Paths I Wish I Knew About in University

so if you're in University right now you might be thinking what the hell am I going to do after I graduate and this is basically the video that I hoped my younger self would have watched I graduated about 2 and a half years ago now and I didn't really know about what else was out there in the world besides the normal traditional jobs now one of

the most common things is just to continue in Academia and that can be getting a master's after your bachelor's and then maybe getting a PhD after your Masters and then after that you will do like some kind of postdoc position if you want to continue in Academia and your hope in getting the post talk position is that you'll gain enough experience that you can become like assistant professor and then you become a professor and then once you're like a professor or like a teaching fellow or something then you'd hope to get tenur at that University that you're working at and tenard basically means that like the university is not able to fire you for unless it's like a really significant reason and you're basically able to research whatever the hell you want to research and you're able to just like decide how your time is spent but before then usually if you're in a postdoc or PhD or something then you have like teaching obligations on top of the research that you are doing and for some people they are fine with the teaching obligations so they quite enjoy them other as not so much especially those who are like assistant professors and they want to like mostly focus on their research they don't care about their teaching obligations and then they're like teaching uh I don't know lectures lecture ability goes down and their lectures just aren't enjoyable to watch anymore now people commonly do this because they even want to like they enjoy research and they just enjoy learning in Academia they want to like push the field forward in some significant way and they're hoping they can do it free research or they just don't really know what else to do and for me during my first day of University I saw many people like choosing the research path and I was like oh let me try a bit of research myself and I think during University as I got like more research experience through various projects and stuff I kind of realize to myself like I don't like doing research I think one significant reason for that is like I like short feedback loops where I like to be able to write a line of code and then immediately know what I'm right or I like to be able to upload a video or like write something online and then immediately be able to get feedback from it and I think in many research or at least what I studied during my undergraduate which is physics is there aren't short feedback loops where it might take like a day or many days or even weeks to do an experiment before you know whether you're right and since I prefer short feedback lips generally I realized for most types of research it was not applicable but if you do want to go down Academia and apply for phds in postdocs then as an undergraduate it helps to get as much research experience as you can do something that are called europs u r o PS and you can find them online which are like undergraduate research opportunities program or something and different universities offer them so you can like go work at a lab or like work in like a research department or something and then you get research experience and that research experience is pretty good when you're applying for phds and post talks because they care more about how much research experience you have most often not than your grades of course most competitive PHD programs care about both research experience and grades but you generally need some because you're unlikely to get into a good PhD program on the basis of grades alone and of course by doing these like research experiences or research opportunities you would ideally get a reference from someone who you did research under which can add to your like PhD or postto application as well

now number two is traditional jobs and these are the jobs you generally expect like being lawyer working in finance engineering being a doctor that kind of stuff and a lot of people after University go down these jobs in the case of being a lawyer or like doing medicine and being a doctor like you are required to study the actual thing such as you are required to have a degree in law if you want to be a lawyer or you're required to have a degree in medicine if you want to be a doctor so I'm going to put those aside and I'm going to talk about more General jobs where I think it's like more than 50% of undergrads aren't working in a job directly related to what they studied as an undergraduate which means that there are many people who do things like I don't know history at University and now they're work in consulting or Finance so for these kind of jobs there are a couple ways people get into them one is doing internships and like work placements and joying University so that can be during the summer of University where you would work apply for an internship at a particular company you'd work there over the summer and then if they like you they will uh give you a return offer which basically means that after you graduate they will like hire you to do um a similar job to what your internship was about so basically a lot of these companies are using it as like a recruitment funnels of sorts where they offer the internship they identify like the top 50 or like top 30% of people who did the internship that summer then give them a return offer and in other cases you can apply either for the job directly or you can apply via graduate program and many companies especially big older companies they offer graduate programs where you would do like a bunch of different jobs so you might like work in a different department like every 2 or 3 months and then eventually after the end of the graduate program where you're scaling up and stuff they would even assign you to department or you would get to choose the department and the graduate program can last like a year or two years or so and unfortunately in many cases like this is a numbers game where you can apply for like 100 jobs and then only get like free interviews and you might only get one offer or you might not even get any offers and there are many cases where people had to apply for like two three 500 jobs or so only for them to get like three or four offers so especially with AI because it's like so easy to write a job application and job stuff it's getting like much more of a numb game

the option that I wish I knew about even sooner is like really high paying jobs so I think one of the highest paying jobs that you can potentially do after University if you have a strong math background is like working as a quantitive Trader which basically means you write algorithms and like systems uh that help trade on financial markets for companies such as like Jane Street or like Citadel Securities and other companies and they can like offer like $200 $300,000 a year and more with like compensation and bonus that you get on top of it so you can get like a signing on bonus which is like $100,000 a year which is like £80,000 and you also get performance-based bonuses so I know of like one person who after graduating they made like a million pounds so over a million dollars in their first year of doing a job as a Trader because they like were really good at being a quantitive Trader and in all these cases you're not trading your own money you're trading like the companies or Banks or whatever firm you're working for that you're trading their money on the financial markets and generally these kind of jobs also offer internships as well and you're much more likely to get the job through doing an internship and then getting a return off at the end of The Internship then applying for the job directly and you don't really need to have like a strong background in like Finance or financial markets to be able to do this kind of job because they generally prefer people who have really strong problem solving skills and can learn on the flight and then for them to teach them everything about financial markets because I had like one of my friends who works for as a Trader and does recruitment for one of these companies describe it as like essentially if you get someone who's very talented but they don't have a lot of like preconceived biases or like misconceptions about how financial markets are meant to work it's much easier to trade train them to become like a better Trader because they don't have to unlearn all of these biases and stuff but of course since these jobs pay so well they're often like very competitive as well so they have like five rounds of interviews and you have to do like tons of like Puzzles and stuff but I would still recommend it if you have like a strong mathematical background and you should also apply early to them because they are often like uh doing interviews on a rolling basis which means that they often like read applications before the deadline and there are a couple other jobs as well that you would see which are like very technical heavy so you can see like jobs that are open AI which are paying like a million dollars a year or so or there are jobs that like meta Google and so forth basically a lot of really high paying jobs that you find are within the tech space and I think

the next thing is like more unusual jobs so it's generally easier to get more unusual jobs because you have much less competition in applying for those jobs and often there aren't even application forms for those jobs like people just kind of make it happen for themselves so for example during the summer after my second year of University I did an internship for a pretty big YouTuber who has like 6 million subscribers now and I just got that sship because I emailed him and I was like hey I have my own channel like these are my skills can I work with you over the summer and he basically just replied in CDs and he didn't like post an internship application form online on his website or whatever I just emailed him he did end up posting it the following year but like I was the first person who ever intend for him which was pretty good but generally like a lot of these jobs you can get them by just emailing or connecting to the right people so for example like let's say you really enjoy enjy sound design and you really want to be a sound designer in the future and you have like tons of experience and you've like worked on all these projects like one way would just be to email like say you want to work in Hollywood and like email 40 50 different Hollywood Studios or something being like hey can I be a sound designer for your like studio and then give them a few like portfolio or sample projects that you worked on and I think your chances of success in like numbers wise is much higher than the previous case of where you might have to apply for 4 or 500 jobs just to get two or three offers or like let's say you really want to be like a board games designer and you really enjoy playing board games and you want to make more board games you might not necessarily find a job that's being offered at a board game Studio but if you have some creative ideas or some experience then you can just email like 5060 uh board game companies or like try and contact people like directly at those companies on specific teams asking for a job or just asking for some kind of internship which you would hope that leads on to a job and yeah I worked out for a guy that I knew where he really wanted to work at SpaceX in the future but the internship program at SpaceX he couldn't apply to because he didn't have like a green card or US citizenship one way around this is that he applied for like uh like emailed and contacted people directly who worked at small rocket companies within his country um and these are like really small companies like less than 20 30 people and he just asked if he could work there over the summer and then he just worked there for like 6 8 weeks and then got a bunch of experience and that makes it easier to apply for like other bigger companies in the future so in many cases like even if you can't achieve like a big goal or Target directly you can find smaller companies that may not necessarily have job postings online contact them directly it turns out that they're looking for help and then just working there to gain experience and you can even work there after you graduate or you can work as somewhere bigger and you're more likely to get the following job because you have that experience and ultimately I think like this kind of path of like emailing Contex from people building a network and basically being able to get jobs through this leads to more interesting paths in the future where I knew someone whose mom was an executive Head Hunter which basically means like when a company needs a new CEO she would help find the new CEO and you don't really see like job postings for executive Head Hunters um online but like she just kind of developed her own network and found herself in this position where people would come to her for like recommendations and she would turn it into her own job instead so I think like having this level of agency where you're contacting people you're kind of like working different places you're getting a sense of like the environment is like building all these connections allows you to in the future develop your own job which people would come to you for such as like being an executive Head Hunter so yeah I would say like these more unusual jobs are basically only limited by your imagination and final

thing that you can consider doing up to university is starting your own business so there are a couple different definitions here I'm going to go in order of like lifestyle business uh traditional business and then also like startups related businesses so lifestyle businesses are more like people who want to travel or maintain a specific lifestyle and they make enough money to fund that lifestyle from their business and they don't have like any hopes or dreams of like growing their business massively in the future or like hiring tons of people they're just happy with whatever extra money it makes for the amount of effort that they're putting in every month and they're willing to spend more of their time like traveling enjoying time with their family and so forth and many people do lifestyle businesses where it's they either like run an ad agency or they like um usually do YouTube or they like write content online or they like do web design or they like various other things basically usually a lot of Lifestyle businesses because they want to be a location independent they're tied to something you can just sit down and do on your computer and then there's like another type of businesses which are like more traditional businesses and they're more like location dependent so for example like a real estate business that sells homes and apartments in a specific City would be location dependent uh where they're tied to that specific City or like a landscaping business would be location dependent and this might be easier for you to do if you already have some connections like if your uncle or something is like a landlord he might be able to help you start your own like real estate business directly after University but in other cases it like sort of takes time to develop skills and you might even have to work for a normal company to like understand the market so for example like if you're trying to start a business and you don't really know what to sell because ultimately your business is you're selling things you're selling products and services to people who need them since you don't have much real life experience of what companies need and what individuals need um you might not have the best business idea and then you might try and start a business six uh 6 months later a year later nothing really happens of it whereas you can work for a company or like a place for like a few years and then you realize like wow this company has tons of problems internally I'm going to start my own business sell my solutions to that company and then hopefully it will like work well and then you get more clients who are similar clients to your company so for example you could work for a law firm for a few years and then you realize like law firms have all these problems internally you really understand the market and you're like wow like these law firms really don't know how to like effectively research I don't know like relevant laws online and they end up spending like 5 10 times longer than they should which might not actually be so case in the case of law firms because law firms are often charge based on how many hours but it might be something else like and you might work for a business and you realize that they're really bad at running ads so you might start your own agency and then try and sell your services back to the business that you did and then if that works well you expend to other businesses or you might make some kind of software that works for that particular business sell it back to them and then you can start your own business so basically like if you gain real life experience by working actual jobs you understand what Mark more problems like people face and business face and people in those businesses you're able to come up with Solutions and then you're able to sell it back to people you know because you developed a network from the job that you actually had and the final type is like more startups so basically what separates a startup from a normal business is that startups have the ability to scale very quickly so for example like if you run a hotel business that is not a startup because if you your hotel business suddenly became popular overnight and it was like fully booked out it would take you more time a lot of time to build more hotels so like building another hotel for your hotel chain might take like 3 or 5 years if you own a restaurant business it might take you 3 or 5 years to build restaurant whereas for a startup like if you have a mobile app or you have like an online website and then suddenly overnight it becomes really popular you're able to scale to fit that demand because overnight like if it be becomes really popular you can just scale your servers by deploying like 50 or 100 new servers in the course of like minute so what separates a startup from a normal business is that it's able to scale massively online and it's basically able to meet whatever demand that is coming of it which also means because it's able to scale massively it's able to make much more money in a shorter time period now when it comes to startups there are either two types you can go down there's like Indie startups or um Venture backed startups Indie startups basically means that you retain 100% ownership of the company or you and your friends uh whoever you're starting the company with retain 100% ownership and you never accept any outside capital and that can offer you like more flexibility in some cases but it can also like prevent you scaling quite as quickly in many cases um like you might not have initial funding or your own money to put in the idea in which case you might want to consider Venture back startups where you accept a venture capital from like either Angel Investors or Venture firms for a promising good idea they usually back startups which like I said before can skill very quickly overnight because they can get their returns more quickly that way so you give some portion of your company or some percentage of your company away for some amount of money and you use that money to grow the company pay salaries pay for Server costs and everything else that needs to be for the company and then you grow the revenue and then your company is valued more because it's somewhat done as a percentage of how much you've grown your Revenue your user base and so forth you raise more money and you continue to do that even until you get to like quite a large stage where another company buys your startup in which case you're the money split between what percentage of the people own the company so for example if you gave away 50% of your company 50% of the money would go back to investors as like a return and you would be left with whatever percentage of the money that you have after like raising all those rounds so for example like in your first round you could give away 10% of your company your new friends or co-founders would be left with 90% of the company and then if you sold immediately uh to like a bigger company for a profit then you and your co-founder would get 90% And the investors who invested and got 10% of your company would get 10% of the sale or instead of being acquired you can either IPO which is you list shares of your company on public markets and then you can sell those shares for a profit or you can sell shares of the company on private markets which is what biggest startups like stripe do where they're selling mainly free secondaries and stuff but ultimately like if you want to get investors for your startup you and your co-founders usually need to have some kind of edge in what you're doing that makes it convincing for investors to put money in so for example like uh I did a startup accelerator called y combinator one of the investors at y combinator said to me that there was a example where it was like free PhD like graduates also joined the program as well and they were thinking about what kind of idea to work on and they were like oh we're going to make a dating app and they just kind of looked at them and they were like why are you making a dating app when you have these really strong backgrounds like in physics phds you have basically zero background in dating apps and they were like man you guys should just work on something related to physics instead so basically when it comes to having investors for a startup you need to explain why you are suited towards whatever particular idea or Market that you're working on so for example like if you have an idea to make it easier for like YouTubers to edit videos or something or you have like some kind of AI powered video editor but you've never edited a video in your life then it's not very convincing for like I don't know venture capitalist or investors to back you or your company's idea because you don't have the right experience to go after the market you're targeting so it's even it better to go and get that experience or to change idea completely to something that you understand better and or you're more suited towards and yeah my recommendation is that if you want to go down the startup route and you're still at University or college one of the things you should be considering is like who could I potentially work with on business ideas after graduating and that can be like you can understand this by working with friends on various group projects or like saying to your friends over the summer like oh let's like start a business together or like let's make an app some money together basically you want to know who you're able to work well with and who you're not because it's not necessarily the case that you can work well with all your friends like some people are just Goods good as friends and some people are also business partners because one of the worst things that you can do after graduating or being doing a startup whether it's Indie backed um backed by yourselves or if it's backed by event capitalists is to have like a falling out with your co-founder or whoever you're working with because that's like bad for the investors it's probably bad for you it leads to a lot of waste of time and like it leads to lots of different problems so basically whil you're still at University I would recommend working on different projects with people and even trying to make a bit of money with some of your friends to see who you would enjoy working with in the future and who you can make money it doesn't have to be anything big I know like one particular case or uh some people I mentioning why comat they started like a it was like a sleeping related app and they weren't really sure whether to work on this immediately I think they started out with some like creative economy related idea but they both realized like they didn't have any idea what they were on about because they weren't creatives themselves but they realized they both suffered from insomnia so they made like a sleeping app which helps people who suffer from insomnia overcome that insomnia but they didn't work on that app straight away they weren't sure if this was an idea that people would pay for so what they did is they did something much more basic which is they set up a website and they said that they had written a guide on how to overcome insomnia and they were selling it for like $29 uh $59 or something and they were basically seeing if anyone would buy the guide and what would happen is like they hadn't actually written the guide you would pay and then it would immediately refund you the payments and be like oh you're um what is it now like we had eror like we couldn't process your transaction whatever so they had claim to write written a guide it would immediately refund you and they'd basically see if anyone would pay and if people would try to pay then they would write the guide and I think in one case one guy like he tried to pay like four or five times and he emailed them saying Oh your website doesn't work I'm like really trying to buy this insomnia like guide or whatever from you guys and your website is not accepting my credit card and they were like oh like maybe we should write the guide after all so they wrote the GU wrote the guide they made like a couple hundred and then they were like let's make an app out of this so they made the app and then 9s later they scaled it to like I think it was like a million AR which is like a million dollar a year and basically these were two friends who were like oh let's try and see if we can make some Mone together they realize they can make money together in a much simpler way with like an insomnia PDF guide they didn't have to write it initially because they only like set up this failed payment system to validate their idea and then they contined to work together as they realized they could work together and make money together

but yeah ultimately like I hope that gives you some kind of idea of what kind of things you can consider doing after University of course this is like not a comprehensive video despite it being long and there are many other things you can consider doing as well I think one pretty common way is just to like speak to alumni who seemed to be doing something interesting and ask them how they ended up in that position because it really like opens your mind to possibilities I know one of my friends during University I asked him why is what like why do you want to do research after graduating and he basically said to me like oh because the only other option is working in finance and I don't want to do that and I think in these cases where you don't know what kind of options exist after University you like become very narrow-minded and then you see like everyone El doing these crazy things around you um and then you're like wow how are they getting all these opportunities or how are they doing all these impressive things um because like during University you didn't open your minds to possibilities or what could be done after graduating so yeah I hope that video kind of makes sense and like if you have any questions like leave a comment down below or just like DM me on Instagram and i' be happy to reply to