Premature Googler

Hey peeps,

I have a friend who is 15, going on 16 in March, and am asking on here, after reading the other post posted earlier about day jobs, about your suggestions for a future career.

This guy is a whiz on the computer, I mean he made http://www.gorkite.com and is currently making http://www.prolongboards.com, with ease. He is in his his last year at school and is looking to either , after completing the year:

1: quit school totally and live off making websites and income from some websites he has now
2: stay on to do A level for 1 year or two then quit
3: stay on for A level and then goto University, which is his least favourered choice.

He has a very good business head, selling over £900 of stuff on ebay each month!!

Thanks in advance

 

He has a good website, he should keep selling.

He can monetize his site by asking his buyers to leave feedback on the item they used. Monetizing the feedback pages can bring in extra income on top of the sale already made.

 

Little to nothing will beat an education in my eyes...

 

Go to university... nothing beats good knowledge, he may earn a nice buck now (especially compared to his class mates), but he may regret it for the rest of his life: also I don't think this would make a great career on the long run... He has to be a real genius to survive without any formal education apart from high school... his sites are nice but nothing special to say: just quit school! A good business school will always be handy...

 

Granted, I'm coming from an american educational background, but it occurs to me that if he wants to be a web entrepreneur, there are courses he's going to want/need.

Like what?

Well, a bit of accounting, statistics, marketing, some higher-level tech stuff like sql, ruby, .net, php, etc.

So many "old" (30-something) guys like me are wishing we had the opportunity to drop everything for a year or so to learn these valuable skills to further our "web empires".

 

He should quit school, because his web business or something else can be good for some years, but drop without warning. Then what? You can start a new business, but it's safer to have something you can hold on...

 

Thanks for the replies guys

 

He should do what he is doing and work to educate himself in it while he is doing it. There is nothing like the real world to motivate. He can always go back full-time or part-time later with money in his pocket, experience in his head and motivation in his heart. I can see no reason why he should take the backward step of returning to the classroom.

 

Stay in school, and learn how to run his web business even better. major in development or something similar, and minor in business. 4 years later he comes out with a head start on a whole lot of people.

 

Not to mention that he can develop sites while he's in school, and by graduation time, they should all be well established and potentially great money makers.

 

If you can learn by doing, why waste $thousands on having some professor tell you how to do it?

If I were him, I would run my own business for a while and then see where I needed more training or felt I was weak, OR where I had an interest and go to college to get trained in that. As far as regular development and business is going, he is doing fine and is well out of debt.

The other way of looking at it is that if he develops a great business, he could think of going back later to study something he was simply interested in that has no particular business or career value. Most people do this round the wrong way - study something of no career value (history etc.) out of interest or lack of another alternative idea, get into debt and then wonder what they are going to do for the rest of their lives.

My big question is, "Why do we in the affluent West see education as an end in itself?" I would say it is not, and it is an easy way to waste many years of life and a lot of money if you follow the education escalator (school -> college -> graduate school) without a real plan or purpose, which is what many, many young people do. I was there. I did that. It was only after college that I discovered my real interests. Fortunately, college education in the UK was virtually free at that time, but alas those days are long gone.

 

Now I see that I wrote "he should quit". As you can see, my idea was to write "he shouldn't quit". Damn, I must be very tired!

Try to do both things. You can study, and take care of medium size sites. I know it's hard, because I did the same. You just need some balance

 

personally i went to uni for about 8 months the social life was good but i came out after 8 months owing 3k and i lived at home, ok i didnt work but to me it was a waste of time and money, the people i met will never be as good as my friends ive had for years, so my advice would be if he has friends already then to work at home £900 a monthis great, ok not all profit but its not bad, then any other money from aditional sites plus selling them he will be on a good wage, however if he doesnt have that many friends then i would suggest at the very least college (the reason im going on about mates is i lived abroad for 6months) and life without friends can be very lonely because at some point you wont need to work, personally though i fi could do what hes doing i wouldnt even contemplate college or uni

 

stephenmunday , all I can say to that is "Youth is wasted on the young".

I'd give my eye teeth for the opportunity to go take courses in all the business/accounting/web dev that it will take me years if not a decade to master on my own. Why don't I? Well, life happens. I can't drop everything and tell my kids, "sorry, no supper this year while I play at being a starving student."

This stuff is far easier to get on with when you are young and have no commitments.

BTW, education is not an end in itself. It is about learning skills that enable you to do what you want and need to do. Preferrably as quickly and painlessly as possible.

 

lol Mister Tut are you by any chance a worker in the education system??

 

My mom is a kindergarten teacher, does that count?

 

I see what you mean, Mr. Tut. My point is not to rush into education, but think about what you want and need to do and why to do it. Of course, also considering future family etc. commitments is a good idea if you are thinking about putting it off further. I would suggest that the guy in question should think about making a decision about his further education when about 21 or 22 when he would have a good experience of the world, know what he wants out of the system and still be free enough from commitments to take the time out. I personally decided to do a full-time masters in Japanese when I was 27 as I knew it was then or never, and I also thought it would be very helpful in my career. And so it has (largely) proved to be.

I agree that sometimes education is not an end in itself. My point is that for 18 year-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives and just drift into higher ed because it is the middle class thing to do, it is a waste of their time and money, and they only do it because of the social pressure that says that any kind of education must be intrinsically good.

 

On that we can agree.

 

I also agree... I must say that I didn't learn much useful things in me Computer Science degree. I would have learned much more with a connection to the internet, and a bunch of ideas, but as you said, the social pressure, and the necessity of having something of a safety net for the future, was stronger...