Now it is a tough time to be a student these days, right?
Unemployment crisis, cost of living crisis, AI taking over the world.
Who knows whether the job that you thought you were going to get after university is actually going to still be around.
There's all sorts of uncertainty.
And so, for whatever it's worth, I'm going to be giving you my hot take in this video about what I would do if I were a student during these troubling times.
All right, by the way, if you don't know who I am, hello, my name is Ali.
I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and YouTuber, and author of the New York Times bestseller Feel Good Productivity.
I was a medical student at Cambridge University from 2012 through to 2018.
And I started this YouTube channel back in 2017, giving advice to medical students in particular, and medical applicants, And then I became like the online study guy, teaching students how to study for their exams back in the day.
And now I'm an old codger.
I'm 31 years old.
I've got a wife and a child.
Oh man, I don't know where the time went.
And because I still make YouTube videos opining about stuff, I'm going to opine about life as a student.
So being a student is like playing an open world video game.
Now, within this open world video game of being a student, you've kind of got like, Let's say, this is your start point, where you matriculate if you're in a fancy place or you enroll if you're in a less fancy place.
And you've got like your main quest line that takes you up to graduation.
As you know, with these sorts of open world video games there's a lot of like branching off side quests that you could do that branch off the main storyline.
Either way, you know, the march of time is still taking you towards graduation.
But while you are being a student, you don't have to just follow the main storyline of study for the exams, tick the boxes and end up graduating.
You can, in fact, run side quests.
Now, what are some examples of side quests that people do?
Sometimes people do the side quest of sports.
I had friends who were super into rowing, so they joined the rowing team.
I played badminton for my college team.
I had a friend who played rugby for the university team.
You know, sports is a very reasonable side quest that you could embark on.
If you wanted to, you could embark on the side quest of alcohol. and or substances.
Lots of people do that.
That wasn't really my cup of tea but you know I knew a lot of people who were super into the alcohol and or substances thing.
You could run the side quest of clubs, by which I mean nightclubs.
You could run the side quest of joining, like the debating society or joining groups, or you know, I was part of an acapella group while I was at university.
I also did the side quest of being the director of the hospital pantomime.
It's like, you know, there's random stuff like that that you can do.
You can do music, you can do theater.
So if I were a student and I knew that okay, there's the main quest that takes me to graduation and there are all these different side quests I could do.
I think it's, firstly, it's worth approaching university or college life as a video game in that sense.
But secondly, it's worth asking the question, what is the point?
Like, what are we actually trying to do here?
One, two, three.
I would like to proffer for your consideration that there are four kind of main objectives that we implicitly have when we are students, or maybe explicitly.
Objective number one is to enjoy the experience, right?
If you ask any old person for advice, you know what they wish, what advice they would have if they were a student.
They were like oh man, I just wish I'd taken the time to enjoy it more.
They'll say, for example you know this is the final time in your life where you're gonna have freedom, because then you're gonna graduate and you're gonna get a job and you're gonna get married and have a child, and like, oh my God, like the next time you're free is when you're retired.
And by then you'll have osteoarthritis in both of your knees.
So really focus on enjoying the experience.
Again, like playing a video game.
What's the ultimate point of a video game?
Well, the point is to enjoy the experience.
What in many ways is the ultimate point of life?
Arguably, the point of life is to enjoy the experience.
The philosopher Alan Watts said something like, you know, life is like a musical symphony.
The point is to enjoy the music.
The point is not to race to get to the end or to the climax or the crescendo or anything like that.
The point is to enjoy the music as it's playing.
100%, we want to, of course, enjoy the experience of playing the video game of student life.
We want to enjoy the experience of being a student at college or university.
Fantastic.
But we won't pay all of this money and spend all this time at university if the only goal was to enjoy the experience.
For some people, the only goal is to enjoy the experience.
Fair enough.
But I think for you, there are probably more goals than simply to enjoy the experience.
Of course, we do want to enjoy the experience.
The second major goal of doing a degree at a college or university is to learn stuff.
Right?
Some combination of knowledge and skills.
So, for example, I did medicine at Cambridge University and therefore I have some knowledge about like how the human body works and physiology and anatomy and biochemistry and all of that stuff that I've long since forgotten.
But I also learned skills during my degree, such as how to diagnose patients and how to deal with an arrhythmia and how to do CPR, and you know the practical skills associated with the stuff that you learn at university.
So I think we can all agree that our goal is to enjoy the experience and also to learn stuff.
Fantastic.
We're enjoying the experience and we are learning stuff.
The third point of going to college or university is for a lot of people to get the certificate.
I'm not saying this in a derogatory kind of way.
If, for example, you wanna be a doctor, you have to have the certificate that says you've graduated medical school.
Otherwise rightly, they don't let you be a doctor.
And this really, I think is the key part of why people spend so much money on university.
Because if it was just about enjoying the experience, you could get it far more cheaply.
If it was just about learning knowledge and skills, you know how to learn stuff on YouTube, right?
You could, if you really wanted, to hire a private tutor to teach you stuff, and it would still be cheaper than university.
To be honest, I went to one of the world's best medical schools and most of what I learned, in terms of the knowledge, I learned off of YouTube videos because, to be honest, YouTube videos are easier to follow than lectures, even in Cambridge University.
And so there's definitely a component of this that's about getting the certificate, right?
And the implicit reason why we want the certificate is not so that we can nail it to our wall.
The reason we want the certificate is so that improves our job prospects.
That is the whole idea behind the certificate.
Sometimes a job physically requires a specific certificate, like you can't be a doctor without a medical degree obviously, but sometimes the certificate is kind of like an indicator of credibility.
Let's say, McKinsey only hires people with certain certificates, ie people who went to fancy universities.
They don't really care what specifically you studied.
They don't really give a toss about the knowledge and skills you acquired at university at least not that much.
What they care about, at least in the initial screening process, is that you have got the certificate as a badge of credibility, so that it allows them to sift through the 20000 people who are applying and give 200 people a job.
So part of the point of university and college is to get the appropriate certificate such that it can enhance our job prospects.
And then the final point of college and university for a lot of people is something that we can call make friends if you're a normal person, and we can call it networking if you are on LinkedIn.
Good, so these are the four points of university.
We wanna enjoy the experience, we wanna learn stuff in the sense of knowledge and skills.
We wanna get the certificate so that it enhances our job prospects and we wanna make friends.
Slash network.
Now, I think these are all very, very, very good reasons to go to college or university.
I sometimes get people asking me like, oh, do you think college university is still worth it?
And it's like, well, it depends on what your goal is and it depends on what you're planning to do.
So I'm gonna assume that if you're a student, like yes, of course you wanna do this stuff.
You wanna enjoy the experience, learn things, improve your job prospects and make friends and network.
But there is a goal, right?
The main quest.
The main quest.
The reason you're playing this game from the start up until graduation is because you want college or university to prepare you for real life.
In particular, you want college and university to allow you to get a job.
All right, quick thing.
I'm going to interrupt the flow of this video to tell you about an amazing AI study bundle that is perfectly designed for students.
So essentially, me and my team have partnered up with various founders of other AI apps for students and we have come together to create the ultimate ai bundle for students.
This is a collection of six ai tools that can help you at different parts of your university or college experience.
We've got jenny ai, which is amazing for research and writing.
We've got gpt zero, which is an amazing way of like you know if you've written stuff, to make sure you haven't accidentally plagiarized something from from the internet.
There's voicepal, the app that my team and i have built to help you take notes on the go and sort of conversational writing, and also to help you record your lectures and turn those into notes.
There's Mathos AI that helps you you know if you're working on maths, equations and problems and stuff.
It sort of talks you through how you can solve them so that you can learn to do them for yourself.
There's Notilo, which is a smart AI note taking assistant.
And there is SightShore, which makes it super easy to manage your bibliography of references if you're writing essays or dissertations or articles.
Now, if you were to buy all of these apps individually, it would cost you more than 1000 a year for it.
But because we've put all of these into the ultimate bundle for students, you can get them all altogether bundled for way way way way, way cheaper than that.
So if you're interested, go to studybundle.com or check out the link in the video description.
And this is available for a limited time only if you are a student, so do please check that out.
Anyway, let's get back to the video.
I know it sounds unsexy to say this, but like, unless you have a trust fund, you are gonna need to have a way of making money.
You're gonna need some sort of economic engine because without money, you ain't gonna live.
And so, in a way, this kind of like this sort of goal of we're being students, we're doing a degree in subject xyz in order to be able to make money as an adult in the real world, which is why we need to get the certificate and, of course, along the way, we're going to be learning stuff.
Learning stuff also helps us make money as an adult in the real world.
Of course, we're going to make friends.
Uh, that will just help us in life and also, you know, a professional network can help you make money as an adult in the real world.
And, of course, we wanna sort of enjoy the experience while all of this stuff is happening.
So the reason I'm doing all this exposition is because I wanna show you my working as to why how we've landed on make money as an adult in the real world is kind of like a key factor here.
And, of course ideally, we would like the method that we use to make money as an adult in the real world to be fun and fulfilling and flexible.
However, it's not quite that simple anymore because yes, there are certain degrees that pretty much directly lead to a job.
Medicine still to this day is one of those things sort of that directly leads to a job, right?
You graduate from medical school, whether you're the top of the year or whether you're the bottom of the year, they still call you doctor.
And now you have graduated and, for the most part, there is a job for you.
This is not entirely true.
Depending on what country you're in and what the state of the country, is this and the other.
Like in the UK, the system that I'm quite familiar with.
Actually, a lot of people graduated medical school last year and there actually weren't enough jobs.
Shock horror.
These people joined med school six years ago and they were told that if you become a doctor, you have a job for life.
You have a way and a job for life basically means you have a reliable, secure way of making money in the real world in a way that's ideally fun and fulfilling.
These people, these poor medical students who joined back in like seven years ago, were told this, and then they graduate and there are actually not enough jobs.
That is a tricky position to be in.
And that's medicine.
Think about non-medical degrees.
I was reading a thing on Substack yesterday from some girl in LA who was lamenting the fact that she did an English literature degree and she was finding it impossible to get a job.
Most degrees i suspect the degree that you are doing statistically is not a vocational degree like medicine that directly leads to a job.
It's probably a degree in something that's a bit more broad, where actually it's not just degree x equals job y.
It's not that sort of one-to-one connection.
It's a bit more like maybe, let's say, you do a degree in accounting and finance now that could unlock a job within accounting and finance as an accountant or as an investment banker or as a analyst or as an associate or as a this, that and the other.
You could do whatever GDL to convert to law.
You could like, most degrees, Don't constrain very much your choices in the future job market.
So this is a video about what I would do if I were a student.
I would recognize that merely completing the main storyline, the main quest of starting and then graduating, just doing that, is actually not enough to set me up for life in the real world.
In the current state of society, with AI and economics that we are currently living in, just doing the main storyline is not enough to prepare you for the real world.
Now this is kind of like again, it's sort of like a video game.
Let's say you're playing a video game and you ignore all of the side quests and you just do the main storyline.
Now, as you're playing your video game, your character is leveling up.
Now i want you to at this point, i want you to imagine two different video game characters.
We've got character a and we've got character b.
Character a just runs the main storyline and ends up at graduation.
But character B runs the main storyline, but she does side quest A, side quest B, side quest there, side quest there, side quest there, side quest there and also ends up at graduation.
Which of these two characters is gonna have a higher level?
Maybe this character might be at level 30 by the time they arrive at graduation.
But maybe this person would be at level 50 by the time they arrive at graduation.
Because by doing side quests in the video games you generally gain more experience, you get more loot, get more gear, you level up your skill trees, all of that kind of stuff.
You are a higher level when you get to graduation, compared to someone who just exclusively followed the main storyline.
Now, why does this level matter?
Well, I think the level matters because, much like in a video game, the job market is kind of based on what is your level and what are your skills.
So if you went through the video game only following the main storyline ie just doing your exams and ticking the boxes and going up until graduation, but you never did any side quests and you never actually worked on your skill trees, you never leveled up your fishing or your alchemy or your cooking or your leatherworking or your witchcrafting or whatever,
Now you are underleveled by the time you get to graduation.
A, you have less experience because you didn't do the side quests.
B, you didn't bother leveling up your skill trees.
And C.
You probably had a worse time of it because actually quite of the fun of video games is like in kind of doing the side quests and stuff and not just single-mindedly following the main storyline.
So if I was a student again, obviously I would not follow path A.
I would not get to graduation, being underleveled.
I would follow path B where I would figure out what are the side quests that I can do?
Because yes, of course, I still want to learn stuff, make friends, get the certificate and enjoy the experience.
But I also want to level up.
Now let's imagine that these are five different skills.
Let's say this is the skill of the guitar.
So if you wanted to, you could level up the skill of the guitar while you're at university.
I learned how to play the guitar when I was in my second year of med school and I would sing a couple of songs and I did a bit of busking.
And so I was doing some amount of leveling up the skill of guitar.
Now, when it comes to the goal of being able to reliably make money as an adult in the real world, in order to have financial security, what is the value of leveling up the trade skill of playing the guitar?
Well, you could be a professional musician, but the chances of you succeeding as a professional musician are very low.
And If you're just picking up the guitar for the first time while you're at university man, good luck making it as a professional musician, because everyone who's making it probably started when they were a kid.
Secondly, you could be a guitar teacher.
Like, okay.
But, like for the most part, you and I would probably agree that learning how to play the guitar unless you're like freaking world-class John Mayer levels learning to play the guitar like the basics of being a campfire guitarist is sort of a low-income skill.
That's not to say it's low value.
You know, I love playing the guitar.
It's a great hobby.
I enjoy it.
It's good for my fun and fulfillment, but it does not help me make money as an adult in the real world, which we've established as being one of the points of university.
Another optional side quest that you could do is you could decide when you get to university.
You know what?
I wanna pick up chess, right?
And so I'm gonna level up my trade skill of being a chess player and so i'm going to go on my phone and go on chesscom in the evenings and i'm going to stay up way too late just playing stuff on chesscom.
I'm going to watch gotham chess, i'm going to watch these chess twitch streamers and chess, but whatever and maybe i'll join the university's chess club and maybe i'll get my rating up to i don't know, 1500 or 1600 or even 2000.
Now again, unless you become grand master level at chess, chess is also a relatively low income skill.
Unless you are Magnus Carlsen or a grandmaster, you're probably not making that much money from chess.
It is not helping you to make money as an adult in the real world.
Maybe if you're an attractive girl and you are streaming chess and you're sufficiently good and also sufficiently attractive and also like good on camera and stuff, then you can combine the skill of chess with the skill of being good on camera.
And now maybe you can make a career out of being a chess streamer.
But again, if I had my time at university and I was a beginner to chess, I would not be banking on becoming a chess streamer as being my method for making money as an adult in the real world.
That would just be a generally not sensible decision to make because it relies a lot on luck.
Maybe you know where I'm going with this, but what's another skill that you could choose to learn?
Well, let's... say this is like a laptop and this is the skill of coding.
Let's say you decide, even if you're not doing a computer science degree.
Let's say you're doing a accounting degree or a medicine degree or a law degree, whatever.
Let's say you decide, you know what?
On the side, I'm gonna learn the skill of coding.
I'm gonna learn how to build a website. how to build a web app.
I'm gonna learn how to AI vibe code stuff.
I'm gonna figure out what it takes to build an app on Swift or on Android.
I'm gonna figure out what deployment is and what production is and how to fix bugs and what unit tests are.
I'm gonna figure out what CSRF means.
I'm gonna see if I can build these little projects.
And I'm gonna learn those things from YouTube tutorials.
Maybe I'll go on Code Academy or Code School.
Maybe I'll join my college or university's coding club or coding camp.
Or maybe I'll join the Entrepreneurship Society and get together with other people.
And maybe, oh, you know, I saw that my university's holding a hackathon for like next weekend.
Why don't I get together with some friends and go to the hackathon next weekend and we can see if we can build something cool in 24 hours?
This person might be choosing to level up the trade skill of coding.
Now, does having the skill of coding improve your odds of making money as an adult in the real world?
Yes, it absolutely freaking does, right?
Of course it does.
If you learn how to code, you could, if you wanted to, you suddenly unlock the ability to get a job as a developer working in tech.
Tech salaries are huge, especially in places like the US.
Working as a remote developer allows you to get a remote job.
Back in the day, in the 2010s, you could just learn how to code and you could walk into one of these jobs.
These days, of course, it's more competitive, but Learning how to code unlocks quite a lot of income earning potential for you.
Whether it's working for someone else ie a job or whether it's working for yourself ie a business.
If you learn how to code and you choose to start your own business, you have the ability.
You suddenly magically unlock the ability to build a business where you're building an app or building a website.
That unlocks the business model of software as a service.
I have a friend, we have a whole case study video about him.
He learned to code.
He leveled up his trade skill of coding while he was at university.
Even though he wasn't taught coding in his degree, he did some side projects.
He and I attended a couple of hackathons and he got okay at coding.
He worked in management consulting for five years and then decided to quit, and then decided to build an app.
It's a video editing app called Firecut that helps video editors save time.
The only reason he could build that is because he knew the basics of coding.
And within like two months, he was making $10,000 a month from his app.
And now two years later, he's making like $1.2 million a year from his app.
And it's recurring revenue because they've got thousands of customers all around the world.
And he's making way more money than he was even working at a fancy consulting firm, because he had spent some time at university as a student learning to level up his coding skill.
There's another skill tree you could develop.
Let's say you were like, you know what?
I'm really gonna learn how to design stuff.
In particular, how to design tech products, probably digital products, like apps and websites and like web apps and user interface and user experience.
So let's say I do UI and UX design.
And I'm like, you know what?
That seems kind of interesting.
I've been intrigued by, you know, why are Apple products designed the way that they are?
Like how does the Airbnb website have such a nice user experience?
Why does Amazon just look so bad?
But like, obviously it still works.
You know, you might be interested in that kind of stuff.
You can watch some YouTube videos about UI and UX design.
And now you can dabble with a few different projects and you could level up your trade skill of user interface and user experience design.
Is that a low income trade skill or a high income trade skill?
That is a very high income trade skill because again, these rich tech companies are always looking for UI and UX designers.
I have a lot of friends who are running tech startups who are funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
And one thing they constantly lament is how few good UI and UX designers there are in the market.
So whether or not you're doing a degree in design, you could be doing a degree in law or medicine for all anyone cares but you can choose to level up your trade skill by doing side quests related to design.
And now you get to graduation and you have leveled up the trade skill of design.
Maybe you've even leveled up the trade skill of coding and having the trade skill of coding plus design man, there's a word for that.
They call it a full stack engineer or a full stack developer, because you're able to understand the design side and you're also able to understand the software and the architecture side.
And those people are like unicorns.
There's not that many of them out there that are actually good.
And so if you are actually good and you are a coder who knows design or a designer who knows code and will become like a product engineer again, your market value increases substantially because there's a lot of startups and a lot of established tech companies that would be willing to hire you remotely, on your own terms, for pretty large salaries.
Again allowing us to complete or to fulfill our objective of make money as an adult in the real world.
Don't just do these kinds of side quests because like, yeah, going to nightclubs is good.
What does it level up?
It levels up.
It makes you lose stats on your liver.
It makes you lose points on like your eardrums.
It probably helps you make more friends.
I mean although, in fairness, a lot of the friends you make in nightclubs generally tend not to be friends that stick around for very long after the whole like drinking and clubbing scene evaporates.
Like, just focusing on the side quest of doing nightclubs is unlikely to help improve your odds of making money as an adult in the real world.
If that's something that you care about, it's unlikely to teach you relevant skills.
Just doing alcohol and substances is probably unlikely to help you make money as an adult in the real world.
Doing sports unless your professional standard is very unlikely to help you make money as an adult in the real world.
These are all very fun to do.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do these things.
I'm saying, in addition to these things, think about doing high income side to level.
We're gonna call these side quests to level up high income skills.
Side quests to level up high income skills.
S-Q-T-L-U-H-I-S.
I'm sure there is a better way of branding this.
I did not learn the skill of branding and I'm just making this up as I go along.
I would say please do some side quests to level up high income skills.
What are those high income skills?
Well, we talked about coding.
Coding is a high income skill.
Copywriting, the ability to write stuff that persuades people to take action is a high income skill.
If you can, as a good copywriter, for example, increase the conversion rate on a website or in a store or something, the company makes more money and then therefore, you've made them more money, and making money is like the engine that drives capitalism.
And so you then have higher value because you've helped someone else make money.
Another high income skill you could learn is sales.
If you know how to sell things, then that works in almost any career you're in that interfaces with, like the free market.
So, for example if, even if you become a lawyer, you might not think sales is useful as a lawyer, but when you become partner and your job becomes not doing the law but to win new clients, you can bet your ass that, like sales as a skill, is going to be super helpful in that.
Learning how to use ai really well, learning how to build ai systems and ai agents and learning how to use ai automations and build ai automations for other people that's a really really, really valuable high income skill that will become more relevant as we progress through time.
Learning the skill of statistics and data analysis, not in the sense of just doing it for a degree, but being able to sort of go into a business or a workplace, be able to understand the data that they've got in their data warehousing, being able to figure out like what queries and like SQL queries and databases and shit that you have to use to be able to turn that data into insights that can allow that business to make more money or to help more customers.
That is a high income skill because very few people have that specific skillset.
Or just ask Claude or ChatGPT, say, hey, I'm looking for some high income skills to learn.
I'd like to do some side quests while I'm a student at university, while I have all this copious amount of free time.
In many ways, the point of university is not the degree.
The point is not graduation.
The point of university and college is that it's a scaffolding.
It is a very nice period of your life where all you have to do is hang out and learn stuff.
You just gotta hang out and learn stuff.
Now, if you are someone who hangs out and learn stuff that results in leveling up high income skills, you're never gonna be broke right.
You're always gonna have a job.
You'll be able to start your own business because you will have had high income skills.
You will have developed skills that are valued in the free market, in this capitalist world that we live in.
If you are someone who spent your time at university just hanging out thinking that, oh man, if I just do my degree it'll help me make money as an adult in the real world, you'll get to graduation and you'll be like crap.
It's really hard to find a job, probably.
Because you didn't spend the time leveling up your character, leveling up your high income skills.
That is the one piece of advice that I would have for students.
Think of university as a video game, where the goal is not simply to speed run the main storyline.
The goal is to also level up high income skills so that by the time you get to graduation you're an absolute weapon of a character.
You have leveled up beyond level 50.
You've got your trade skills.
You've got the skill of, I don't know, coding or design or video editing.
You know how to speak to a camera.
Maybe you know public speaking.
Maybe you know statistics.
You've dabbled in all these different arts so that now, when you are applying for jobs or maybe thinking of starting your own business, you have the ability to add value to the marketplace.
Because adding value to the marketplace, if you are in a profession that interacts with the free market so not doctors in a state-funded healthcare system, but pretty much everyone else if you have a job that interacts with the free market, then your ability to make money as an adult in the real world directly correlates with your ability to add value to the market, ie to develop valuable skills that solve problems in people's lives that they are willing to pay for.
So please don't waste your time at university.
Please, I beg you, recognise that you have an incredible opportunity right now because you're a student and you have so much free time on your hands.
If you think you don't have free time as a student, just wait till you get a job man, then it's really gonna hit you.
If you have copious amounts of free time as a student, I would really recommend you.
Please use that time to develop high income skills, learn stuff, get the certificate, make friends and network obviously.
Obviously, enjoying the experience is super, super important, but I don't need to tell you that because hopefully you know that already.
But while enjoying the experience, we can level up our high income skills and that will help you be way more attractive in the job market so that you can actually make money as an adult in the real world, unlike all the people who are struggling with employment and then have to go on welfare.
And if you enjoyed this video and you're interested in this thing of making money as an adult in the real world, I have this video over here which talks about how getting rich is a again kind of like a game.
I use less of a video game analogy in that, but it's more like getting rich as a game.
And if you care about making money as an adult in the real world, understanding how money actually works and understanding the language of business will be incredibly helpful.
So I really recommend you check out that video.
Thank you so much for watching and see you next time.
