It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. Am I off-base about the value of a college degree “just in case”?
I hope you can help me set up my high school junior for success and happiness in her work life. She’s very academically gifted, so her grades and test scores will help her have her choice of colleges. The potential careers she has identified so far are pastry chef or fashion/costume design, which can be great careers, but aren’t always a reliable source of stability and security.
Her dad and I have said we’ll pay for culinary school if she gets a four-year degree first, and we support her looking for colleges with apparel/costuming programs. We just want her to have the option to do a desk job if she ever wants to, and it’s so much easier to get corporate jobs if you can check that “college degree” box!
I told her if her bliss means doing creative work for a living and potentially dealing with the challenges that come with less income, that is great! But I don’t want her to be stuck without options to do more traditional office work if she wants to. (I know I’m much happier to trade my labor for a generous paycheck and then spend it on my beloved hobby than to try to make a living at my hobby!)
Are we off-base about the value of a college degree “just in case?” I don’t want to be like the parents from a movie about someone who loves dance/poetry/art and is forced into the family business instead!
You are not off-base! This is a very good plan. Not only for the reasons you said, but also because it’s incredibly common for what people want out of their careers to change as they get older and tons of people have found themselves wanting to pursue different paths than the ones they were thinking about at age 17. And of course, she could always get a degree later if it turns out she wants one — but for most people it’s much easier to do it at this stage of life (when most of their peers are doing it, when our society is set up to better support people in doing it, and when she has financial support from you, and when doing it now means it’ll be behind her as she launches her adult life). And the reality is, her path is life is likely to be easier if she has a degree, rightly or wrongly.
You’re not squashing her dreams; you’re offering to pay for culinary school afterwards, and you’re trying to give her more options, not fewer. It’s a good plan.
2. A student isn’t addressing my feedback on her work
I’m currently a graduate student and I also do research in a science lab. Part of my job in this lab is reading papers by undergraduate students and giving them feedback on these papers. There was one student in particular last semester who asked me for a lot of feedback on her papers. She is a good writer and I do enjoy reading her work, but she does something that’s particularly annoying sometimes: I’ll give her feedback, and she’ll hand me back her paper to review again and will have not accounted for this feedback. Because I work closely with her I’m fairly accessible and so if she has questions she’s always welcome to come and ask me about what I’ve said. But I’m getting really tired of reading her papers over and over again seeing these same mistakes and having to point them out again and again.
I used to be an undergrad student who was once in her position, too. From my own experiences, I know how discouraging and hurtful it is to have someone tell you, “I don’t see the point of helping you with this if you aren’t going to take my feedback.” I know she is trying her best, and I don’t want her to feel how as hurt as I did when I got this feedback. I do want to make her understand that I do put in a lot of time to read her papers and I want to know that my feedback is being taken seriously (e.g., if she doesn’t understand or agree with something I said, she should come and talk to me about it). What is a kinder way to communicate these sentiments?
When she gives you a paper to review a second time without having taken your feedback from the first review, say this: “I noticed you didn’t incorporate my feedback from the earlier draft. What was your thinking there?”
Start there because you want this to be a conversation. She might have good reasons for not taking some of the feedback (like she considered it but decided she disagreed or it wasn’t in sync with what she was trying to do). If that’s the case, you can say, “You don’t have to take all my feedback, but when you ask me to review something a second time, can you flag any feedback you didn’t take and note what your thinking was? Otherwise I don’t know if you missed the comment the first time and I should repeat it, or if it’s something else.”
But if it becomes apparent that she’s just missing the feedback because she’s not paying enough attention — and especially if what she’s missing are outright mistakes — I’d just start giving the papers back to her when you notice that happening and asking her to incorporate the feedback from the first round before you look at it again. If you do that a couple of times, it’ll probably sink in. But you can also explicitly say, “It’s not a good use of my time to review your work a second time when the feedback from the first round hasn’t been incorporated yet. Please make sure you’re vigilant about doing that before the work comes back to me.”
3. How can I politely blow off a persistent favor-asker?
About a year and a half ago, I agreed to have coffee with a company intern who was finishing up her internship and preparing to graduate. I did this as a favor to a colleague — this intern never did any work with my team or department and we never interacted prior to this coffee meeting. (Incidentally, or maybe not, she is also the niece of a company VP.) She asked smart questions about my career and department, and how to approach the job search after graduation. I gave her what information I could, told her I’d forward on any entry-level openings that were shared within my networks, and wished her luck.
Since then, I’ve received emails and LinkedIn messages from her at least once a month asking for introductions to people at seemingly every company she’d applied to (all large organizations in my industry). Some of the time, I don’t have an appropriate contact for her, so I tell her as much, but other times I do have a contact and simply don’t feel comfortable calling in a favor on behalf of a person I barely know and haven’t directly worked with.
I know it’s tough to find a good job right out of college, but this has been going on for A YEAR AND A HALF. How can I politely tell her to stop asking me, a virtual stranger, for introductions?
So, some people deal with this by just not responding. I don’t normally recommend that strategy, but in case like this — with someone you met only time and who has been asking for constant help (and especially where you’ve been saying no and she keeps asking) — I think it’s an option for you if you want.
Alternately, though, the next time she messages you, you could say, “I’m not the right person to ask for these sorts of introductions since we don’t know each other well and haven’t worked together. Typically for someone to call in this sort of favor with a contact, it needs to be someone who has directly worked with you or at least knows you fairly well. But even though I can’t help going forward, I hope our coffee a while back was helpful, and I wish you all the best in whatever comes next.” And if the messages continue after that, feel free to ignore them.
4. Application deadlines and start dates
How should we interpret a super short time period between a job application’s deadline/closing date and the expected start date for the position? Sometimes I see as little as a week between these two dates, and I hesitate to believe they can select, interview, etc. candidates in that short period of time. Additionally, the time between when the position is first posted and the application deadline can be quite brief (less than a month), so to conduct interviews as the applications come in seems limited as well. I suspect that in these instances they already have an internal person in mind and are required to post all jobs before hiring the person they already have in mind. Is that correct?
Sometimes but not always.
A really short time period between the application deadline and the expected start date can just be lack of attention to detail. They might have put that expected start date in back when it was further out and by the time the job posting got routed, approved, and posted, the time in between had shrunk and no one caught it. Or it made sense when the job was first posted but the process has been longer than they expected so the application deadline has been pushed back but no one thought to adjust the start date. Or it’s a quirk of the software they’re using, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusions from it.
But as for jobs with less than a month between the posting date and the application deadline — that’s normal! Application deadlines don’t mean “we’ll be done interviewing candidates by then.” They mean “that’s the cut-off for submitting your application.” (And even then they’re sometimes wrong; see this post.) Allowing only a few weeks for applications to come in isn’t weirdly short at all.
Of course, sometimes these things do mean that they’ve already picked out an internal candidate. But you can’t really know that from the outside. And sometimes even when they do have someone internal in mind, a clearly stronger candidate can still get the job.
the value of a college degree “just in case,” student won’t take my feedback, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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