WHETHER you’re a farmer or an English teacher, be good in your endeavor in 2008 so you will be financially rewarded. If you are a farmer at the agricultural regions in Garabandal or Texas, then you must be diligent to know all about the economics of farming so your business will even prosper. After all, being self employed can be a career in itself. If you are an agricultural economics graduate at the Harvard Business School and you want to apply what you have learned to your farm back home in Texas, then that’s really swell. One of the successful farming techniques in the United States nowadays is to buy land in nearby Mexico and install their farms there. That way, labor and logistics in maintaining the farm are both cheap. Once you have replicated this stunt and it will be successful, the agriculture sector in Texas will notice you and you may be awarded as farmer of the year. Later on the governor himself or herself may be the one to even notice you and you will be appointed as state secretary of agriculture. Now isn’t that lovely?
If you are an international relations graduate from Georgetown, chances are you will land a job at the State Department. Be diligent enough and learn more languages as well as take master’s and doctorate so that your rise at Foggy Bottom will be steady and you will soon land a post as an ambassador to a foreign country. If you are a broadcast journalist, then be diligent in your job so you will be pirated by other outfits. A lot of CNN employees have been pirated by Qatar-based Al Jazeera which pays its employees even more lucratively. Or if you are a graduate in food technology or nutrition, then you can be hired by such Fortune 500 companies as Nestle, Monsanto, Coca-cola and Pepsico. Nestle is of course based in Switzerland while Monsanto, Coca-cola and Pepsico are all based in the United States. If you are a geologist, you may be employed by such companies as Dutch-based Shell and United States-based Texaco. If you are a graduate of a New York film institute, then start making your own films and emulate such neo-realist directors as Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Greengrass, Michael Mann and Joel Schumacher. A lot of these directors have been discovered not at formal film institutions though but during stints in short term courses at Sundance in Utah. Or if you want to be a model, you can start as young as 11 years old. A lot of models I know start young such as Dakota Fanning and Katherine Heigl.
If you want to be an epidemiologist, then you must constantly be updated with all the infectious diseases around the world such as the recent strain of tuberculosis discovered on an Indian woman on board a continental flight bound to the United States or the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo.
ONE can get rich by having a varied career. If you are someone from Costa del Sol, you may be enticed to work in the hospitality industry in your country at the beach resorts there. So the first thing that you have to work on is to hone your English skills because there are a lot of English-speaking tourists in Spain. Thus, before taking up a degree in hotel and restaurant management, you decided first to pursue a degree in AB English at one of the posh universities in Madrid. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, you still are not contented with your laurel, thus, you pursue all the stages in Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) – basic, intermediate and advanced. Each of these stages is worth an academic semester, thus you will diligently study for another 18 months after graduation. Yet the price is worth it because by this time, your desire to work in the hospitality industry has diminished.
Instead, you decide to put up an English language school of your own because a person who has successfully completed the advanced stage of TOEFL is now eligible to teach English as a second language. Earnings from the language school are okay yet you are not contented so you go abroad to teach English to others who are in need of them. There’s a lucrative market for English teachers in Thailand so you go there. You land in Phuket, literally a paradise. To those of you who do not have any idea what Phuket is, then you better rent The Beach starring Leonardo di Caprio. Leonardo’s partner there is Virginie Ledoyen. There is one scene where Virginie was dipping in the beach on a moonless night and glowing planktons illuminated her body under the water. That is not a CGI scene. The glowing planktons were real. They really exist along the coasts of Phuket and if you are in Phuket, you will not just be financially rewarded but you will experience a literal paradise. Besides, it is really financially rewarding there because Thais pay English teachers good.
Or you can go to the Philippines. There are a lot of South Koreans who go there for six months and learn English. They also pay much to these English tutors. Or you can go to Montreal. Montreal is a big city with a population of 1.6 million and all of them are speaking French. If you teach English to them or establish an English language school there, then that is another sure shot of making money. China is another country where you can explore being an English teacher. They also badly need English tutors there. While teaching English in China, you have heard that a major Hollywood production is going on in Salamanca back home in Spain. So you go there and offer your service as an English dialogue coach for the Spanish extras. Now isn’t that swell?
RIGHT after graduating from high school, even would-be college students can now have carriers in their own right thanks to online education. Think of being a miner. If one is employed in a diamond mine in Utah, then that would be a carrier. And since the minimum wage in the United States is more than enough to pay a family of four, then it can be considered a means of livelihood already. During the day, he may toil at the mine while at night, he can check out his student’s account through the online college he is enrolled. And I’m saying here a real Internet connection at work. Working in a mine is no joke but the pay is no joke too. You can pamper your kids with his own gaming console and you can have all the cable channels that you want and surf at the Internet at the same time, staring at a 45” LCD television monitor with subwoofer sound systems and a high definition DVD player on the side.
Meanwhile, other high school graduates would opt to be in service of the United States Armed Forces after graduation. After two tours of duty, others drop out and continue to a civilian life in a traditional college. Some go to West Point. Soldiering then becomes a profession and while the student is at West Point and upon graduating from it, he or she may proceed to other professions like becoming a physician and eventually an expert in infectious diseases. He is then assigned at USAMRIID or the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Speaking of becoming a physician, there are lots of health professionals which are in need in the United States today. To become a physician, one must first embark on a four-year academic preparatory course a.k.a. the undergraduate program such as a degree in biology. To do this, there are lots of ways. If you are affluent, you can finance yourself through college. If you are not, there are lots of study grants which you have to take entrance exams to pass. And there are also academic scholarships themselves which are aided by the colleges. Or a varsity scholarship may be in the offing. And then there are student loans with very minimal interest and payable for 30 years. They are either offered by the federal government or some private lenders like Sallie Mae.
While in college, you may want to pursue becoming a physician. That will take another eight academic semesters. After that, you have to pursue a specialization, say, surgery or infectious diseases perhaps. If you are lucky, you will land a job at CDC in Atlanta and dispatched to highly risky areas when outbreaks come out. Or you may want to have a low but equally lucrative profile and continue your work as an adolescence pediatrician or a geriatrician for that matter. The possibilities are really endless. Maybe you want to have a hint in nursing and adore the practicing nurses of ER. Whatever endeavor you are about to take, always remember that luck be with you if you’re only as diligent as it can be.
