Managing income risk



Life is a full of choices and you need to face the results of the choice that you have made whether it was a wise decision or not. Each choice has a risk, and we will learn to manage our future risk as we continue to have experiences in decision making. To be honest, I don’t yet know where I will choose to work, how much I will earn after my graduation this semester. And, those conditions would impact my consumption spending when I decide to work in certain places.

Before I have decided to come to U of I, I was a student of Missouri Academy of Mathematics, Science, and Computer Science (MASMC). MASMC is the STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) school where students are mainly taught STEM courses and some humanity and English courses. MASMC is an early-college program where high school juniors and seniors can take classes at Northwest Missouri State University and earn around 60 college credits and high school diploma upon graduation. The tuition for MASMC was close to tuition for international student in U of I, which is quite a lot of money.

When I applied to MASMC, I thought that extremely expensive tuition compared to other private high school in the United States would worth it since I can graduate college early and save some time for my future and start working earlier than others to earn salaries. And, I was interested in STEM field. It was taking a risk for me and my parents in tuition wise and we decided to think as an investment for future since I can graduate two years earlier in the college. It was tough courses for high school students since we were taking the same courses with ordinary college students in the same classrooms and professors were asking the same expectation for us. I didn’t really have time to think about what I would like to do in the future. I was too busy to follow the courses and to prepare standardized tests to get into the colleges. So, when I applied to college, I put chemistry major for all my application. Among all science, mathematics, and computer sciences courses that I had taken in MASMC, my favorite was Chemistry.

After graduation from MASMC, I became Chemistry major freshman with Junior standing at U of I. And, I started to take upper level chemistry courses at U of I such as Organic Chemistry II since I had credit for Organic Chemistry I from MASMC. When I took more chemistry courses, I didn’t find it interesting for me. In addition, I figured that most chemistry majors do research after their graduation which I don’t think like. I would like to work in active environment, not like sitting in the same seat for hours and hours and repeating stuff. So, I decided to double major in Economics, which made my graduation to be postponed one semester. This means there will be more tuition to be paid to college, more time to study as student and I have taken more risks in the future to earn more salaries in order to make up for what my parents have paid for college. But I thought it was a wise decision, since I have figured that Chemistry is not for me, and it won’t be enjoyable to work in the field that I am not interested in.

I have a cousin who recently graduated from University of Pennsylvania. Her parents wanted my cousin to become a doctor, but my cousin didn’t want to do so. However, she followed what her parents suggested in academic-wise. She majored in neuro-science as her parents suggested and participated in some research regarding health care. She even started to studying MCAT for her future at academy in South Korea. But, in the last semester at UPenn, she finally told her parents that she is not planning to follow the path of becoming a doctor, rather she would like to work in performance field since she is interested in music. Her parents had mentally hard time after my cousin’s strong will to work in performance field. Yet, she hasn’t found a job in the field after about four months after her graduation. And, her parents stopped supporting her financially. Considering my cousin, I believe that it is really important to find what you are interested in and communicate well with parents since they are the one who financially supports you. If my cousin has told her parents that she has no interest in becoming a doctor earlier, her parents might have supported her in different ways, not wasting time and money. She has made more risks in the future, since she could have used those time and financial support in a wiser way.

Now, I am looking back, I wonder if it was a good idea to go to MASMC. I could have had less busy junior and senior years studying in high school and have more time thinking about my interests and future. If I could find my interest in Economics earlier in high school, I wouldn’t need to postpone my graduation by one semester. On the other hand, I won’t be able to graduate one and half year earlier than my peers if I didn’t go to MASMC. At the end, I think it was a wise decision for me to postpone my graduation and decide to double major in Economics and Chemistry. However, I now have more pressure to find a better job in the future since there was unexpected investments made in my journey. There will be more unexpected situations in my future journey. If I learn to manage the future risks well through experiences, I believe that I will be able to make the best out of the situation and make a wise decision in the future. Taking a risk is not always a bad decision. You just need to be responsible for your decision.


Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 21, 2019 at 7:42 AM

    Let me talk about some non-economic considerations and the timing of entering college and graduating from college. The most obvious of these is social life. If you are younger than the people you take classes with and the people who live with you in the dorm or and apartment, does that age difference matter? If it does matter, does it impact how you do in your classes and how much you get out of school?

    I've had quite a number of students who came to the U of I for STEM but then found economics when the STEM major didn't prove completely satisfactory, for one reason or another. So you are definitely not unique this way. This suggests a question to me about whether some of the challenges that these students faced could have been anticipated ahead of time. And if they could have been anticipated but weren't, why did this happen?

    Parents, of course, want what's best for the children but they may not really know what that means and they may have some biases on this matter because they don't understand their child on an intellectual dimension. If they are paying for college, this can lead to some choices that don't make sense in retrospect, but are easy to understand in prospect.

    Not being your parent, there are different things that I don't understand about your choices. For example, might you have started college in Korea, rather than in the U.S., and then transferred to an American university as a junior? If you had done that, would it have been cheaper? Since you didn't do that, there must have been a perceived disadvantage to attending a Korean college. I wonder if you might explain that some.

    The other issue is where you plan to be after graduation. If you'd like to spend some time in the U.S., then a different issue than your technical proficiency is your mastery of English and your knowledge of American culture. Have you had experiences of the sort that would make you grow in this dimension? If so, have those happened during the school year, or during the summer? It may be that such experiences are valuable even if you go back to Korea immediately, if you end up working for a multinational that does business in the U.S. So I wonder if part of your thinking has been focused on these sorts of matters.

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    Replies
    1. Lawrence Klein Econ 490 fall 2019October 22, 2019 at 11:26 AM

      For me, age matters in term of social life. MASMC students are total of 60 students, we don't really share social life with college students. We are encouraged to share social life with college students yet we have many rules to follow as academy students. For example, we had study time from 7-9pm everyday and after those hours we can't get out of dormitory unless we are going to the library. There was one specific dormitory building for the academy. And, you need to be back at the dorm before 12pm from library. Everytime we go out the dormitory, we need to sign out/in unless it is for class. As college students know, most socializing events start afternoon around 7 and, we can't really enjoy it due to study time. In addition, we only had around 30 juniors and 30 seniors. So, you don't get to socialize with other people except time gap between classes.

      I had choice to go high school in Korea, but I wanted to go to the United States for an exchange student to improve my English skills. During the time, I enjoyed being in the United States, so I decided to keep studying in the United States. After my graduation in the United States, I would like to continue studying in college. It would have been much cheaper if I went to college in Korea, but since I finished high school here, I thought it would be better for me to go to college here. In fact, I had to take college entrance exam in Korea to get into the college which I am totally not prepared for.

      I originally wanted to spend some time in the U.S. after my graduation, but since I am neither permanent resident nor citizen, it would be hard for me to get a job that would sponsor my visa to be able to work here after my OPT, which is the visa allowing me to work here for 1 year upon college graduation. So, I figured it would be better for me to go back to Korea or other countries to find some jobs with multinational background. With that being said, spending 5 years in the U.S. has helped to me to understand the culture and develop my language skills.

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