t seem too bad to me (i.e. irregular/uncertain pay, self-marketing, bookkeeping).
How common is it for college students (engineers in particular?) to move straight from graduation to a career as a freelancer? You see stats all the time about how the graduating class of year X had an average salary of $Y, or you’ll hear about what companies hired a lot of them, but you never hear much about freelancers (or entrepreneurs, unless they’re super-successful).
Comments 4
I don’t know, but I wish I could freelance right out of school. I think it all depends – twenty years ago it wouldn’t have been very plausible, but now, whose to say? Especially because the Internet is so prolific, and especially because you can have free storefronts, or get ad revenue so easily … I guess it all depends on what you want to do.
If you think of any ways, let me know. I’m also reluctant towards the whole career fair thing.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 8:33 pm ¶Oh, forgot to mention – I like the redesign. Very sleek.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 8:33 pm ¶I would imagine that this would be really hard to do unless you already have several existing clients. I’m only about to make the jump to freelance because I’ve been out of school a bit over a year, have few clients already, and landed a major contract job that will provide consistent work (and consistent pay). If you’ve been freelancing throughout college you may be fine, but if you haven’t been done any, I imagine it would be quite hard to do right out of school. I guess you could think of it from the perspective of the client — would they want to hire you without any working world experience, especially over someone who has more experience? I think being in the working world, even for just a year or two, will give you much more of an edge. I may just be on the cautious side, but I’d definitely caution you to only go this route if you’re confident you could get steady work. As a beginner you wouldn’t necessarily get great pay, and then there’s the health insurance issue. I’m all for freelancing, I’m just not sure it’s the best move immediately out of school. That’s my two cents
Posted 19 Aug 2008 at 5:37 pm ¶I freelance / contract. I did not do that right out of school but I should have.
You can do it. You should start before you get out of school, so that you have a client or two, and some things figured out about how to do it.
You can get clients from craigslist or rentacoder or other online places, but it is better to get them via word of mouth from your friends who have real jobs. Keep track of where all your friends end up working, and ask them regularly if their workplace outsources projects.
You can expect, especially at first, to earn less money but have more controll over your life.
Another perfectly legitimate strategy is to look for a real job, keeping in mind you expect to quit after a year or 18 months, and have your ex-employer as your first consulting client. This is a very common pattern. If you do this, you don’t want to have your first job be for a very large bureaucratic company, because it will be hard to get contracts with them. Focus on companies that are mid size, large enough to be financially stable but small enough that single owner or a few key players can decide to let you continue working on a contract basis.
Do not make the mistake of underpricing yourself. Charge money like you were going to work only 8 hours a week, and you still need to cover rent. I am serious.
Posted 02 Sep 2008 at 6:56 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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