Bullish: Using Your College Skills to Succeed After College

By Contributor Jen Dziura

This article originally appeared on TheGrindstone.

I always say that you shouldn’t take business advice from someone whose only business is giving business advice (Pyramids: Great shape for a pharaoh’s tomb, bad shape for a business model), and that multiple streams of income are crucial.

One of my businesses is offering educational comedy shows to universities — I do about six gigs a year — and this was how I recently found myself at sunny Palm Beach State University, where I had offered, since I was in town anyway, to speak to any college classes that wanted to have me. That turned out to be an introductory composition class.

My speaking topic is “Forging Your Own Career,” but I tend to do my public speaking a bit on the fly — you really just have to get a feeling for things once you get there. Colleges are more different from each other than nearly any other group of groups of people; there is no Chamber of Commerce that only takes the top 8% of businesses, and then some other Chamber of Commerce for people who couldn’t get into that Chamber of Commerce, and then a bunch of Chambers of Commerce full of people who were excluded from the other Chambers of Commerce for a host of financial and sociocultural reasons.


Read the rest at TheGrindstone.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing in the Women in Comedy Festival.