by: Joan Ramirez

So many people talk about what is wrong with teaching today. I am going to tell you what is right. Last year, I completed my student teaching in a wonderful elementary school in New York City with several exceptional special education students in the third grade. One in particular has a stuttering problem and felt uncomfortable every time he had to talk in front of the class. In addition, he has test phobia in math. He tried several times to take a subtraction/addition test and quit after he was only half way through. On the fourth try, I told him that his dream of becoming a policeman will never come true if he can’t do math operations. He thought about it and finished the day. On the fifth try, he started the test, got frustrated, and was ready to quit–partly because he was so upset about his stuttering during response time earlier in the day. I told him to breathe deeply, think positive, and focus. He kept going. When he handed in his paper, he turned to me and said, “I tried harder this time, Mrs. Ramirez. I didn’t quit.”

That made my day. I helped a child to learn. A precious gift.

On another day, I worked with a boy who wears an FM device and is very self-conscious because of same. In addition, he is small in size for his age and self-conscious in gym. When I worked with him on math problems, he told me that he likes to learn but wants to be like everyone else. I told him that each of us has special gifts to offer, and we are all special in our own way. Little by little, I drew him out of his shell. Before long, we were partners on a math team and competed against two other kids. After a while, he picked someone his own age to be his teammate. However, I told him that I would always be there if he needed me. Again, it was great to see a child flourish in learning through positive support.

My third encounter was a recent assignment in a school in New Jersey with a middle grade young girl who told me of her desire to be a songwriter. With limited English, she composed a song that spoke of her feelings on life in middle grade. She also told me that she has composed many other songs. I told her to keep on writing. Before the end of the day, she sang a little of the song to me. As I was about to take the children to their parents, she handed me a card. When I arrived home, I read the message: “Dear Mrs. Ramirez, Thank you for listening to me. You are a patient and great teacher. Someday I hope to sing you my finished work.”  I gave her my email and encouraged her to keep on going.

These are but a few of the wonderful encounters that I have had as a teacher with creative minds yearning to achieve.

In the fall, I hope to have my own class to nurture and encourage and share the successes that I’ve had in my professional life. To teach, as the saying goes, truly does touch and change, for the better, another life.

A book review by Adrienne Rodney

In 2005 I borrowed $60,000 to take 12 classes in an 18 month master’s degree program in Journalism at Boston University.

Now my boss is paying for me to take writing classes taught by professional writers at Gotham Writer’s Workshop for $395 a class – that is 92% less than the $5000 cost of a BU course.

For more than a decade I will be paying off debt for a master’s degree that has proven to be neither a requirement for, nor guarantee of, getting a job. In my current job my boss is paying for writing courses that will improve the articles I write for No Shortage of Work – a direct link between my education and employment.

Now I find that there are free writing courses, not just cheaper ones, In her book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz discusses the ways we can educate ourselves without going into debt. More people are choosing alternatives to four year universities, such as online and for-profit schools, while others are taking advantage of the free courses universities offer on their Web sites.

The Open Courseware Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers video, audio and lecture materials from their 1,900 courses. MIT pays up to $15,000 in development costs to put each course online for free, and they’re not all science related. I can take courses in creative writing, anthropology, and Chinese. Other schools such as Tufts and UC Berkeley offer courses which can be found at the Open Courseware Consortium.

Teachstreet.com is an online community for people who love to learn a variety of subjects and Unclasses.org connects students with teachers on anything from graphic design to rock climbing. DIY U lists these and hundreds of other resources for free universities, work colleges, and study aids which we’ve put up on our Resource Links.

Kamenetz’s goal is not to discourage people from attending college, but to encourage parents and prospective students to research their options and understand what they are paying for. While a degree is necessary for a career in medicine, you don’t need any degree to be a journalist.

Anya Kamenetz wrote another book, Generation Debt, detailing the negative effects the rising costs of education are having on the younger generations. I asked what we can do to stay out of debt, and she offered some advice for those looking to go to school but aren’t sure how to pay for it.

Unfortunately it {debt} is all too common. There are lots of great sources of information out there on the costs of higher education and dangers of student debt, from the Project on Student Debt (http://projectonstudentdebt.org/)  to Finaid.org to Student Loan Justice (http://www.studentloanjustice.org/)  to the National Center for Education Statistics (the federal source for higher ed information), which has a great College Navigator search engine that includes expected student costs, graduation rates, and cohort loan default rates – the percentage of students from that school who end up defaulting on their loans.

Good information about the benefits of a graduate degree is harder to come by. I wish everyone who was thinking of applying to graduate school, whether business school or journalism school or the humanities or MFA programs, would reach out through their social networks and talk to at least one person who managed to make it in their chosen field who did NOT go to graduate school, or did not complete it. As a person who didn’t go to journalism school, I would have lots of advice about how to succeed in journalism without that degree.

Kamenetz also has advice for adults past college age who want to embrace the do-it-yourself educational movement.

I have one suggestion. The next time you need to caulk your bathtub or program your DVR or make a birthday cake, the first step should be to go to YouTube and type in “How to…” and the task you are looking for. Chances are you will find dozens of videos with step-by-step instructions to learn how to do the task yourself. Or think about reaching out to your existing social network: post a Facebook status update or a Twitter update and say, “Hey, anyone out there have experience with…” These are very simple ways to adopt a DIY attitude while leveraging the vast amounts of resources that are already there for you.

Reminder: The resources Kamenetz lists in DIY U can be found on our Resource Links.

Watch Anya talk about the DIY movement in higher education at the TED conference in Atlanta:

And They’re Coming to Teach You Things You Need to Know
By: Victoria Goldenberg

Could No Shortage of Work (NSoW) have existed 20 years ago? The costs in time, money and labor to gather and direct members and run a publication might not have justified the modest and seemingly unrealistic ends of encouraging people to work for free. But now that the Internet is widely accessible, setting up the NSoW Web site was relatively inexpensive and easy. More important, communities commonly assemble around Web sites without anyone organizing them. The formerly difficult task of finding people and directing them to collaborate on meaningful work now happens organically, as those who share NSoW’s philosophy participate in the community on their own.

NSoW exemplifies the behavioral shift New York University professor Clay Shirky analyzes in his engaging book Here Comes Everybody (2008, Penguin Books). He describes a compelling variety of cases, from charming Livejournal and Meetup groups to flash mob protests against the government in Belarus, to illustrate how ordinary people are taking the reins and using new tools, such as cell phones and blogs, to organize themselves.

Mr. Shirky stresses that technology itself hasn’t changed the world, but the ways people adopted it have. He cites people who took photos of Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade and posted them to the photo-sharing site Flickr under one name, so people could view all the pictures in one place. Prior to 2005, parade attendees hadn’t pooled their photos, but they’ve changed their behavior because of access to a service that makes it simple. At the same time, the photo-takers organized the pictures themselves, without supervision from Flickr or the parade’s sponsors. By coming together, the photographers created a new, valuable resource for the public.

What’s most appealing about Here Comes Everybody is that it resists exaggerating the Internet’s democratizing power and takes a realistic, contextual approach. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that new media and behaviors do not render older institutions useless, (such as newspapers and commercial developers of operating systems), but they do decrease their relative influence. I especially liked the chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” which compared the effects of mass amateurization of journalism to the popularizing of the printing press, noting how it ends professional publications’ monopoly on the news just as the printing press ended scribes’ monopoly on publishing.

I spoke with Mr. Shirky by phone to discuss how No Shortage of Work can challenge people’s assumptions and encourage working for free, rather than not working at all.

“Whenever the digital sharecropper hypothesis comes up—why are all these people working without pay?—the answer is: That’s the wrong question. The idea of working for free assumes there’s this normal case in which you only do something if you get paid, and then there’s this pathological case in which you do things because you like them. That is a legacy of neoclassical economics that assume we’re all self-interested and isolated, rational, maximizing actors. One of the observations I’ve made recently is that one reason these behaviors are so surprising to us is because our previous explanations for human behavior were so lousy. We all do things for free all the time and we don’t even experience them as being for free.

“I think the surprise has been that we’ve believed that intrinsic motivation—things we do because we like them—is inherently limited to the private sphere, basically hearth and home.

“The intrinsic motivation can take place in the public sphere now. We just needed a medium to make that possible. The value of people working, full stop, is basically the value of making yourself happy. It’s a value that’s indivisible to other things.”

He also discussed whether communal learning might decrease the higher education system’s relative importance in the job market:

“Given that the premium of college education offers on the job market is now being leveled out, we’re clearly going to see a rise of lower-cost attempts to deliver the value of a college education.

“We may be in one of those times where people say, ‘demanding a four-year college degree for the training I need for this job doesn’t make sense anymore’. There have certainly been enough observations about the economic disadvantage of four-year education that people are willing to consider it, but it’s not going to be a general social change. Probably some industry will shift away from demanding a four-year degree pro forma to figuring out when it matters and when just having the skills training is enough.”

Shirky described how he learned skills such as computer programming from online communities and how this valuable method of learning can be invisible:

“I think it’s telling about the social piece that we don’t have any middle word between ‘I went to an accredited institution and got formal learning’ and ‘I am self-taught’ to reflect the way a lot of people learn these things which is, ‘I joined a community that knows and cares about the subject I care about, and I learned it there.’

“The language doesn’t yet give us a way to reflect on being communally taught as opposed to institutionally taught.”

No Shortage of Work is a venue for communal education. By participating in it you can learn from the pros, outside of a formal setting, and work to build vital job skills—or just for the joy of it.

A DISCUSSION WITH BILL BLACK.

by: Brooke Allen

William Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-07. Bill is an outspoken critic of our regulators, banking, and business leaders. You may have caught him on Bill Moyer’s Journal, or in his congressional testimony where he stressed accountability and the fact that elites refuse to accept responsibility.

I recently attended a conference on institutional decision making and group behavior. Many academics presented experimental results and mathematical models to explain how we make bad decisions. Yet, when I asked about the role morality plays in individual decision making, I was told that little research has been done and therefore there was not much that can be said about the topic.

So, I called Bill Black. I caught him at a conference run by the Gruter Institute for Law and Biology.

Brooke: You coined a term, “control fraud.” Could you tell us what that is?

Bill: Yes, control fraud is when the people that control a seemingly legitimate entity, whether it is private, non-profit, or governmental, use it as a weapon of fraud.

Brooke: There seems to be a lot of that going on now.

Bill: Yes, way too much. And the FBI just announced that property crime had fallen to yet another all-time low, because we don’t count serious white collar crime. None of the major things that cause massive losses are even counted. And, if you don’t count it, at the end of the day, it doesn’t much exist [as far as they are concerned].

Brooke: I recently sat next to a young soldier coming back from Afghanistan; a wise man at age 20. I asked him, “What have you learned?” And he said, “I have learned to make apologies, not excuses. If your gun jams because you have not maintained it, and your buddy gets killed because you can’t cover him, you have to apologize to his widow, and it is not your gun jamming that caused his death.”

He also said, “I now see my country as a nation that cannot apologize, and that is full of excuses masquerading as reasons.”

How can we be excused just because we haven’t modeled morality mathematically therefore we can’t know anything about it? This young man knows something about it.

Bill: Brigadier S. L. A. Marshall found that small unit cohesion was the absolute key. You will do astonishing acts of bravery for your little group, and you will do it for members of your group who you actually hate. And they’ll do the same thing for you.

What you see from our elites is an almost complete unwillingness to take responsibility. We even have all these flakey apologies. To take the soldier’s statement, when he apologizes, he doesn’t say, “I am sorry if you have interpreted my comments in a manner that caused you distress,” which is the standard non-apology apology that people use today that puts it on you; there must be something flawed about you that led you to take offence at your husband being shot down because my gun jammed.

Brooke: I have an MBA in Finance, and I took an ethics class, which was all about how to stay legal, and not about ethics. The strongest impact for me was in a course called Managing Organizational Behavior where we talked about the Milgram Experiments. [A series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, where he showed that most people would go so far as to give people an apparently lethal shock when instructed to do so by an authority figure.] These experiments were presented in class as things that couldn’t be repeated again. We are obligated to mention them, but don’t worry about them because we can’t repeat the experiment. But, isn’t that experiment repeated all the time? I had a hard time sleeping after that because I saw it in all our behavior. It was not Germans in Germany who did what they did in World War II, but humans, just like the rest of us, and we are all capable of that. That, combined with small unit cohesion (you fight for your buddies, not your cause) is a combination that is extremely powerful and scary, isn’t it?

Bill: It’s weird, but I had the same experience. That is the single scariest thing I have ever watched in my life, and of course, I have seen much more horrific, graphic, violent things that are real – and that was an experiment. My fear was, my god, what would I have done? I know what I hope I would have done, but after you see that film, you have to wonder. [He continued with a discussion of the Stanford Prison Experiments.] That’s why you have to have immense restrictions on abusing people you have made powerless, because it is such a human thing to abuse them.

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Perhaps psychologists consider running the Milgram experiments to be unethical these days, but reality TV producers do not. In 2006, a British TV station produced a show called The Heist in which illusionist, Derren Brown, began with 13 businessmen and women, and was able, in just two weeks, to persuade four of them to commit what they believed to be an authentic armed robbery. As part of the show, he reenacted the Milgram experiment as a test to identify his four most obedient participants. Darren got the same results Milgram did in 1963: over 50% of the subjects administered what they believed to be lethal shocks simply because a man in a white coat told them to. You can watch a report on the TV show here.

_____________________________________________________

Brooke: Are business schools doing a good job of teaching ethics?

Bill: When I am in a dispirited mood, I refer to them as “fraud factories.” They do a miserable job right now. We know empirically that in business schools and econ programs, when people enter they are materially less altruistic than their peers, and we know when they get done with the program, that is even more true. (See a paper by Gintis and Khurana.) So, through self-selection, training, and peer effect, we are turning out people who find it easier to cheat other people and to not care about other people. So, yes, we are teaching ethics, and we’re teaching it effectively, but it should be called “anti-ethics.”

Brooke: So, if you want to get a good ethics education, you should take diligent notes, and then negate whatever you are being told.

Bill: Yes, put a negative sign in front of most anything.

I refer to our prior conversation with Professor Mintzberg of McGill University, in which he said there is a clear moral obligation for colleges to disclose the flaws in their education, but not a legal one. Bill and I continued to discuss how a moral obligation is enough of a reason to refuse to do something that is wrong, and you don’t need to discuss it any longer.

Bill: That’s right. You’re done. Period. It doesn’t matter how fancy you make it, how many excuses you create, you’re done. End of story. It’s off the plate as an option if it’s unethical.

Bill explains how our simple social rules keep most of us from cheating each other. He continues,

Bill: What if you say my job is to maximize return to the shareholders, and, if it is not illegal, and short-term profitable, then am I supposed to do it even when it is immoral? If that’s the rule, then you have just developed a rule that will destroy America.

Brooke: A psychologist friend of mine says that many of her patients don’t have psychological problems; they have morality problems. They want to feel good about themselves while they cheat on their spouses, screw their business partners, or steal from their clients, and if she can’t help them with talk therapy, they want a drug. She says, “They don’t have an emotional problem. The problem is their emotions are working fine.”

Bill: Exactly. The problem is they are not listening to their body. There is something in their system that is telling them that what they are doing is very wrong.

We return to the question of whether ethics can be taught.

Brooke: A fellow applied for a job with me, and I asked if I hire him, could I introduce someone to the job he currently has because I am all in favor of helping improve employment, and when I hire someone away from another employer, I haven’t decreased unemployment, I’ve just transferred my problem to his prior boss.

He said, “I would never recommend anyone to my job because I am asked to do immoral things.”

So, I asked him why he had not quit.

He said, “What are you talking about? I need a job.”

I said, “Let me see if I have this straight. What you are doing is immoral and you don’t think anyone on the planet should do it, but you are willing to do it.”

How does this work? How can I teach someone that, if they have that feeling, they have to stop, and it doesn’t matter if they are getting paid to do it; they have to stop?

Bill laughed: Did he get it, once you talked to him?

Brooke: I might have succeeded in sending this guy home much more conflicted, because he came with an attitude that it was his employer that was causing his problem, and the solution was to get Brooke to hire him. I made it clear to him that he was not qualified to work for me. I said, “If I do something immoral, which can easily happen – I’m deathly afraid of that – I need you to tell me that I am doing something wrong. And if I don’t respond, you need to tell my boss, and Compliance, and if the organization doesn’t respond, you need to quit your job and you have to go to the regulators.” I need that because I do not think I am immune from what Milgram showed.

Bill: You expressed that it was an ethical issue where the individual had deliberately put scab tissue on to make sure he did not internally frame it as an ethics issue. All you can do with a person like that is make the point that they are acting immorally directly to their face, in a naked way, and you did it where there was an actual consequence of his unwillingness to take a moral stand.

Similarly, when you find somebody is unethical and you fire him you need to consider avoiding the advice you get from everyone and give him a negative reference. People have to take a willingness to get sued, and if that can’t work, then as a society, we have to give protection.

We must simply start teaching ethics in our own ponds with our own kids, or own friends’ kids, using our own behavior. You always look, as a parent, for teaching opportunities that are not didactic, so it was always great when someone gave me back too much change when my kids were present, because I simply made sure that they heard me giving it back, and that they were actually paying attention when I did it.

Brooke: Recently, I was on a train and sat with this young woman who is in her second week on the job working for a dubious corporation, that’s to say a large Wall Street firm, but I repeat myself.

I ask her, “What do you do if you are asked to do something unethical?”

She says, “What are you talking about? There are two sides to everything?”

I say, “But what happens when you are on the wrong side? Have you ever taken an ethics class?”

She says, “Of course. It was required. But, that’s what’s wrong with you old people, and how you guys used to be taught, because in our classes, we all get to discuss all sides, and everybody is entitled to their opinion.”

Do you think that is the right way to teach it?

Bill: I’ll give you my interaction with a young person who worked for a law firm who said, “What I like about my firm is that it is really ethical.”

You know, you don’t often hear that, so I said, “Wow, that’s great. How did you learn about that aspect of the firm?”

And she said, “Well, I know that my firm would never do anything against the interests of Israel.”

We both laughed. This would probably distress supporters of Israel, but Bill and I know that you can’t know in advance that Israel will be for all time on the right side of every issue.

Bill: I was dumbfounded. Frankly, I decided my powers of persuasion were probably impossible when dealing with somebody like that. It is bizarre what some people define as ethics.

The young woman you met was taught that ethics disappears because issues are complex, so there is never an answer, and we are not required to seek an answer.

Brooke: Many of our subscribers at www.NoShortageOfWork.com are in the New York area, used to work in finance, and are now unemployed.

One of the things I try to teach, which is probably the most useful thing from economics, is the concept of opportunity cost.

I say that when you’re unemployed, the advantage is that you can do anything because the opportunity cost is zero. You might have to struggle to get people to bid up your price, so it is a good idea to pursue things of value to others.

If you are not working at an unethical firm because you are not working at all, then you are not called upon to compromise your ethics. You will not have to say to yourself, “Oh, my god, if I don’t continue to do this, then I will lose my job, and I won’t have money to send my kids to college where they can take an ethics class.”

Perhaps, if you are on the street without a job, now you have time to reflect on those things.

Bill: That’s right. Reflect. Take the opportunity to read. And teach your children well.

—

Bill Black recommends To Kill a Mockingbird.

What do you recommend? If you have read a book lately of interest to No Shortage of Work readers, let us know. We will even try to arrange for you to interview the author, although I wouldn’t count on getting Harper Lee to take your call.

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A conversation with Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University.

By Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work

“Perhaps business schools should issue recall notices.” These words were spoken last week by Henry Mintzberg, a featured speaker at a Fordham University conference titled, “MBA Under Siege: Reimagining Management Education”

Because I feel my MBA is one of my all-time worst purchasing decisions, I gave Professor Mintzberg a call at his office in Montreal.

I began, “As a hiring manager, I can report that there are lots of recently minted MBAs with upwards of $100,000 of debt, who, as far as I can tell, have no skills or knowledge I’d pay them a dime for. Worse yet, they come with an attitude, and it usually isn’t a good one. Are you saying that business schools have an obligation to tell students when their product is faulty?”

He replied, “There is no question that schools have a moral obligation to disclose, but it isn’t clear that they have a legal one. Toyota has a legal obligation to let people know when they uncover a problem, but the case can be made that schools are not failing all students, and in many cases they add value. I refer to the functional courses in business, not the courses in management, where they do very badly.”

“But, the fact that most Toyotas work just fine does not mean they should cover up a fault in a few,” I said. “Besides, one of the things I hated about my MBA education was that the discussion in Ethics class was about legality, not morality. Isn’t a moral obligation enough of a reason to do something? Shouldn’t universities hold themselves to a higher standard than businesses?”

Mintzberg laughed, “Don’t look for too much morality at most Universities these days. It is popular for academics to make the case that honesty pays, that ‘It pays to be good’ n – not so– it’s a sham. Sometimes, it pays to be bad. Shouldn’t you always do the right thing, whether it pays or not? I’ve written about that in my book, Power in and Around Organizations.”

“In your more recent book, Managers, Not MBAs, you say that businesses are all about making things and selling them, but MBAs don’t study that. Instead they develop a disdain for production and sales.”

“That’s right. Selling is earthy, and business schools don’t do earthy things. Marketing is one-to-many, and it is hard to tell if you are doing a good job. Selling is one-to-one, and there is instant feedback.”

“And rejection can make you feel bad,” I said, “I once took a day-long sales training class that began with the instructor asking each of us why we where there. One fellow said, ‘I want to manipulate people so they will do what I want.’ The instructor took out his checkbook, refunded the $100 fee, and told him to leave. He said selling was about helping people make decisions that are in their own best interest. Then he taught us how to do it. On that one Saturday, I learned more of value than during five years of night classes at N. Y. U. where not once did I see anyone, professor or student, called on the carpet for their ethics or morality.”

He said, “If you want to be a doctor, you should go to Medical School, and if you want to be a nurse, you should go to Nursing School, but if you want to manage in business, you should not go to management school.”

“So, how can someone learn about management if not in school?” I asked.

“Some colleagues and I have created a program called Coaching Ourselves. We provide materials and guidance, but the basic idea is that small groups of people can learn a lot by reflecting on their own experiences, and sharing their thoughts and feeling with others. Rather than send employees to business school, we created an in-house program that helps develop groups of managers for a few thousand dollars, rather than hundreds of thousands.”

I was impressed. “We’ve sent three people in our group for master’s degrees with explicit instructions to report anything they learn that we can use, and they have not reported a single thing. I can certainly imagine it would be much better if we just got together and discussed things in the context of our own circumstances. But what advice do you have for our readers, many of whom are unemployed or working at firms with no education budget whatsoever?”

“They could do Coaching Ourselves by themselves; implement our methodology without us. They would get the benefits of pre-selected and synthesized material, not a person to help, but people can certainly implement these concepts on their own.” Of course, on their own, managers can still get the benefits of reflecting with each other on their experiences, just without the CoachingOurselves content downloaded to stimulate their discussions.

“It may be much more time-efficient for us to buy a solution for our employees, but if my friends and I were unemployed, we’d have more time and much less money, so perhaps we could roll our own. Professor Mintzberg, I, and our readers, thank you for your time.”

“And I thank you.”

It is refreshing to hear a business school professor call it like it is.

- – -

If you would like to join with other NSoW subscribers to learn from each other as Professor Mintzberg suggests, go to our newsletter submission page, and select “Form a Study Group” from the first drop-down menu.

A Review by NSoW subscriber: Ariel Gros-Werter

Charlie Hoehn, in his free on-line e-book, “Recession-Proof Graduate”, outlines how a newly-graduated 22-year-old can become recession-proof, i.e. receive multiple job offers in under a year despite being in a recession.

His plan is fairly simple in essence; reject the old job search methods. Rather, offer “free work” to gain employers’ trust and show your skills, with the understanding that while there is no immediate payoff, you can theoretically do non-paying projects of your choice for companies you like with the hope that after they have come to know and trust you they will create a job for you in their company.

Unlike an internship, Hoehn claims, free work lets you avoid competing with others for advertised internships, and allows you to control your work by offering companies a 1-3 week project that you have thought out for their own benefit. This is ideal for them, Hoehn explains, because they don’t have to think up a project for you or babysit you as you work, and they will accept your idea because there’s effectively no risk on their side – they don’t have to meet you or have you in their office, and since they’re not paying you if they don’t like your work they can reject it and forget it happened.

Hoehn’s idea of free work has both pros and cons. An advantage is that you set your own work schedule (just make sure you complete the project within the deadlines). You choose companies you like, and set your own project parameters so you’re always doing work that’s interesting to you. Furthermore, you will gain great connections and potentially a job if you do quality work.

A negative is that this can be a difficult path; you should only go for it if you can fully commit. Doing unpaid freelance work for months can be difficult. It takes consistent dedication and discipline which is hard for many to sustain without a reward in sight. If you can keep to it, this method may reward handsomely, but before starting on this route carefully consider whether you’re up for the challenge. It can be difficult to focus on unpaid projects for weeks on end when there’s always another job to apply for or other more immediate-gain job-search items on the to-do list.

Additionally, with college loans to pay back, high health care costs, and a desire to immediately move out of parents’ homes to live independently, freelancing for free can be financially draining, while also insecure of rewards (there’s no guarantee you’ll be hired).

Hoehn claims we need to stop thinking we are entitled to a paycheck. I believe that if you are doing work for a company, there should be a benefit, whether monetary or otherwise. You should be willing to work without monetary compensation – not because you don’t deserve it, but because the time working is an investment towards getting a job, gaining experience or a good line on your resume. Hoehn is right that we shouldn’t define work simply as something we do for pay; however when choosing work always consider what benefit you gain, whether monetary, good will, or otherwise.

Free work is much easier to do in some professions and skill ranges than in others. If you are marketing yourself as a website designer, it is simple to send a redone prototype of a company homepage. However, most jobs are heavily administratively-based (in a broad sense of the word) and so are difficult to accomplish without either being in the office or using private company information (which HR may not let you have without a non-disclosure agreement).

Offering to do work for free is a great way to make connections and gain a company’s trust. However, to avoid sounding cocky as if you know what the company needs better than an employee of 20-years, offer your project idea as a suggestion only while putting the main emphasis on helping with whatever will be most useful. This unfortunately may result in not working on projects you are interested in, but will succeed in the main purpose of gaining the company’s favor.

Hoehn is dead-on that as a recent graduate, skills are key. Experience is certainly a plus, because working professionally is different than doing college work, but employers want to see you can work in an office environment at the bottom of the hierarchy. More important than experience, employers want to know you have the skills to do the job and can learn the rest. However, it is hard to prove ability without showing it, so decide which skills you need to prove and figure out other ways to showcase them, be it writing samples or community event planning or designing your own webpage.

It is necessary to have something to show for your job-searching time. I was asked at two interviews, “what have you been doing?” That, I learned, was not just a question of how I pass my time. The interviewer wants to know that I am enhancing my skills and maintaining my focus.

It is even better to have material results of what you have accomplished, both for the interviewer and for your own mental confidence. Nothing is worse than feeling you’ve wasted months with nothing to show for it. Volunteer or learn a language; do something that you can look back on and see results. Better yet, find an activity to do everyday or 3-4 times a week to maintain a sense of regularity in your life.

Hoehn suggests it is cheaper and more useful to skip grad school and gain knowledge from experience or reading. While in some professions having a Masters degree may not be as important as having the knowledge, it may be hard to get the experience needed to gain knowledge without a higher degree. This is also highly dependant on the professional field in question. In some fields, having the degree is less important while in other professions a higher degree is necessary to advance beyond low-level jobs, such as in research and public health.

Hoehn comments on controlling your web presence. Start a blog, create a LinkedIn account and join other groups, anything so that a Facebook page with drunk photos won’t be in the first 3 entries if a potential employer does a Google search of you. If you can’t delete it, hide it. College may be in the past, but it can still haunt you. Having a well-written blog pop up allows you to show off your writing skills while also displaying a human side amidst a sterile job application process. I suggest this be started long before graduation. A blog is most credible when it’s been maintained for months, so start early and cut the dead-time.

Hoehn’s article presents interesting ideas for a recent college graduate. However, his ideas do not apply to everyone. His concept of free work is golden for some professions and skills, but is impractical for others. It can also be extremely difficult to maintain the needed discipline for months. However, offering to work for free is a great way for a recent college graduate to gain a company’s favor. It is one option for a regular activity and something to show for time spent job-searching. Additionally, do things which display your skills, which are often more important than experience. Lastly, control your web presence to present yourself professionally on the internet.