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How to study debt free, expand your mind and gain international experience

D

Deleted78083

Guest
Hi,

It's me, Monfi. In this post, you can find information about how you can study debt-free while expanding your comfort zone and learning another language.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You recently turned 17 or 18 and are wondering what to study, where and how you can finance it without ending up in a mountain of debt? I did too (minus the debt part) but instead of asking and looking for information myself, I dove into the first degree that looked easy and interesting enough and never looked back. Today, I thoroughly regret that choice and would therefore like to offer some sort of guidance so you can avoid the mistakes I have made. You’ll also see how you don’t need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a decent education.

In this post, we’ll take a Fastlane perspective, meaning we won’t look at what you should study “because you find it interesting”, we’ll look at what you should study to ease the creation of a Fastlane business that respects the CENTS commandments. We’ll look at whether you should study at all, what you should study and where you should study.

I expect to get a lot of critics for this post, because I talk about “slowlane jobs” and “safety nets” which goes against the Fastlane mentality. Sue me, not everyone is ready to jump out of a plane without parachute at 18. I’m also using a lot of generalizations that many people will disagree with. It's fine, one should read this with a critical mind anyway. However, let's clear some things up right away:

1. You don’t need to study at university to create a Fastlane business, or to become a billionaire. I’ve read this in a book called “The Billionaire Highway” or something like that, about a car that goes fast and gets you rich quick, cannot remember….

2. There is no type of knowledge you can’t learn outside of university, because students learn from books and everyone can buy and read books.

3. Choosing whether you should study and what to study is ultimately a decision that depends on each individual, just like a lot of things. I wrote this post as if I was talking to a close friend or a sibling, based on my experience. It is not a “universal guide”, because everyone’s situation is different. HOWEVER, if one is completely lost regarding higher education, I think (and hope) this post can serve as a bit of guidance. This is a post I wish I had read when I was 18.



To give a bit of background, I’m 25 years old, have studied economic sciences one year in the French speaking part of Belgium before giving up, then I studied a bachelor in communication and media in the Netherlands for three years, went on exchange to France in a political science university, and studied two masters in a Flemish Belgian university, one in business economics, and one in political science and EU studies. I also worked as an ambassador for my university during which I had to learn about all the programs that were taught and this is how I learnt about the content and skills taught in other programs. Finally, I don’t know everything and don’t pretend I do. This is only the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, a lot of research should be done before choosing studies.


1. First question: should one study?

Yes.

BUT, it all comes down to what you study. If studying means getting 100 000$ of debt to graduate with a communication degree, then my answer would be “hell no”. Do you know what you can do with 100 000$ dollars? You can buy 5 housing units in Bansko, Bulgaria. Furthermore, as interesting as it is, communication doesn’t give you many tools to build a Fastlane business and the slowlane job prospects are probably below 0%.

A frequent counter-argument to studying is Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Zuck etc. Most of these guys actually started studying and built their Fastlane business while in college and when it worked, they quit their studies: they didn’t need to get an education because they had gotten it themselves somewhere else, and they were able to solve problems. As for Branson, he had created a nation-wide newspaper at 17 years old, so he didn’t really need an education either since he had this thing going on that he subsequently used to launch Virgin. If you’re reading this, I can reasonably expect that you don’t have an existing business. That's ok, no worries.

So, why should you study? For the following reasons:

- If you choose the right degree, university actually teaches you interesting stuff: it helps you structure your thoughts and you get to learn important skills that you can use to build a Fastlane business (talked about in the “what to study” section). While what you learn at uni could be learnt anywhere, you can enjoy having professors challenging your thoughts and mentoring you into developing your skills.. You also write assignments and have someone correcting them, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Exams teach you organization and stress you out so that you learn to face stress for future situations. You also learn to give public presentations, and to work in teams.

- A diploma is an IQ test result: this is going to draw a lot of criticisms, but I believe a diploma is used a lot nowadays as a way to quickly assess someone’s capacities. There are diplomas that scream “SMART” (engineering or medicine, even though not everyone getting these diplomas are necessarily smart) and diplomas that scream “DUMB”. Communication, for example, screams “DUMB”. In fact, about 1/3 of my auditorium ended up in communication because they had failed their business studies (me included) and while all people in communication are not necessarily dumb…the public is not the same than in astrophysical engineering, let's be honest.

- A diploma allows you to get a slowlane job to pay bills while building your Fastlane business: I know, I know, MJ didn’t get a corporate job when he was building his business, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won't need to…or want to. Furthermore, a slowlane job can be a great catalyst to build a Fastlane business. The 5 people that created SAP for example, met and worked at IBM in the slowlane before quitting and starting SAP together. Sometimes, it is good to have a corporate job to get a bit of experience and inspiration before starting a Fastlane business, or to simply look for problems that need to be solved.

- A diploma is mandatory to build a business: where I’m from at least, but it ultimately depends on your country.

- It gives you the chance to meet like-minded people: priceless if your Fastlane idea requires more than one person, or if you need different profiles. A campus is a great untapped talent pool.

- It’s a safety net: as more and more people are getting higher education, it is increasingly difficult to find a job when one has no diploma (again, not the rule, there is this awesome gold thread about that guy that became an IT engineer without going to college) . While I wish you success with your ventures, there are sometimes difficult times when money must be gathered urgently and for which a slowlane job is the best solution, and it’s easier to find a slowlane job when you have a high-demanded degree than when you don’t.

- It gives you time to think and experience: few people know what they want at 18 years old and this is normal. Society is pressuring you already and makes you feel guilty about a bunch of stuff so that you consume and work asap. As such, I believe that debt has been enforced onto the US students so they must work as soon as possible after they graduate, which allows the government to get taxes (non-empirical, it’s my personal conspiracy theory).
In a way, university gives you the chance to explore, think, test your competences and who knows, build already some skills.


Now that we have established why it is interesting to study, let’s have a look at what to study.

2. What to study:

I’ve had a look at the first 6 websites that Google showed me when I typed “high-demand degrees” and then selected the degrees that gave interesting skills to develop creative solutions to solve problems or to build high-value businesses. For example, "nurse" was something that came up quite often because there is a shortage of nurses around the world, but I took it off the list because the skills you learn there are not as problem-solving oriented than other degrees written below, even though I’m certain nurses come across plenty of Fastlane business ideas every day.

- Engineering: engineers are with inventors and entrepreneurs the people that make the world moving forward. The computer/phone you have has been built by an engineer because other engineers built machines and infrastructures to mine resources needed to build the computer, while other engineers invented then wrote computer code so you can communicate with the machine. Engineering may be the best topic you can study, because it teaches you how to solve problems, the core to creating a Fastlane business. On top of that, engineers can pretty much work anywhere, their diploma/skills are recognized, and they can find high-paying slowlane jobs faster than people that are not engineers (wide generalization) because the world needs engineers, and there aren’t many because it is harder to study. Topics such as civil engineering, IT engineering, mechanical engineering, business engineering, financial engineering are quite good, followed by chemical or bio-engineering (more restrictive, but it ultimately comes down to the study program also).

- IT: the world won’t de-digitalize, quite the opposite. There are many Fastlane opportunities in IT, and it is a skill in high-demand for slowlane jobs.

- Math: tightly linked to engineering, there are less and less people that study math despite math being tight to a lot of important tech disciplines, from AI and data-science, to genetic-sequencing and blockchain. Math are important both in life and business and is a great tool to decision-making, a core skill of entrepreneurship. However, not everyone can do that.

- Physics: just like math

- Economics/finance: economics is fascinating as we’re still not exactly sure how it works, you’ll have your fair share of math, which is good, it is a good degree to get a slowlane job.

- Business: I always hesitate when I tell people to study business, because they will learn about marketing and HRM and strategy, things you de facto learn while building a Fastlane business, and things you can easily learn by yourself anyway (which is not the case of engineering, for example). So studying business can be good for someone who is afraid not to be able to study engineering, or math, for example.

There are a lot of other studies I left out, so keep STEM in mind as a rule of thumb.

3. Where should you study?

Where it's cheap and high quality, meaning "not in America". Unless you can score an Ivy league university (and even then, I don’t know if the price is worth it), I wouldn’t study in the US if you need to borrow money, because it directly restricts your choices once you graduate. I would instead study in the EU, where the universities are still excellent, much cheaper and where you can survive by having a student job. Worst case scenario, you can always borrow a bit to pay your rent, but this very rarely happens as very poor students can apply for financial help on different levels (government, university, city, etc).

“But Monfi, I only speak English and studying in the UK is horribly expensive”. Yeah, it is, though not as much as in the US, but to be honest, I wouldn’t study there unless you get into an Oxbridge school. Now, when it comes to language barriers, you have two choices:

1. You don’t learn the local language and choose an English-taught bachelor (not recommended)

2. You learn the local language and study a local-language-taught bachelor (recommended)

Let’s do 1 first. If you only speak English and don’t want to bother learning another language, then the Netherlands would be an ideal destination, or any other Scandinavian country (mind that Ireland is a possibility, but I’m not sure about the prices to study over there, if you know, please comment). More and more countries in Europe start proposing programs in English, so you don’t need to restrict yourself to Northern-Western Europe. In terms of tuition fees for foreigners, Germany, Belgium and France are for most programs super cheap (100€-1000€).

When it comes to studying and working, Scandinavia is great because you’ll make enough money with a student job to pay rent and food (high purchasing power). Southern and Eastern Europe are less ideal as you’ll make less money there, but the cost of living are also lower.


Now, let’s see what to do if you want to learn a foreign language.


Learning a language to study:

First of all, I recommend you to learn a language because it helps with brain plasticity, it opens a whole new world of meaning and it is an achievement you can genuinely feel proud of. But is it possible to learn a language and then go studying in this language? To answer this question, Imma do like Jesus, or Disney: I’m going to tell you a story with a strong lesson at the end.

Some time ago, I’ve met two 20 year-old Russian girls that had moved to Czech Republic because they didn’t want to stay in Russia, and Czech Republic is a rather friendly country for Russians visa-wise. Since they couldn’t speak a word of Czech when they arrived, they spent the first year taking Czech classes and working in local bars and restaurants. After one year, they were fluent in Czech and entered university. They got jobs working in Czech companies in Czech and in a couple of years, will be Czech citizens.

This is great and this is something I did myself (although not with Czech). After living a year in Australia to learn English, I’ve entered university in the Netherlands and studied in English, which now prevents me from “proving” I speak decent English when applying for jobs. Learning a foreign language never is a waste of time and really expands your capacity to understand the world. One year should be enough to learn about any latin alphabet language so that you can use it to study. We’re not talking about Chinese, Arabic or Russian here, where you’d have to learn a whole new wording structures and different characters. Also, no one said studying debt-free was easy.

4. What about tuition fees?

They vary, most EU universities will make you pay more if you don’t have a EU passport/residency, but it’ll never be higher than 10 000€ per year (for bachelors, some masters are more expensive). In the Netherlands for example, non-EU people paid 6000€ while EU people paid 2000€. Obviously, some programs are often more expensive for non-EU people when taught in English, but you’ll never see in Europe something along 40 000 USD per year, that simply doesn’t exist.

5. How do I finance it?

You get a student job/build a freelance business. I am not aware of any EU countries where student jobs don’t exist. In most cases, a student job will be enough to finance your life. Universities also help students with low financial means, and if you’re lucky, you can always ask your parents to give you 100$ or 200$ a month to pay for food. In the worst case scenario, you can always borrow money to finance food/rent while working on the side, but that probably won’t be needed as you can easily live with 1000€/month in any EU city (London excluded). I personally spend 650€/month in Brussels, all included, but I’m also a cheap f*ck. I have up to this date, never met any European that had to borrow to study because no other solution had worked out (except British people). Some countries also propose programs where students go to school 1/2 week and work for a company the other 1/2 of the week, like Germany for example. The company pays for the studies of the student and also pays a small salary.

The bottom line

If there is one thing I want you to remember, this is the following: you don’t need to study at home, you don’t need to borrow astronomical sums and you don’t need to study in English. The world is your playground, you can study anything anywhere for much cheaper than what you'd pay in the US/Australia/etc. In my case, being an international student wasn’t easy every day, but I have learnt a lot, met a lot of different people, and it expanded my comfort zone up to the point that by the time I was 20, I had no problems with the perspective to move anywhere in the world. The only thing I regret was my topic, but I won’t go back in time.


I hope this guide has given you some more clarity regarding studies, and that you’ll now do the work to choose well your degree, and the country where you’d like to study it.

Best,


M.




 
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fridge

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2. What to study:

I’ve had a look at the first 6 websites that Google showed me when I typed “high-demand degrees” and then selected the degrees that gave interesting skills to develop creative solutions to solve problems or to build high-value businesses. For example, "nurse" was something that came up quite often because there is a shortage of nurses around the world, but I took it off the list because the skills you learn there are not as problem-solving oriented than other degrees written below, even though I’m certain nurses come across plenty of Fastlane business ideas every day.

- IT: the world won’t de-digitalize, quite the opposite. There are many Fastlane opportunities in IT, and it is a skill in high-demand for slowlane jobs.

What are some fastlane opportunities located in the IT field? I work in IT and I'm very interested to learn what the future could hold.
 

Inventor001

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Hi,

It's me, Monfi. In this post, you can find information about how you can study debt-free while expanding your comfort zone and learning another language.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You recently turned 17 or 18 and are wondering what to study, where and how you can finance it without ending up in a mountain of debt? I did too (minus the debt part) but instead of asking and looking for information myself, I dove into the first degree that looked easy and interesting enough and never looked back. Today, I thoroughly regret that choice and would therefore like to offer some sort of guidance so you can avoid the mistakes I have made. You’ll also see how you don’t need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a decent education.

In this post, we’ll take a Fastlane perspective, meaning we won’t look at what you should study “because you find it interesting”, we’ll look at what you should study to ease the creation of a Fastlane business that respects the CENTS commandments. We’ll look at whether you should study at all, what you should study and where you should study.

I expect to get a lot of critics for this post, because I talk about “slowlane jobs” and “safety nets” which goes against the Fastlane mentality. Sue me, not everyone is ready to jump out of a plane without parachute at 18. I’m also using a lot of generalizations that many people will disagree with. It's fine, one should read this with a critical mind anyway. However, let's clear some things up right away:

1. You don’t need to study at university to create a Fastlane business, or to become a billionaire. I’ve read this in a book called “The Billionaire Highway” or something like that, about a car that goes fast and gets you rich quick, cannot remember….

2. There is no type of knowledge you can’t learn outside of university, because students learn from books and everyone can buy and read books.

3. Choosing whether you should study and what to study is ultimately a decision that depends on each individual, just like a lot of things. I wrote this post as if I was talking to a close friend or a sibling, based on my experience. It is not a “universal guide”, because everyone’s situation is different. HOWEVER, if one is completely lost regarding higher education, I think (and hope) this post can serve as a bit of guidance. This is a post I wish I had read when I was 18.



To give a bit of background, I’m 25 years old, have studied economic sciences one year in the French speaking part of Belgium before giving up, then I studied a bachelor in communication and media in the Netherlands for three years, went on exchange to France in a political science university, and studied two masters in a Flemish Belgian university, one in business economics, and one in political science and EU studies. I also worked as an ambassador for my university during which I had to learn about all the programs that were taught and this is how I learnt about the content and skills taught in other programs. Finally, I don’t know everything and don’t pretend I do. This is only the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, a lot of research should be done before choosing studies.


1. First question: should one study?

Yes.

BUT, it all comes down to what you study. If studying means getting 100 000$ of debt to graduate with a communication degree, then my answer would be “hell no”. Do you know what you can do with 100 000$ dollars? You can buy 5 housing units in Bansko, Bulgaria. Furthermore, as interesting as it is, communication doesn’t give you many tools to build a Fastlane business and the slowlane job prospects are probably below 0%.

A frequent counter-argument to studying is Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Zuck etc. Most of these guys actually started studying and built their Fastlane business while in college and when it worked, they quit their studies: they didn’t need to get an education because they had gotten it themselves somewhere else, and they were able to solve problems. As for Branson, he had created a nation-wide newspaper at 17 years old, so he didn’t really need an education either since he had this thing going on that he subsequently used to launch Virgin. If you’re reading this, I can reasonably expect that you don’t have an existing business. That's ok, no worries.

So, why should you study? For the following reasons:

- If you choose the right degree, university actually teaches you interesting stuff: it helps you structure your thoughts and you get to learn important skills that you can use to build a Fastlane business (talked about in the “what to study” section). While what you learn at uni could be learnt anywhere, you can enjoy having professors challenging your thoughts and mentoring you into developing your skills.. You also write assignments and have someone correcting them, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Exams teach you organization and stress you out so that you learn to face stress for future situations. You also learn to give public presentations, and to work in teams.

- A diploma is an IQ test result: this is going to draw a lot of criticisms, but I believe a diploma is used a lot nowadays as a way to quickly assess someone’s capacities. There are diplomas that scream “SMART” (engineering or medicine, even though not everyone getting these diplomas are necessarily smart) and diplomas that scream “DUMB”. Communication, for example, screams “DUMB”. In fact, about 1/3 of my auditorium ended up in communication because they had failed their business studies (me included) and while all people in communication are not necessarily dumb…the public is not the same than in astrophysical engineering, let's be honest.

- A diploma allows you to get a slowlane job to pay bills while building your Fastlane business: I know, I know, MJ didn’t get a corporate job when he was building his business, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won't need to…or want to. Furthermore, a slowlane job can be a great catalyst to build a Fastlane business. The 5 people that created SAP for example, met and worked at IBM in the slowlane before quitting and starting SAP together. Sometimes, it is good to have a corporate job to get a bit of experience and inspiration before starting a Fastlane business, or to simply look for problems that need to be solved.

- A diploma is mandatory to build a business: where I’m from at least, but it ultimately depends on your country.

- It gives you the chance to meet like-minded people: priceless if your Fastlane idea requires more than one person, or if you need different profiles. A campus is a great untapped talent pool.

- It’s a safety net: as more and more people are getting higher education, it is increasingly difficult to find a job when one has no diploma (again, not the rule, there is this awesome gold thread about that guy that became an IT engineer without going to college) . While I wish you success with your ventures, there are sometimes difficult times when money must be gathered urgently and for which a slowlane job is the best solution, and it’s easier to find a slowlane job when you have a high-demanded degree than when you don’t.

- It gives you time to think and experience: few people know what they want at 18 years old and this is normal. Society is pressuring you already and makes you feel guilty about a bunch of stuff so that you consume and work asap. As such, I believe that debt has been enforced onto the US students so they must work as soon as possible after they graduate, which allows the government to get taxes (non-empirical, it’s my personal conspiracy theory).
In a way, university gives you the chance to explore, think, test your competences and who knows, build already some skills.


Now that we have established why it is interesting to study, let’s have a look at what to study.

2. What to study:

I’ve had a look at the first 6 websites that Google showed me when I typed “high-demand degrees” and then selected the degrees that gave interesting skills to develop creative solutions to solve problems or to build high-value businesses. For example, "nurse" was something that came up quite often because there is a shortage of nurses around the world, but I took it off the list because the skills you learn there are not as problem-solving oriented than other degrees written below, even though I’m certain nurses come across plenty of Fastlane business ideas every day.

- Engineering: engineers are with inventors and entrepreneurs the people that make the world moving forward. The computer/phone you have has been built by an engineer because other engineers built machines and infrastructures to mine resources needed to build the computer, while other engineers invented then wrote computer code so you can communicate with the machine. Engineering may be the best topic you can study, because it teaches you how to solve problems, the core to creating a Fastlane business. On top of that, engineers can pretty much work anywhere, their diploma/skills are recognized, and they can find high-paying slowlane jobs faster than people that are not engineers (wide generalization) because the world needs engineers, and there aren’t many because it is harder to study. Topics such as civil engineering, IT engineering, mechanical engineering, business engineering, financial engineering are quite good, followed by chemical or bio-engineering (more restrictive, but it ultimately comes down to the study program also).

- IT: the world won’t de-digitalize, quite the opposite. There are many Fastlane opportunities in IT, and it is a skill in high-demand for slowlane jobs.

- Math: tightly linked to engineering, there are less and less people that study math despite math being tight to a lot of important tech disciplines, from AI and data-science, to genetic-sequencing and blockchain. Math are important both in life and business and is a great tool to decision-making, a core skill of entrepreneurship. However, not everyone can do that.

- Physics: just like math

- Economics/finance: economics is fascinating as we’re still not exactly sure how it works, you’ll have your fair share of math, which is good, it is a good degree to get a slowlane job.

- Business: I always hesitate when I tell people to study business, because they will learn about marketing and HRM and strategy, things you de facto learn while building a Fastlane business, and things you can easily learn by yourself anyway (which is not the case of engineering, for example). So studying business can be good for someone who is afraid not to be able to study engineering, or math, for example.

There are a lot of other studies I left out, so keep STEM in mind as a rule of thumb.

3. Where should you study?

Where it's cheap and high quality, meaning "not in America". Unless you can score an Ivy league university (and even then, I don’t know if the price is worth it), I wouldn’t study in the US if you need to borrow money, because it directly restricts your choices once you graduate. I would instead study in the EU, where the universities are still excellent, much cheaper and where you can survive by having a student job. Worst case scenario, you can always borrow a bit to pay your rent, but this very rarely happens as very poor students can apply for financial help on different levels (government, university, city, etc).

“But Monfi, I only speak English and studying in the UK is horribly expensive”. Yeah, it is, though not as much as in the US, but to be honest, I wouldn’t study there unless you get into an Oxbridge school. Now, when it comes to language barriers, you have two choices:

1. You don’t learn the local language and choose an English-taught bachelor (not recommended)

2. You learn the local language and study a local-language-taught bachelor (recommended)

Let’s do 1 first. If you only speak English and don’t want to bother learning another language, then the Netherlands would be an ideal destination, or any other Scandinavian country (mind that Ireland is a possibility, but I’m not sure about the prices to study over there, if you know, please comment). More and more countries in Europe start proposing programs in English, so you don’t need to restrict yourself to Northern-Western Europe. In terms of tuition fees for foreigners, Germany, Belgium and France are for most programs super cheap (100€-1000€).

When it comes to studying and working, Scandinavia is great because you’ll make enough money with a student job to pay rent and food (high purchasing power). Southern and Eastern Europe are less ideal as you’ll make less money there, but the cost of living are also lower.


Now, let’s see what to do if you want to learn a foreign language.


Learning a language to study:

First of all, I recommend you to learn a language because it helps with brain plasticity, it opens a whole new world of meaning and it is an achievement you can genuinely feel proud of. But is it possible to learn a language and then go studying in this language? To answer this question, Imma do like Jesus, or Disney: I’m going to tell you a story with a strong lesson at the end.

Some time ago, I’ve met two 20 year-old Russian girls that had moved to Czech Republic because they didn’t want to stay in Russia, and Czech Republic is a rather friendly country for Russians visa-wise. Since they couldn’t speak a word of Czech when they arrived, they spent the first year taking Czech classes and working in local bars and restaurants. After one year, they were fluent in Czech and entered university. They got jobs working in Czech companies in Czech and in a couple of years, will be Czech citizens.

This is great and this is something I did myself (although not with Czech). After living a year in Australia to learn English, I’ve entered university in the Netherlands and studied in English, which now prevents me from “proving” I speak decent English when applying for jobs. Learning a foreign language never is a waste of time and really expands your capacity to understand the world. One year should be enough to learn about any latin alphabet language so that you can use it to study. We’re not talking about Chinese, Arabic or Russian here, where you’d have to learn a whole new wording structures and different characters. Also, no one said studying debt-free was easy.

4. What about tuition fees?

They vary, most EU universities will make you pay more if you don’t have a EU passport/residency, but it’ll never be higher than 10 000€ per year (for bachelors, some masters are more expensive). In the Netherlands for example, non-EU people paid 6000€ while EU people paid 2000€. Obviously, some programs are often more expensive for non-EU people when taught in English, but you’ll never see in Europe something along 40 000 USD per year, that simply doesn’t exist.

5. How do I finance it?

You get a student job/build a freelance business. I am not aware of any EU countries where student jobs don’t exist. In most cases, a student job will be enough to finance your life. Universities also help students with low financial means, and if you’re lucky, you can always ask your parents to give you 100$ or 200$ a month to pay for food. In the worst case scenario, you can always borrow money to finance food/rent while working on the side, but that probably won’t be needed as you can easily live with 1000€/month in any EU city (London excluded). I personally spend 650€/month in Brussels, all included, but I’m also a cheap f*ck. I have up to this date, never met any European that had to borrow to study because no other solution had worked out (except British people). Some countries also propose programs where students go to school 1/2 week and work for a company the other 1/2 of the week, like Germany for example. The company pays for the studies of the student and also pays a small salary.

The bottom line

If there is one thing I want you to remember, this is the following: you don’t need to study at home, you don’t need to borrow astronomical sums and you don’t need to study in English. The world is your playground, you can study anything anywhere for much cheaper than what you'd pay in the US/Australia/etc. In my case, being an international student wasn’t easy every day, but I have learnt a lot, met a lot of different people, and it expanded my comfort zone up to the point that by the time I was 20, I had no problems with the perspective to move anywhere in the world. The only thing I regret was my topic, but I won’t go back in time.


I hope this guide has given you some more clarity regarding studies, and that you’ll now do the work to choose well your degree, and the country where you’d like to study it.

Best,


M.




can't we just study in a average college near our home
 

finnc

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(mind that Ireland is a possibility, but I’m not sure about the prices to study over there, if you know, please comment).



Guy from Ireland here. Tuition maxes out at three thousand euro per year for Irish citizens and people who have attended high school in Ireland. The Irish government heavily subsidises third-level education. Int. students have to pay the entire tuition themselves ($15k+/year) + accommodation. We have good universities here but they might not be worth that price tag.
 
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Funky Monkey

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Hi,

It's me, Monfi. In this post, you can find information about how you can study debt-free while expanding your comfort zone and learning another language.

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You recently turned 17 or 18 and are wondering what to study, where and how you can finance it without ending up in a mountain of debt? I did too (minus the debt part) but instead of asking and looking for information myself, I dove into the first degree that looked easy and interesting enough and never looked back. Today, I thoroughly regret that choice and would therefore like to offer some sort of guidance so you can avoid the mistakes I have made. You’ll also see how you don’t need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a decent education.

In this post, we’ll take a Fastlane perspective, meaning we won’t look at what you should study “because you find it interesting”, we’ll look at what you should study to ease the creation of a Fastlane business that respects the CENTS commandments. We’ll look at whether you should study at all, what you should study and where you should study.

I expect to get a lot of critics for this post, because I talk about “slowlane jobs” and “safety nets” which goes against the Fastlane mentality. Sue me, not everyone is ready to jump out of a plane without parachute at 18. I’m also using a lot of generalizations that many people will disagree with. It's fine, one should read this with a critical mind anyway. However, let's clear some things up right away:

1. You don’t need to study at university to create a Fastlane business, or to become a billionaire. I’ve read this in a book called “The Billionaire Highway” or something like that, about a car that goes fast and gets you rich quick, cannot remember….

2. There is no type of knowledge you can’t learn outside of university, because students learn from books and everyone can buy and read books.

3. Choosing whether you should study and what to study is ultimately a decision that depends on each individual, just like a lot of things. I wrote this post as if I was talking to a close friend or a sibling, based on my experience. It is not a “universal guide”, because everyone’s situation is different. HOWEVER, if one is completely lost regarding higher education, I think (and hope) this post can serve as a bit of guidance. This is a post I wish I had read when I was 18.



To give a bit of background, I’m 25 years old, have studied economic sciences one year in the French speaking part of Belgium before giving up, then I studied a bachelor in communication and media in the Netherlands for three years, went on exchange to France in a political science university, and studied two masters in a Flemish Belgian university, one in business economics, and one in political science and EU studies. I also worked as an ambassador for my university during which I had to learn about all the programs that were taught and this is how I learnt about the content and skills taught in other programs. Finally, I don’t know everything and don’t pretend I do. This is only the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, a lot of research should be done before choosing studies.


1. First question: should one study?

Yes.

BUT, it all comes down to what you study. If studying means getting 100 000$ of debt to graduate with a communication degree, then my answer would be “hell no”. Do you know what you can do with 100 000$ dollars? You can buy 5 housing units in Bansko, Bulgaria. Furthermore, as interesting as it is, communication doesn’t give you many tools to build a Fastlane business and the slowlane job prospects are probably below 0%.

A frequent counter-argument to studying is Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Zuck etc. Most of these guys actually started studying and built their Fastlane business while in college and when it worked, they quit their studies: they didn’t need to get an education because they had gotten it themselves somewhere else, and they were able to solve problems. As for Branson, he had created a nation-wide newspaper at 17 years old, so he didn’t really need an education either since he had this thing going on that he subsequently used to launch Virgin. If you’re reading this, I can reasonably expect that you don’t have an existing business. That's ok, no worries.

So, why should you study? For the following reasons:

- If you choose the right degree, university actually teaches you interesting stuff: it helps you structure your thoughts and you get to learn important skills that you can use to build a Fastlane business (talked about in the “what to study” section). While what you learn at uni could be learnt anywhere, you can enjoy having professors challenging your thoughts and mentoring you into developing your skills.. You also write assignments and have someone correcting them, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Exams teach you organization and stress you out so that you learn to face stress for future situations. You also learn to give public presentations, and to work in teams.

- A diploma is an IQ test result: this is going to draw a lot of criticisms, but I believe a diploma is used a lot nowadays as a way to quickly assess someone’s capacities. There are diplomas that scream “SMART” (engineering or medicine, even though not everyone getting these diplomas are necessarily smart) and diplomas that scream “DUMB”. Communication, for example, screams “DUMB”. In fact, about 1/3 of my auditorium ended up in communication because they had failed their business studies (me included) and while all people in communication are not necessarily dumb…the public is not the same than in astrophysical engineering, let's be honest.

- A diploma allows you to get a slowlane job to pay bills while building your Fastlane business: I know, I know, MJ didn’t get a corporate job when he was building his business, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won't need to…or want to. Furthermore, a slowlane job can be a great catalyst to build a Fastlane business. The 5 people that created SAP for example, met and worked at IBM in the slowlane before quitting and starting SAP together. Sometimes, it is good to have a corporate job to get a bit of experience and inspiration before starting a Fastlane business, or to simply look for problems that need to be solved.

- A diploma is mandatory to build a business: where I’m from at least, but it ultimately depends on your country.

- It gives you the chance to meet like-minded people: priceless if your Fastlane idea requires more than one person, or if you need different profiles. A campus is a great untapped talent pool.

- It’s a safety net: as more and more people are getting higher education, it is increasingly difficult to find a job when one has no diploma (again, not the rule, there is this awesome gold thread about that guy that became an IT engineer without going to college) . While I wish you success with your ventures, there are sometimes difficult times when money must be gathered urgently and for which a slowlane job is the best solution, and it’s easier to find a slowlane job when you have a high-demanded degree than when you don’t.

- It gives you time to think and experience: few people know what they want at 18 years old and this is normal. Society is pressuring you already and makes you feel guilty about a bunch of stuff so that you consume and work asap. As such, I believe that debt has been enforced onto the US students so they must work as soon as possible after they graduate, which allows the government to get taxes (non-empirical, it’s my personal conspiracy theory).
In a way, university gives you the chance to explore, think, test your competences and who knows, build already some skills.


Now that we have established why it is interesting to study, let’s have a look at what to study.

2. What to study:

I’ve had a look at the first 6 websites that Google showed me when I typed “high-demand degrees” and then selected the degrees that gave interesting skills to develop creative solutions to solve problems or to build high-value businesses. For example, "nurse" was something that came up quite often because there is a shortage of nurses around the world, but I took it off the list because the skills you learn there are not as problem-solving oriented than other degrees written below, even though I’m certain nurses come across plenty of Fastlane business ideas every day.

- Engineering: engineers are with inventors and entrepreneurs the people that make the world moving forward. The computer/phone you have has been built by an engineer because other engineers built machines and infrastructures to mine resources needed to build the computer, while other engineers invented then wrote computer code so you can communicate with the machine. Engineering may be the best topic you can study, because it teaches you how to solve problems, the core to creating a Fastlane business. On top of that, engineers can pretty much work anywhere, their diploma/skills are recognized, and they can find high-paying slowlane jobs faster than people that are not engineers (wide generalization) because the world needs engineers, and there aren’t many because it is harder to study. Topics such as civil engineering, IT engineering, mechanical engineering, business engineering, financial engineering are quite good, followed by chemical or bio-engineering (more restrictive, but it ultimately comes down to the study program also).

- IT: the world won’t de-digitalize, quite the opposite. There are many Fastlane opportunities in IT, and it is a skill in high-demand for slowlane jobs.

- Math: tightly linked to engineering, there are less and less people that study math despite math being tight to a lot of important tech disciplines, from AI and data-science, to genetic-sequencing and blockchain. Math are important both in life and business and is a great tool to decision-making, a core skill of entrepreneurship. However, not everyone can do that.

- Physics: just like math

- Economics/finance: economics is fascinating as we’re still not exactly sure how it works, you’ll have your fair share of math, which is good, it is a good degree to get a slowlane job.

- Business: I always hesitate when I tell people to study business, because they will learn about marketing and HRM and strategy, things you de facto learn while building a Fastlane business, and things you can easily learn by yourself anyway (which is not the case of engineering, for example). So studying business can be good for someone who is afraid not to be able to study engineering, or math, for example.

There are a lot of other studies I left out, so keep STEM in mind as a rule of thumb.

3. Where should you study?

Where it's cheap and high quality, meaning "not in America". Unless you can score an Ivy league university (and even then, I don’t know if the price is worth it), I wouldn’t study in the US if you need to borrow money, because it directly restricts your choices once you graduate. I would instead study in the EU, where the universities are still excellent, much cheaper and where you can survive by having a student job. Worst case scenario, you can always borrow a bit to pay your rent, but this very rarely happens as very poor students can apply for financial help on different levels (government, university, city, etc).

“But Monfi, I only speak English and studying in the UK is horribly expensive”. Yeah, it is, though not as much as in the US, but to be honest, I wouldn’t study there unless you get into an Oxbridge school. Now, when it comes to language barriers, you have two choices:

1. You don’t learn the local language and choose an English-taught bachelor (not recommended)

2. You learn the local language and study a local-language-taught bachelor (recommended)

Let’s do 1 first. If you only speak English and don’t want to bother learning another language, then the Netherlands would be an ideal destination, or any other Scandinavian country (mind that Ireland is a possibility, but I’m not sure about the prices to study over there, if you know, please comment). More and more countries in Europe start proposing programs in English, so you don’t need to restrict yourself to Northern-Western Europe. In terms of tuition fees for foreigners, Germany, Belgium and France are for most programs super cheap (100€-1000€).

When it comes to studying and working, Scandinavia is great because you’ll make enough money with a student job to pay rent and food (high purchasing power). Southern and Eastern Europe are less ideal as you’ll make less money there, but the cost of living are also lower.


Now, let’s see what to do if you want to learn a foreign language.


Learning a language to study:

First of all, I recommend you to learn a language because it helps with brain plasticity, it opens a whole new world of meaning and it is an achievement you can genuinely feel proud of. But is it possible to learn a language and then go studying in this language? To answer this question, Imma do like Jesus, or Disney: I’m going to tell you a story with a strong lesson at the end.

Some time ago, I’ve met two 20 year-old Russian girls that had moved to Czech Republic because they didn’t want to stay in Russia, and Czech Republic is a rather friendly country for Russians visa-wise. Since they couldn’t speak a word of Czech when they arrived, they spent the first year taking Czech classes and working in local bars and restaurants. After one year, they were fluent in Czech and entered university. They got jobs working in Czech companies in Czech and in a couple of years, will be Czech citizens.

This is great and this is something I did myself (although not with Czech). After living a year in Australia to learn English, I’ve entered university in the Netherlands and studied in English, which now prevents me from “proving” I speak decent English when applying for jobs. Learning a foreign language never is a waste of time and really expands your capacity to understand the world. One year should be enough to learn about any latin alphabet language so that you can use it to study. We’re not talking about Chinese, Arabic or Russian here, where you’d have to learn a whole new wording structures and different characters. Also, no one said studying debt-free was easy.

4. What about tuition fees?

They vary, most EU universities will make you pay more if you don’t have a EU passport/residency, but it’ll never be higher than 10 000€ per year (for bachelors, some masters are more expensive). In the Netherlands for example, non-EU people paid 6000€ while EU people paid 2000€. Obviously, some programs are often more expensive for non-EU people when taught in English, but you’ll never see in Europe something along 40 000 USD per year, that simply doesn’t exist.

5. How do I finance it?

You get a student job/build a freelance business. I am not aware of any EU countries where student jobs don’t exist. In most cases, a student job will be enough to finance your life. Universities also help students with low financial means, and if you’re lucky, you can always ask your parents to give you 100$ or 200$ a month to pay for food. In the worst case scenario, you can always borrow money to finance food/rent while working on the side, but that probably won’t be needed as you can easily live with 1000€/month in any EU city (London excluded). I personally spend 650€/month in Brussels, all included, but I’m also a cheap f*ck. I have up to this date, never met any European that had to borrow to study because no other solution had worked out (except British people). Some countries also propose programs where students go to school 1/2 week and work for a company the other 1/2 of the week, like Germany for example. The company pays for the studies of the student and also pays a small salary.

The bottom line

If there is one thing I want you to remember, this is the following: you don’t need to study at home, you don’t need to borrow astronomical sums and you don’t need to study in English. The world is your playground, you can study anything anywhere for much cheaper than what you'd pay in the US/Australia/etc. In my case, being an international student wasn’t easy every day, but I have learnt a lot, met a lot of different people, and it expanded my comfort zone up to the point that by the time I was 20, I had no problems with the perspective to move anywhere in the world. The only thing I regret was my topic, but I won’t go back in time.


I hope this guide has given you some more clarity regarding studies, and that you’ll now do the work to choose well your degree, and the country where you’d like to study it.

Best,


M.




I appreciate the two threads you have created.
 

DragosAbal

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Im a bit late here. But rn i live in the uk. I have the choice to get about 30k in debt by going to a good uni around me (top 100 world wide apparently) or go abroad to eu as i have european passport. I could also go all out and move out to London to go to the likes of imperial abd get in 70 k in debt


Any help?
 

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