An "easy credit" is also a waste. You're spending countless dollars and the most energetic years of your life, and you're happy to find a course that doesn't improve your brain? If you bought an empty box of chocolates, you wouldn't be happy that it's "easy" to finish. You'd be pissed off! Forrest Gump would be pissed off! And thinking less than Forest Gump is a good sign that you're losing at college.

6 Choose a Subject You Care About

We live in the most amazing time ever to exist, a world where people can spend years upgrading themselves with a deeper understanding of something they love. This is new. It didn't used to matter if you were the next Isambard Kingdom Brunel: If your father was a poor plague rat masturbator, that was it, you had to take over the family trade when he died of the worst STDs imaginable.

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You got soft little hands, college boy.

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Now you can learn molecular biology, or comparative theology, or programming or ancient Greek languages or medicine or whatever you want. The STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields drive the entirety of human progress, while the arts and humanities give us even more reasons to do that. But you have to care. You need either a love of the subject or a deep passion for getting paid later. Preferably both, but at least one. And yet every year we read scare stories about a million percent of new graduates being unemployed, followed by interviews with idiots who stumbled through a bare pass in philosophy and are now genuinely shocked that regurgitating the basics of a field where they were supposed to be learning how to think didn't work out.