Lesley Carhart May 1, 2023

I have to let you all in on something.

At this point in my career I’m privileged to mentor a lot of young people, especially veterans and college students. And every so often they’re like really excited to meet me and say they would like to be like me. This totally blows my mind because they go to like MIT, Stanford, or Purdue ….and they’re usually in the second year of a PHD and they run their cybersecurity competition team and speak 9 languages or something….

I was a TERRIBLE youth. Yea, I eventually went to DePaul which is respectable and I have three okay undergrad degrees - merely because I had no choice but to enlist at 17 and the military kicked the crap out of me. I went to community college first the hard way around. I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a miserable, unhappy, uncool gnc goth kid who hacked computers and swore a lot. Those schools would have .blown their noses at my application and probably banned me from the campus for being a delinquent.

What I want to say is if you’re one of those rock star young people, I’m super impressed by you, and you’ve picked one hell of a role model. Keep it up, and don’t burn out.

If you’re that totally screwed up teenager, though, I might not get to see you at awards ceremonies and touted by the top professors at cons, but you can make it too. Even if nobody is ever in your corner.

Show threadevacide
@hacks4pancakes I feel these feels. I just spent a couple of weeks meeting with extremely high-performing type-A students at fancy schools and the thing that I told them that seemed to resonate the most is that the job they will have in 20 years hasn't been invented yet and that it is ok to screw up or make the wrong choice or change their minds because my career has definitely not been a straight line of non-stop success.
May 1, 2023 at 1:06amWeb
Show threadNicholas WeaverMay 1, 2023
@evacide @hacks4pancakes
As someone who both graduated and taught at such a school, one of the big resources I have during teaching is a copy of my undergraduate transcript showing my various screwups.
Show threadTindraMay 1, 2023

@ncweaver @evacide @hacks4pancakes it took me 12 years and three colleges to get a Bachelors.

Last fall, I was trusted to teach West Point cadets an upper level course.

Show threadDennis Faucher  May 1, 2023
@evacide @hacks4pancakes One of my favorite pieces of advice for my kids is "A career is not a 30 year tunnel, it is a series of connected dots." Start somewhere and be open to opportunities.
Show threadDewey Ritten May 1, 2023
@evacide @hacks4pancakes the experience of recovering from your screw ups and wrongs choices better equips you for the real world anyways.
Show threadTom IsaacsonMay 1, 2023
@evacide @hacks4pancakes ironically I’m doing almost exactly what trained for at Uni in the 90s - embedded software. Of course we have wifi, Bluetooth, 5G and other technologies now but the core work is pretty much the same.
Show threadStargeezer SmithMay 1, 2023
@evacide @hacks4pancakes
Wise advice. I'm retired, and while I feel good about my career it isn't the career I had in mind. I had to slide, take advantage of opportunities that were in reach, and in the process I found a career that equaled the one I initially had in mind.