In 21 years, Chris Lee has worked part-time for close to a dozen different employers. After every job, he learned a few valuable lessons, acquired new skills, and died a little on the inside.
He waited on tables and ran take-out at a Chinese restaurant. He was the sullen teenager behind an over-caffeinated, overly-cheery-sales-associate-mask at Old Navy. He gutted houses and interned at Maxim Magazine. He was a Resident Assistant for 14-year olds in upstate-New York, 17-year olds in Nanjing, China, and college students at Rutgers University. He is now giving vasectomy serious contemplation.
He simultaneously held three positions throughout college, and for the last two years, it’s been four: residence life at Rutgers, interning with Maxim Magazine Online, consulting at a computer lab, and editor for a college magazine.
Post-graduation, he will be completely and utterly unemployed for the first time since the age of 14. He will pursue young-adult fiction, freelance writing, and anything that piques his interests, no matter how temporary. Since none of those involve seeking or obtaining employment, he hopes to remain far away from the 9 to 5 life for a long time.
Chris Lee's blog is Christopher Ming Lee.
If I’m not having fun with it, then I won’t do it. Sometime here at CTY I realized this is the mantra I want my lifestyle to reflect.
You reverently hand your plan over to someone else, but not before offering latex gloves and a look that says, “Do you know how lucky you are?” And without further ado, the person holding your plan proceeds to defecate all over it. Doesn’t matter if they’re a Fortune 500 CEO or Dirty Pete the Clown - they’ll find a reason to treat your business plan like a diaper.
I have a general aversion to technology, and distrust anything that pledges to instantly make my life easier/faster/more streamlined. If this thing was so great, they would have invented it already, no? But I did pick up two new toys last week worth talking about…
Everyday you need to put everything you’ve got into little steps, making incremental improvements. You figure out your tasks, the targets you need to hit to reach your goal, and you work on scoring bull’s eyes, day in, day out. Until one day, everything “clicks.”
If you’re passionate about the topic, when you get up in the morning, it won’t be like going to work. And be focused! Decide what your target is, then hit, and hit it hard […]
Honing the ability to focus and get work done on a tight deadline is a skill set that’ll pay huge dividends throughout the duration of your career.
Too many graduates or soon-to-be-graduates flock to graduate school simply because they’re unsure of their next move.The only real reason you should be going to graduate school is if the position you want requires a graduate degree.
Two freelancers I spoke to are Diana Mimon and Elena Rover. Both have been very helpful about answering my questions on freelancing, and I thought it’d be a good idea to include their advice in a post: On Cold Querying: Elena says she hasn’t cold queried in years, but to write a good one - you […]
After college, I wanted to spend time living abroad, either in Europe or China. I wanted to explore, have an adventure, or to use my mother’s cliche, “find myself.” People, things, and situations change, however - I just never thought I’d make the move back to Albany. But I realized if I want to make […]
I make it a point to be as much of a late-adopter as possible. One reason is contempt for the self-serving American high schooler, who prance about with blue tooths deep in their ears and smart phones jammed equally far up their backdoor. “There’s no rush!” I want to yell at them, “You still […]
