Namita Bhasin

Daniel Brusilovsky, renowned teen entrepreneur, wrote a post debating whether or not to go to college. As I tend to do, I got a little emotional in my response, but I find the subject important enough to repost it here.

Daniel,

I really admire what you’ve accomplished already – more than I have at 22 – but I really think you’re young and inexperienced enough that college may have something to teach you.

For you, college wouldn’t be about starting you on your career path. It would be more about finding people (friends, partners, significant others – especially valuable since there’s a relatively limited selection of people your age in your current circles) and expanding your knowledge of other things. Most entrepreneurs ignore me when I say this, but there is (at least a little) more to life than your startup. There is more to learn and be interested in than just what Silicon Valley and your current area of knowledge have to offer. It’s too early to isolate yourself from other opportunities.

Personally, I’m deeply involved in SV too, but I majored in Political Economy and Linguistics, two things that made little practical sense but were incredibly valuable for my own interest and enrichment. Academics aside, I lived on my own, got a taste of a different place and lifestyle, met different kinds of people, grew up, and had a little bit of fun. Four years of college was anything but a waste of time.

I really hope you decide to go to college. Continue what you’re doing by all means – being in school doesn’t mean you have to stop working – but I promise it’s worth going.

Here’s the second installment of those personal finance notes I promised. This module was more complicated -mortgages, insurance, financing a house and car. Nasty stuff, but vital nonetheless. Yay for being an adult.

(You can find part one here)

Personal Finance - Risk Management and Securing Assets

I’ve told a lot of you about the personal finance class I’m taking - one of my very last fun classes at Cal, *sigh.* Anyway, it’s an incredibly valuable and practical course because it lays many of the (admittedly common sense) guidelines for planning out your financial life. It’s alarming how many people my age have no idea how to manage money. Some can earn it, everyone knows how to spend it, most of us are well-versed in asking for it… but hey guys, we’re about to graduate, and that means financial independence along with the salary, endless bar tabs, and swanky yuppie apartment somewhere in the Mission.

Here’s the intro: the basics of credit, budgeting, loans & mortgages, and taxes, for your perusing pleasure. Enjoy.

I ditched (one) class Friday afternoon to go judge the Global Social Venture Competition. Someone had reached out to ST@B to see if anyone wanted to be a student judge for the Berkeley applications, so I signed up. After all, I’m interested in how ventures’ intentions can actually be socially beneficial. I didn’t know anything about it prior to - or after - volunteering, but I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some ‘formal’ experience/training interacting with business plans.

I’ve had plenty of exposure to business plans via classes, internships, and talking shop with my dad, but I have this weird habit of seeking further instruction on certain topics whether I think I need it or not (why I keep going to stuff to “learn about social media,” for example). Story of my life, actually. I know a lot of stuff, but I’ve never gotten any kind of structured lessons on much of it, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right/well/properly. Perhaps that’s what business school is for, but that remains to be seen. I’ll let you know in a few years if I decide to go.

So I show up and walk into a room full of MBA students. Oops… didn’t get the memo on that one. Luckily someone asks me if I’m in one of his classes, so I suppose I didn’t appear too out of place. Actually, a few people at the She’s Geeky Unconference also assumed I was a grad student; I wonder what makes people think that. Anyway, instead of swooshing right over my head, the task at hand was totally manageable.

I’m rambling as usual, so here’s my point: It turns out I am well able/qualified to read and evaluate executive summaries that had taken MBA students presumably months of research and planning and writing to formulate. Yay for me, right? The sad part is, some of them were awful (I’m not an MBA so I don’t have to be politically correct!). I encountered badly written plans, full of typos and illogical sentence structure, and one that could have been amazing - if the core idea made any sense at all. Still another looked like the product of an hour of brainstorming over coffee with zero research backing it up (at least not in the summary). There are real judges that will decide which plans continue in the competition, but since they asked for my input, I strongly feel that some of those should not.

Does this mean I’m The Shit when it comes to business plans? Hah. I think it suggests that I can trust a lot of what I know even if it isn’t formally delivered information. It may also mean that I can continue learning for my career in the way that I have been so far - nonacademically and sometimes haphazardly. I’m smart enough to discern what’s important. Indicator: when people ask what I’m majoring in (Linguistics, International Political Economy) and what kind of work I’m looking to do after grad (the non-technical side of the tech industry), they no longer ask what the relationship that can possibly be. I just talk about what I’ve done outside and around school, and they’re satisfied.

Well, at least it looks like I know what I’m doing.

I was just about to make my last tuition payment ever - about $3800 - and I got to thinking how (while I definitely will not miss that part of college) it really wasn’t a bad deal at all for the kind of education I’ve gotten. My 4 years at Berkeley are worth much more than the dollar value I paid for it.

I consider myself a relatively successful product of the public education system and a very ardent supporter of it. I’m going to be that hokey alumnus that donates to her elementary school and visits her first grade teacher until she retires. Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that my parents had the foresight to move to Cupertino for its awesome school district before housing prices tripled overnight. I’ve gotten some of the best that public education has to offer, so I guess I’m a little biased. That doesn’t stop me from wholeheartedly supporting the idea, though. Education is a fundamental necessity, a huge leveler of the playing field, and that’s something the government ought to make a priority above many other things.

Right now funding for education sucks. I’m not impractical enough to suggest that it top the List of Important Things We Really Ought to Pay For (see my rant on healthcare) but it definitely deserves more attention than it’s getting in comparison to things like felons’ expenses or the size of chickens’ cages (sorry). You know, if the American public as a whole was smarter, a lot of dumb issues wouldn’t even come up in the first place. Just saying.

Don’t expect priorities to shift around with the miraculous surplus that everyone is waiting on the edge of their seat for Obama to deliver. Californians, don’t hold your breath for anything Arnie says, we’re way too far out of money. This is how it’s going to happen: one day, China and India will finally, effectively, scare the crap out of the US. We will fear losing our intellectual superiority to these quickly rising powerhouses and will begin throwing money into education - probably into math and science - just like we did during the Cold War with Russia, when it was imperative to our security and much more that our weaponry and space-exploring abilities were better than theirs. To be fair, education had also expanded from 1910-1940, but my interpretation of a primary reason for that is the lack of employment during the Great Depression and the hope that more education would better chances to find some. The next time it will be more refined than an international pissing contest but still bear traces of desperation - it will be a fight for economic power and respect.

(Disclaimer: I need to do more research into this; I’m going off of what I know but haven’t looked up the facts) When my dad went to IIT Kanpur from 1978-81, a semester at one of the most prestigious engineering institutes in the world cost basically next to nothing. India subsidizes education heavily, and this opens up opportunities for numbers of brilliant young people that would otherwise never be able to afford the luxury of college education, let alone one of such quality. This has led to the unfortunate (for India) consequence of brain drain. For the US, though, it has provided a substantial and free boost to the economy, as waves of immigration to this country are historically inclined to do. Again, I know my perspective is biased, but a giant segment of Silicon Valley can thank the Indian education system for its very existence. However, I believe that this pattern will begin to change in the next generation or two. India is an evolving, fast-growing country, with a huge market eager to adopt new things and a pleasantly rising GDP per capita. Soon enough, the outputs of places like the IITs will not be tempted to seek their fortunes a hemisphere away from everything they know because the opportunities and the quality of life will be plenty good enough at home. The government has begun to step in to assist in that realization (I don’t know much about this; please post any links you may have on the subject). The smart people will stay at home, benefiting the places that put forth the resources to educate them, and the US will lose a big source of its brains/innovation/growth.

Once things begin to slow down around here, I am quite confident that the freaking out will begin - and that is when education will once again be a priority in America.

I finally made a profile on Yelp. I use it so damn much that I figured I should throw in my two cents from time to time, in case anyone cares to know. So far I’ve reviewed a handful of Berkeley joints and will add more from time to time as I get bored in class, hungry, etc.

I’m also avoiding midterm studying. Somehow it’s hard to concentrate on the distant past when all I want to do is figure out the future. I really do love history but more often than not, it’s so far from high tech that it’s hard to switch gears back and forth. Therefore, it’s goodbye to the virtual world until I’ve learned enough about political theory to indulge myself on the web. Gotta love being a liberal arts student.