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comment by caeli
caeli  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: High school graduate here, I'm stuck on figuring out what to do with my life!

To be honest, if you're completely unsure of what you're interested in, I'd suggest not even going to community college when there are so many free online courses are available. I'd suggest taking a couple of online classes that seem interesting - Coursera is great and has a huge selection of topics. Devote as much free time as you can to this and see if there's anything you really love, and if there is, then research the shit out of what careers you can go into in that topic!

Don't let people pressure you into going back to school. As long as you're able to support yourself for now, you don't need to be in any kind of rush. You might even discover that you don't need too much more education for whatever you want to go into.

In short, take it slow and figure out what interests you. You're young and have plenty of time!





Grimdark_Rainbow  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks! I'll check out the site. This is great advice!

caeli  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are a bunch of others too. I've heard Udacity is good, but it's restricted to programming. There are also a bunch of good sites for learning programming (I like codeacademy for quickly learning the syntax of a language).

MIT OpenCourseware has almost every course they offer, but a lot of them don't have video lectures (which I find to be the most useful part of courses!). Stanford also has some of their classes online, but I think they're slightly different from the MIT ones and be designed for being online IIRC.

I have another piece of advice on this front. I've found that it's very difficult to stay motivated with online classes since there's no real incentive to put in the work. So you might want to set up some sort of weekly "class schedule" to keep yourself motivated and on track. Picking a time where you force yourself to work on the class (even getting out of the house & going to a coffee shop/library if necessary) makes it easier to finish out the class.

besthubris  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I did the Udacity programming course, and I found it really helpful. I was in high school at the time, but I could pick it up at night and it felt really low pressure.

The coffee shop atmosphere can be surprisingly conducive to productivity, and you can meet some interesting people. I've gotten into a lot of good discussions about writing style by reading my book at a coffee shop instead of at home.

Grimdark_Rainbow  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's what happened in my online course in High School. No incentive besides "get it done so you can graduate". Thanks again!