Jeremy S. sent me a link to a great, quick post on advice by Tyler Cowen.
In that post, Cowen linked to an article in the Wall Street Journal by an economics reporter giving advice on avoiding journalism as a career.
Yesterday, I doled out a lot of advice. I told an acquaintance who is starting up a blog (and who kindly offered to teach me how to blog, too) that he needed a blogroll. I told Jonah that he really needed to know how to spell Connecticut property for his geography test. I told another friend that googling ex-boyfriends was dangerous business.
Question of the Day. What advice did you give out this weekend?
Apt. 11d 
I told my daughter that sometimes you have to follow “stupid” rules in order to get good grades on assignments, but that right now (3rd grade, no official grades), I didn’t care if she didn’t care.
Of course, this is because she’s in a school where her talents are recognized regardless of whether she follows the stupid rules, even if her “grades” are impacted. My advice might have been different in other circumstances.
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I told my daughter that no one appreciates fart jokes at the dinner table. (When she gets to college she’ll realize this is not universally true.)
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If you think that it will take until college, you must be planning on a single-sex primary and secondardy school.
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“Don’t touch that, it’s hot!”
Some problems are easier than others.
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I didn’t eat dinner with people outside my family (regularly anyway) until I got to the dorm. Having arrived at said dorm, I spent an entire year pushing the boundaries of how long a life form can be sustained on nothing more than sugared cereal and beer. It was bliss itself.
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Using “dinner” to mean only the evening meal, I see your point.
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I told my friend who’s getting out of academia to apply to some second-tier law schools as well as top ones. (But I’m not sure I’m right.)
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My daughter, who was graduated in June from a top-tier law school advises that the legal gravy train has run off the tracks. At a time when it’s hard for all new lawyers to find paying work, a second-tier law degree — which cost a lot of time and money to earn — may not lead to a decent job. (She’s working pro bono this year, though the law firm that offered her a job has given her a stipend to wait to start till fall, 2010.) Even pre-recession, first-tier degrees were “national” (good anywhere) while second-tier degrees were “regional” (good locally).
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Going to a second-tier law school is a major crapshoot. If you are in the top ten percent or so of your class, you can get a job in biglaw and your academic choice will be justified, at least financially. But it gets harder at a lower level.
Now if someone graduates in the middle of his or her class at a second tier law school, spends the bulk of his or her professional career closing small commercial real estate loans, or defending small accident cases for insurance companies, or whatever, at an income in the low six figures (or the high five figures if not in a major city), and really enjoys what he or she is doing, then that’s fine. But I wouldn’t spend three years of my life preparing for that career unless I had some thought that I would enjoy it.
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I told someone to be wary when connecting the beginning to the end of the first cast-on row on circulars. Kind of the blind leading the blind, because I am not much of a knitter, at all.
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It wasn’t on the weekend, but I recently advised somebody to start a career in bad literature.
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I just advised a friend who’s trying to decide how his unborn daughter’s name (Josie) should be pronounced that this is an unwise endeavor.
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Ben,
Yes, indeed, if your friend intends any pronunciation other than JO-ZEE. I discovered, very soon after our daughter was born, that the spelling I chose was nonintuitive (although it’s totally traditional). She continues to get misspelled gifts and cards from close relatives.
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He’d asked because that’s what we named our daughter, who is called either JO-ZEE or JO-SEE by different people, depending on their ideolect. The thing is, do you really want your child to provoke stifled eye-rolling and teeth-grinding when they introduce themselves with “It’s ON-drea, not AN-drea”, or the like?
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“The thing is, do you really want your child to provoke stifled eye-rolling and teeth-grinding when they introduce themselves with “It’s ON-drea, not AN-drea”, or the like?”
Oh dear.
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That sounds like an acceptable level of variation to me. My youngest, Saskia (SASS-key-ah), is called SAH-skee-ah from time to time and seems to take it in stride. And I love the name Josie. My husband refused to entertain the name Josephine even as a middle, alas.
On the strength of Laura’s pertussis post, I told my coworker who’s been coughing for weeks to get tested for pertussis.
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Googling ex-boyfriends IS dangerous. I advised a friend to rent the more reasonably priced, adequately sized apartment versus the fancier, more expensive one with two stories. In the end, he applied for both but my choice won by default as the two-story condo was leased out to someone else. Ha ha.
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Regarding law school, while the situation is not as bad as with adjunct professors, becoming a “lawyer” is not the path to steady, good income that it used to be, or that — say — graduating medical school still is. According to this article from last week’s LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-greenbaum8-2010jan08,0,4457698.story?track=rss
There are currently 45,000 new law school graduates per year competing for approximately 30,000 job openings. Based on the upward pull of the few good “big law” jobs, substantially fewer than half of those 30,000 will pay “average or above” salaries (median law salaries are far below average law salaries).
So, optimistically saying that there are 15,000 “good” law jobs per year, and applicant should determine whether she thinks that she will be in the Top Third of all law school grads. That means a Top Tier school, some Second Tier schools, or else the Top 5-10% of your bottom tiers. That’s a personal judgment call, of course, but for someone who is on the fence, reading http://esqnever.blogspot.com/, or the various blogs on his blogroll definitely gives a good example of the “con” argument against law school.
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