Making the Most of College

Foreign. Thanks everyone for joining. It's great to be with you all this evening. I do this pretty regularly and so what I typically do is I'll walk through kind of my story, what got me here, why am I here talking to you tonight, what do I have to say and what's kind of history behind it? We'll walk through as part of the story, some of the high level things that I would encourage you all to do in the college arena. Kind of what matters, some of the things that matter and what don't matter. And then as Susan mentioned, we will open it up to Q and A at the end. So if that works for you, that's what I generally found works best. So with that, let me dive into my story. It's 2005. I'm a high school senior playing one of my final football games. Despite my small hometown in central Pennsylvania having more cows than people, somehow 5,000 screaming fans find their way to our school's football stadium on Friday night. Of course, many are clad in camo just because football attire is not their thing. The sky is dark, the lights are bright, and because this is the conference championship game, somehow my small town football team is on statewide television. It's the fourth quarter and only minutes left in the game. My team is on defense, desperately trying to hang on to our one point lead so that we can go to the state tournament. We finally force a fourth down at our own 17 yard line. The opposing team's field goal kicker runs onto the field and this Guy nailed a 35 yarder earlier in the game so everyone is expecting him to to make this attempt and if he makes it, we're certain to lose. Now, despite being one of the slower guys on the team, I'm tasked with blocking the opposing team's game winning field goal attempt. So I line up opposite this 300 pound corn fed monster in front of me who looks like with one outstretched arm is going to send me flying into the snack bar. But during that moment, I recall what my coaches taught me about rushing a field goal attempt to get a half second head start. They said start rushing when you see the forearm tense of the person hiking the ball and not when the ball moves. And that's good for me because my short stocky legs can use all the help that they can get. As I step up to the line, I watch the forearm tense and the ball is hiked. And because of my good game plan, I get a quick jump off the line. I rush around the big guy in front of me, get just enough of my fingertips on the ball to block the kick. We win the game, the crowd goes crazy, and after the game, an 8 year old comes up to me with a Sharpie and a miniature football wanting my autograph. For one Friday night in a small town in central Pennsylvania, I'm a celebrity and life is good. I come away from this game believing that if I just follow the game plan given to me, things will always end up so well that I'll feel like a celebrity. And as an 18 year old looking to launch his adult life, I believe college works this way too. One year later, I'm at college determined to get a premier job in finance. Or according to my more pretentious business professors, finance. My professors tell me that with good grades I can get whatever job I want. My parents seem to believe this assessment as well, and also tell me that good grades are the ticket to my future success. My friends seemed to agree too, since this is what their parents and professors told them. As a result, the game plan for college success, it seemed, was to achieve a high gpa. Now, according to this game plan, that high GPA would land me a great job. And a great job meant that I could buy a big house and a fancy car. Everyone seemed to agree that this was a good game plan, not just in college in particular, but to life in general. So I set off to college to execute this gameplay, which meant studying really hard. Now, to optimize study time, each morning I fill my backpack with everything required for my day. Four textbooks, two laptops and a bulging backpack heavy enough to tip over a small child. I study more than anyone I know. They say that hard work pays off, and I guess it did for me. I make dean's list every semester, graduating with honors from Penn State University, one of the country's best business schools. So when I get to graduation, I expect that sweet job in finance. I expect to relive that celebrity feeling from the football field only four years earlier. And I expect to get a job on Wall street to deliver exactly what I want. Wall street is where I have my sights set. But by the end of my senior year in college, instead of signing bonuses and six figure salaries, I received no job offers. Zero. I don't even think employers know I exist. I can't believe it. The game plan that everyone said works so well failed. I don't know what to do. But here's one thing I refuse to be. And that's unemployed. So I make a plan. I look around to find out who people consider to be a success. Doctors, or lawyers, it seemed, were the only two options. But I wasn't dealing with blood, so I decided to go to law school. I'm now 22 years old and don't have enough money to pay for law school tuition, let alone guacamole at Chipotle. So I borrow the money and lots of it. I take my first law school loan in the amount of $42,000 for one year. I plan to take out another $87,000 to cover the rest of my law school costs. By my calculations, when I graduate law school, I'll have so much debt that I'll be able to buy a small house instead. I won't own that house. I'll just owe a bank. But that's fine, I believe, since I know that at graduation I'll work at one of those high paying law firms with those marble statues in the lobby and make lots of money. But when I arrive at law school, it's an entirely new experience for me. My teachers are former clerks of the United States Supreme Court, and my classmates are sons of judges. Unlike home, no one here is dressed in camo. I feel like I've been transported to a different planet. However, I don't shy away from challenges. And all I have to do, they say, is study really hard, get really good grades, graduate, and everything will take care of itself. I executed that game plan at Penn State. I thought so. I can certainly execute that game plan in law school as well. Three months later, about halfway through my first year at law school, I received a phone call from Adam, my college fraternity brother. Only about a year ago, Adam and I were in business school together at Penn State. We both dreamed about making it big in finance. We both wanted that same job on Wall Street. But Adam was one of the biggest slackers I knew, which also made him one of the best video game players I knew. Because he played all the time. When he studied, he did just enough to get by. He went to class about as little as one can before a professor considers filing a missing person report. Now, despite not taking college seriously, Adam was magical with people. He's always building relationships, talking with others, and using his connections to intern at new places each summer. Places that, despite my excellent grades, I somehow could never even land an interview. Now, since networking has nothing to do with GPAs, I thought if anyone between the two of us was going to strike it big in finance, it was surely not going to be Adam. So when Adam calls me, I was ready to console him for landing that mediocre job with those mediocre mediocre grades I was sure he was going to get. So about 30 seconds into the phone call, Adam asked me, how's law school going? Not well, I respond. I'm studying 80 to 100 hours per week. I'm taking on lots of debt, and frankly, I don't think my job prospects are any better than they were a year ago. In response, Adam immediately burst into laughter. But I didn't make a joke. He was laughing at me. But after the laughter dies down, Adam goes, I'm here on wall street managing $300 million. I'm killing it. I recoil at Adam's response, thinking to myself, out of all people, Adam is not the one who's supposed to land his dream job out of college. Suddenly, a light bulb explodes in my brain. An aha moment that goes straight to my core. I finally realized what should have been so obvious to me for years. My plan, which was built on gpa, student loans, and a shallow notion of what success means, was not working. How did I miss this? But perhaps the worst part of this surprise was, in fact, that was a surprise at all. Somehow I convinced myself to study 100 hours per week, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, all to chase a job that I had no idea why I even wanted in the first place. At that moment, I didn't feel like someone who had graduated college with honors only a year earlier. I felt like someone punched me in the gut. Eventually, I say goodbye to Adam and hang up the phone, still in disbelief from what just happened. But Adam is at home tonight, enjoying a career that I was sure he would never get. And I'm still at law school, taking on a mortgage worth of student loans with no house to show for it today. There are millions of students across the country right now, just like my former self, Many of these students believe that if they simply follow a very narrow script, namely enroll in college, study really hard and graduate with good grades, they will succeed not only in college, but also in life. Tragically, it's a script has convinced me and millions of other 18 year olds just like me back in the day to take on more than $1.8 trillion of student loans which remain outstanding today. Even more dangerous is a script that portrays college as the golden ticket to a golden life, even though there's much more to college and much more to life. In response to my experience in 2017, I published a book called Hackiversity. Now, within eight hours of launch of Hackiversity, it becomes an Amazon number one new release. And eight days later, with the help of a marketing influencer named Seth Godin. Perhaps some of you have heard from him or about him. He posted a blog to his 1 million followers and then Hackiversity became and Amazon number one bestseller. In Hackiversity, I offer a tactical toolkit for how I believe students should approach college in the new economy. In a sense, hackiversity represents everything I wish I would have known about college day one or freshman year. I call the book Hack Adversity because a hack is to go outside the conventional norms with a particular outcome in mind. A hack rethinks the process. A hack saves time and money. A hack does things differently. So by hacking college, I envision breaking free from this conventional wisdom to focus on what matters most. The tagline to my book is achieve more by doing less. But it's not an invitation to laziness. It's a call to double down on what matters most inside the college arena. It's a call for reducing student loans, it's a call for for obtaining better job prospects, and it's a call for better learning practices. Through hackiversity, I provide a two part framework for how I believe students ought to approach college in this new reality. I have a slide here I will share if you all can see that. Now, here's my framework that I lay out in my book. The first part of the framework encourages students to figure out what to do at college and in their early career. Now that's everything to the left of that center line. Now in the book I lay out the process for how students can effectively and efficiently discover the what in that equation, what they are passionate about, what drives them, and what they are good at before spending $100,000 in four years of their lives guessing at what these answers might be. The second part of the framework shows students how to implement these things, namely what colleges to pursue, what skills to develop, and how to network and study. That's everything to the right of that center line. The big idea is that through this framework, students will discover practical ways to successfully carry out their own college game plan. So what does this mean for all of you? Well, there's so much to say from the book and unfortunately we don't have time to talk about all of it tonight. But allow me to focus on three things for purposes of this event. The first thing I want to talk about tonight is what I call self awareness. So it's the idea of determining who you are, what drives you, what makes you different from others, and where do you want to go. Even though I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. I couldn't answer these basic questions like why I wanted to go work on Wall street or why I wanted to be a lawyer. Now, if you don't know what you want out of college, that's perfectly okay. It took years after law school for me to answer this question. But while it's okay to not know these answers right now, it's not okay to be content with not knowing. You need to start crafting a vision for your future self. That's my encouragement to you and to do that starting today. If you want to be a lawyer, great. Why is that? If you want to be an engineer, awesome. Why is that? Whatever your vision, it's almost guaranteed to change. And that's okay. But changing your vision is very different than having no vision at all. And that's where most people are simply coasting through life and coasting through college with no bigger vision, no bigger purpose for themselves. My encouragement to you is don't let that be you. Now, many of you are going to be tempted to skip this step and think it's a complete waste of time. Many of you just want to know how I can help you get into the best college at the best price. I was there too, and we'll get there in a moment. But disregarding this step is a huge mistake. That's because how you see your life shapes your life. And how you see your life will largely influence what college, what major among many other college factors that you consider. So I'm begging you to please take the self awareness stuff seriously. Now, if you need help unlocking self awareness and crafting a vision for your future self, let me just suggest a few things. One suggestion is to start having experiences and start by working or interning or even taking a gap year. Experiences are one of the best ways to determine what you like, what you dislike. These are things that are critical in establishing self awareness. Another suggestion is to start talking with people. People who know you and can provide insight into how you're wired, what your strengths and what career you may find fulfilling. Another suggestion is to travel. Back in 2014, I rode my bicycle across America, which was an amazing experience, but also provided me with insights that I could never have learned back home. So while your travel doesn't need to be some kind of crazy cross country cycling trip, even a long weekend away can be meaningful. Many of these tactics are referenced in my book and accompanying workbook that I have on Amazon. But my my workbook will walk you through some key exercises to unlock the self awareness. So no matter which tactic you choose, maybe it's some of the ones I mentioned, maybe it's others. Creating space and time to think about what you want out of college is vital. As Warren Buffett says, an idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan. So get a plan. The second thing I'd like to focus on tonight, and frankly, the reason why most people attend workshops like this is the cause selection question. In particular, how people can graduate and perhaps how you can graduate college without student loans the size of a mortgage. If you're wondering how to approach that issue, I would consider three things. My first suggestion at a very high level is to go in state. Virginia State schools provide incredible value and it makes little sense to pay out of state tuition. Beyond that, yes, I went to Penn State. I'm biased. I think Penn State's amazing. I think it's one of the best colleges in the country, even better than Virginia Tech. But it's not that much better. And so there's very little reason why you should pay twice the amount to go to Penn State when you can simply just go in state. My second suggestion is to explore community college. Now Nova in particular has many partnerships with many of Virginia State schools. That means you can go to nova, knock out your pre reqs very cheaply and then transfer into a four year university from where you can graduate same degree, half the cost. My third suggestion is to graduate college in three years. Yes, that's totally possible. In fact, I had a guy on my podcast, I have a podcast. At least I used to do it back in the day. It's called the Hack of a few podcast. He graduated college in two and a half years. But for you to make that happen, for you to graduate early, you'll need to have a game plan. Which is why I started my advice section with Self awareness. So I know that good things come in threes, but let me give you just a bonus here under the college selection question, and that is one which will be kind of a Loudon library first for me. So I've spoken here at the library many, many times. This is the first time that I will put this on offer and that is since the launching of my book. I've assembled a team that has one mission and that is to help students and families graduate debt free from their best fit college. So out of that mission, I founded a company. It's called Find you'd Future. And we built a powerful resource called the College Selector tool. Let me just explain what that is very briefly. The cost Selector tool takes your unique profile, your goals, your financial situation, your preferences, and matches you to the colleges that best fit you, while showing you clear paths to avoid student debt and graduate debt free. Frankly, it's one of the most comprehensive college planning resources available, particularly that I'm aware of. And it's built to empower you to make smarter, more confident decisions about your future. So here's my challenge to you. Before you spend a single dollar on college, you can try out the college selector tool. You can go to our website so findyourfuture.net we have a free version. Sign up and get the free version. But the kind of Loudon Library exclusive that I want to offer tonight is you email Susan after this and you want to access to our premium account, our premium version, it's $400 a year. You can have that for free. I'll give it to you for being here for free and you can get access to it for a year. So just email Susan after this and I will give you the credentials. So that is the college selection section. Now with my third and final thing I'd like to cover under the advice segment here. Here I want to focus on the power of networking and internships. So as I mentioned in my story, my fraternity brother was a master networker. He leveraged his network into an internship which he then leveraged into my dream job. Frankly, our dream job. However, I didn't even have a network and certainly did not land my dream job out of college at least. So many people ask me, kyle, how do I start networking? Many people are just starting out and they have no idea. Here's what I tell them. I say, look, just start close to home. You have parents or you have friends or you have teachers or whatever. Start talking with them and then use your network to start collecting internships. That's the key to this whole thing. You want so many internships that by the time you graduate college, you can provide value. Day one at your job. The key phrase here is relevant work experience. That is the name of the game. You want relevant work experience. That means no training necessary. You can hit the ground running day one of your job. So get out there, start networking and then look for internships through your network. That's what Adam did. That's the opposite of what I did. So in conclusion, let me just wrap this up here. Students need a game plan that actually works for college and actually works for their early adult life. The game plan given to me by virtually everyone, including many well intentioned people, simply did not work. Yet. It's the same game plan given to virtually every student today. It's creating an entire generation of deeply indebted and deeply discouraged graduates. But my game plan, as I lay out in my book, provides the game plan which I believe actually works in today's world. It's the game plan that I wish I had Day one of freshman year, but did not. My book, hackiversity, along with the accompanying workbook, is available on Amazon, as I mentioned, and in there you'll find the game plan that I learned the hard way. Ultimately, not every game plan will result in an eight year old asking you for your autograph after a football game. Some game plans are good, some are terrible. It took me four years in undergrad and three years in law school and around $150,000 in student loans to learn this lesson. But for those who attend college, the best way I found to do it well and pursue your dreams is not the conventional approach recommended by so many, but rather is my game plan of hacking college. So thank you for listening to me. And with that, I'll stop running my mouth and we can open it up for questions.