By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Mar 19, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET The column below is an irresistible one—even for me (at age 49) and not looking for either a college major or a job.
They are interesting reading and worth glancing at for information. Bu…t not, in my opinion, for life guidance.
The only thing worse you can do than pursue a degree you are interested in that pays a low starting salary is get a degree you aren’t interested in because it pays a high salary. If you do the former, at a minimum you will almost surely do much better while in college or graduate school (higher GPA), which translates into more professional options, better educated, and more self-confidence. Not a bad outcome.
 If you do the latter, you will likely do poorly, have a negative experience with school, have a lackluster record, get a second or third tier job in the field of study and not enjoy or excel at it. Pretty lousy outcome.
I’m not saying don’t balance the practical aspects of the connection between college degree and future jobs. You should and must. But make it only a part of your analysis. And at the end of your analysis, go with your gut and your passion.
No one has yet been able to quantify either. But being engaged something you are interested in and passionate about seems the common denominator of almost every person I know who excels in their field.
Even if they majored in English. (And many did!)
From Forbes:
The Best And Worst Master’s Degrees For Jobs
Thousands of new college grads will enter the workforce this year, but with unemployment at 8.2% and underemployment near 18%, many will put off the taxing job search process and opt out of the weak job market to pursue graduate degrees.
With this in mind, Forbes set out to determine which master’s degrees would provide the best long-term opportunities, based on salary and employment outlook. To find the mid-career median pay for 35 popular degrees, we turned to Payscale.com, which lets users compare their salaries with those of other people in similar jobs by culling real-time salary data from its 35 million profiles. We then looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment projection data to see how fast employment was expected to increase between 2010 and 2020 in popular jobs held by people with each degree. Finally we averaged each degree’s pay rank and estimated growth rank to find the best and worst master’s degrees for jobs.
As it turns out, although there are too few doctors in the U.S. and too few seats in medical schools, those shortages are good for one segment of the population: people who get degrees as physician assistants.
Click here to read the full article.
By Jeff Smith, on Fri Feb 1, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Q: I’m a veteran lobbyist in a midsize state. I have a client I’ve represented for six years. Decent client, pays fine, nothing to write home about. Now a large firm that is typically on the other side of things wants to hire me away—for twice the money. What should I do?
—Initials and Location Withheld
Good question. Depends on your financial circumstances and the value you place on your professional reputation, loyalty and your principles—assuming you have them. Let’s go one at a time:
1) Do you need the money badly? Is your practice struggling? Do you have a family to support? Start at 0 and add 1 point for each “yes.”
2) How important to you is the respect of your peers?
“Very” = subtract 2
“Somewhat” = subtract 1
“Not very important” = 0
3) Do you think loyalty is an extremely important trait, a somewhat important trait or a not very important trait in a lobbyist?
“Very” = subtract 2
“Somewhat” = subtract 1
“Not very important” = 0
4) Do you think it’s very important, somewhat important or unimportant to agree with your clients’ view?
“Very” = subtract 2
“Somewhat” = subtract 1
“Unimportant” = Do Not Pass Go: Proceed directly to “Free Parking” in the office of your new client.
Tally your points. If you have a positive number, take the new client and drop the old one. If you have a negative number, stand pat. If you’re at 0, flip a coin.
While we’re on the subject, a Missouri lobbyist named Brian Grace just issued a challenge to his corridor colleagues: Take on one nonprofit group pro bono as a client. Should you decide to switch teams, I recommend that as a way to ease your conscience.
Q: Okay, I know you usually do questions from politicians, but how about politicians’ spouses? Here’s my question: My husband just got elected to the state Legislature. I’ve heard it’s a cesspool up there. And I’ve already caught him checking out one of his interns as she was walking away from him. Let me be honest: I love him, but he’s not a great-looking guy and so I probably shouldn’t worry. Or should I?
—E.B., Location Withheld
Yes, you should worry. He’s got three strikes against him already: 1) He’s got enough of an ego to seek office, which suggests that he probably enjoys attention; 2) You caught him ogling his intern; and 3) He’s not very good-looking. You’ve misinterpreted No. 3. You think that because of his homeliness, he won’t be able to attract women up there? I can promise you, it won’t matter. Handsome pols/athletes/movie stars are probably less likely to cheat—they’ve had a lifetime of opportunities for romance. For those who are less attractive, the initial brush with fame may be their first chance for significant romantic opportunities, and thus more difficult to resist.
Kissinger noted that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. He was referring to the presidency, not the power of a minority party freshman rep in the Wyoming Legislature. But to a 20-year-old sophomore at Casper College, that could be a distinction without a difference. Remember, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Whoops, sorry, bad pun.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
By Jonathan Miller, on Sun Jan 27, 2013 at 12:30 PM ET 
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I’m very excited to announce The Recovering Politician’s wonderful service to our loyal RP Nation: The RP’s KY Political Brief — a FREE email delivered every weekday morning, straight to your inbox, that provides you with a complete wrap-up of the latest political news and notes from the Bluegrass State.
You don’t have to be a Frankfort statehouse junkie to appreciate this free service — The RP’s KY Political Brief provides you with a one-stop shop for all of the latest news, commentary and analysis about what could be the hottest 2014 campaign in the country: the re-election attempt by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who looks like he will face the challenge of his career from Ky. Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. And The RP’s KY Political Brief is your best place to find all of the latest stories about Tea Party favorite (and potential 2016 presidential candidate) Rand Paul.
Best yet, we offer this service with no political biases; much as in the No Labels style of The Recovering Politician, we provide links to the state’s and nation’s best journalists, as well as opinion pieces by writers from all over the political spectrum.
 Your tour director is former editor of The Kentucky Enquirer, Kakie Urch, who took over for founding editor Bradford Queen. She is currently an assistant professor of multimedia at University of Kentucky in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications. Kakie also served as assistant managing editor of The Kentucky Post and as assistant managing editor at The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif. In 2011, Kakie served as a professor-in-residence on “The Caucuses” site of the Des Moines Register for coverage of the Iowa Caucuses.
In these roles, she had the honor of editing some of the best political reporters in Kentucky and had responsibility for Washington, Frankfort and Sacramento bureau coverage for the newspapers and their Web sites. Her favorite political ad of all time is the Kentucky radio spot from an 1980s campaign that said “Just because you sit in the garage for 10 years, that don’t make you a Buick.”
Kakie is up every weekday morning at the crack of dawn to compile the latest and best news about Kentucky politics.
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By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Jan 7, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET
Writes contributing RP John Y. Brown, III:
One of the greatest sins we can commit is to have a chance to get to know extraordinary people. And then not take advantage of it. And you never know when the opportunity will present itself. So always be ready to talk. Even when you’re not sure.
A picture of a cat siting on a column led to some chuckles from my wife and daughter but then a nice lady with a very professional looking camera decided to take the same shot. I nudged my wife and daughter and said, “Told ya it was a good photo to take.”
The woman with the professional camera overheard us and, along with her husband, laughed. And that’s all I needed. Over the next 20 minutes I learned that Matt Chua worked as a VC for 6 years before he and his wife, Erica, dropped out and became professional world travelers 2 years earlier. They’ve visited and written about 30 countries, mostly about economic development but also offering a sort of young person’s Trip Adviser take on each destination. (Think of Albert Brooks’ Lost in America —but working out. And going international)
Next year Matt hopes to find himself in Stanford’s MBA program. And deserves to be there. And if that still isn’t enough to pique your curiosity, their website is titled “LivingIF.com” with the tag line, “Living to never wonder, What if.”
Now, we are pleased to have Matt and Erica Chua join us as weekly travel columnists at The Recovering Politician, with their first column, cross-posted from LivingIF.com, below. Please help me welcome them to the RP Nation, and come back every Monday at this time to read about their next extraordinary adventure!
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Incomparable. Stunning. Choose your superlative…none will do the Everest Region justice. Nowhere else on earth is like it. Walking amongst the world’s largest mountains, admiring deep valleys and snowcapped peaks, will be one of your life’s highlights.
Here even view from the outhouses are spectacular…
Read the rest of…
Erica and Matt Chua: Hiking Mount Everest and Three Passes Unguided
By RP Nation, on Thu Dec 27, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET With the recent release of the blockbuster, critically-acclaimed Lincoln, The Recovering Politician has asked Lincoln scholar, Matthew Pinsker — a professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania — to share some historical insights about our 16th President. Click here and here and here for his prior 3 pieces.
Here is the latest of his columns:
Here is a quick breakdown of the initial reaction from historians to Spielberg’s movie:
The leading academic critics so far have been Eric Foner from Columbia and Kate Masur from Northwestern. Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and one of the most respected historians in the field, claims the movie “grossly exaggerates” its main point about the stark choices confronting the president at the end of the war over abolition or peace (Letter to the Editor, New York Times, November 26, 2012). Masur also accuses the film of oversimplifying the role of blacks in abolition and dismisses the effort as “an opportunity squandered” (Op-Ed, New York Times,November 12, 2012).
Harold Holzer, co-chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and author of more than 40 books, served as a consultant to the film and praises it but also observes that there is “no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie” in a lively piece for The Daily Beast (November 22, 2012).
 Professor Matthew Pinsker Other historian / fact-checkers have been more kind. Allen Guelzo, Gettysburg College, also writing for The Daily Beast has some plot criticism, but argues that, “The pains that have been taken in the name of historical authenticity in this movie are worth hailing just on their own terms” (November 27, 2012). David Stewart, independent historical author, writing for History News Network, describes Spielberg’s work as “reasonably solid history” and tells readers of HNN, “go see it with a clear conscience” (November 20, 2012). Lincoln Biographer Ronald White also admired the film, though he noted a few mistakes and pointed out in an interview with NPR, “Is every word true? No.” (November 23, 2012).
Historical author / blogger Kevin Levin finds the whole process of historical nitpicking and response to be more than a little aggravating. Writing for The Atlantic, he complains, “Historians Need To Give Steven Spielberg A Break” (November 26, 2012). I agreed with Levin in some ways, but for the opposite reason. I argued for Quora (and Huffington Post) that people should simply stop worrying about whether any movie which necessarily invents dialogue, characters and scenes should ever be considered as “historically accurate.” It’s a work of art –historical fiction—which we need to judge by other standards (November 27, 2012). That’s also the point, Spielberg himself made at the Dedication Day ceremonies at Gettysburg (November 19, 2012) when he called his effort a “dream” and made a careful distinction between his historically inspired movie and actual works of history.
By RP Nation, on Mon Dec 24, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET With the recent release of the blockbuster, critically-acclaimed Lincoln, The Recovering Politician has asked Lincoln scholar, Matthew Pinsker — a professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania — to share some historical insights about our 16th President. Click here and here for his prior 2 pieces.
Here is the latest of his columns:
This question is easy to answer as far as the movie is concerned, but much more complicated to explain in real life. The movie needs a plot device that raises dramatic tension, and so the audience is encouraged to believe through a series of scenes that passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by the House before the war’s end is absolutely essential –both to ending the conflict and for securing the final destruction of slavery. The implication builds in scene after scene that it was truly now or never for abolition by the end of January 1865.
But in reality, there is no indication that President Lincoln actually considered quick passage of the abolition amendment to be so crucial. His message to Congress in December 1864 strikes a much different tone. He wrote that “the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not” and so suggested that since there was “only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States” why “may we not agree that the sooner the better?” The confidence of that taunt (“the sooner the better”) was no accident. The National Union (Republican) Party had won a sweeping victory in the 1864 elections on a platform that explicitly called for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The next Congress (39th) was going to have an anti-slavery super-majority in both houses. Lincoln considered the 1864 elections to have offered an overwhelming mandate. Many northern Democrats were demoralized and there was open talk in places like Tammany Hall (the New York City Democratic Party) about the need to distance themselves from slavery. And by every reckoning, the Confederacy was on the verge of total military and political collapse.
Professor Matthew Pinsker This is not to argue that Lincoln was somehow reluctant about securing the amendment or not anxious at all about ending the war. But if Congress didn’t act on slavery at the beginning of January, it was going to do so either by special session in March or during the next regular session in December. Of course, it’s always possible that Lincoln feared any delays might jeopardize the balky Unionist/Republican coalition (represented in the film by the differences between Thaddeus Stevens / Tommy Lee Jones and his radical faction and old Francis P. Blair, Sr. / Hal Holbrook and his clique of conservatives).
Yet, practically every sign of the times suggested otherwise. For example, the movie makes much out of Lincoln’s fears regarding the Supreme Court and what they might do to his Emancipation Proclamation, but that was a concern much more relevant circa 1862 than early 1865 when leading abolitionist Salmon P. Chase was being confirmed as the new Chief Justice of the United States (replacing arch Lincoln enemy Roger Brooke Taney). I don’t think Chase’s name was even mentioned in the movie. Also left unmentioned was the fact that the Unionists / Republicans had actually packed the Supreme Court after 1863 –adding a tenth justice that helped their majority. Anti-slavery forces controlled the Supreme Court by the war’s end.
Read the rest of…
Matthew Pinsker: Why Did Lincoln Rush the 13th Amendment?
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET I am proud of my bona fides on supporting the advancement of women. It angers me to think how slow executive suites and boardrooms are to welcome more qualified females. Stubborn gender wage gaps for comparable work are unacceptable and must be closed.
However, with all of the attention and focus on supporting equal opportunities for women, we have taken our eyes off an alarming trend. Young men in the US are in trouble by any measure of educational attainment. It’s a big deal and, for reasons of political correctness, we aren’t talking enough about this growing national problem.
I refuse to believe the support of young American’s progress is a zero-sum game – that somehow if we call attention to the problem and take a different approach to improve the experience and outcomes of boys it would come at the expense of celebrating and enabling continued advancement of girls. We can and must recognize the unique challenges of young men and we had better start doing something about it now.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Plight of Young Males
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Nov 30, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
The truth about attorneys.
Lawyers aren’t always as smart as they want you to think they are.
(Email exchange today with my law firm doing a conflict check for a potential new client.)
Me: No conflict….
Partner: John, Why the ellipsis?
Me: Smart people use ellipses and I never knew why. I thought it would make me look smart if I used one during the conflict check after “No.” So, that’s why I used the ellipsis.
Partner: Nice….
By RP Nation, on Fri Nov 30, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET As the new Steven Spielberg movie has reignited our national passion for our 16th President, we continue our series of posts from one of the nation’s leading experts on the topic: Dr. Matthew Pinsker, a Lincoln scholar, Civil War historian and college professor based at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA (and of course, longtime Friend of RP). For the last five years, Pinsker has personally trained more than 2,500 K-12 educators on Civil War and American history topics, and he has also been directing the House Divided Project, a digital effort designed to help classroom teachers use the latest technologies to promote deeper study of the American Civil War during its 150th anniversary.
Click here for his first column.
Here is is second, cross-posted with Quora.com, with permission of the author:
Why do most people think of Lincoln as an anti-slavery President? Wasn’t he really more a pro-reunification president?
The best way to answer this question is to begin by defining terms. When Lincoln wrote on August 22, 1862 in his famous open letter to Horace Greeley, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he was employing a word –“union”– that meant different things to different people (and still does, by the way). For Lincoln and the Republicans, the union was never merely a collection of states. Nor was it a centralized federal government or some abstract attachment to a paper Constitution.
This is the key point and what always leads to confusion. For Lincoln especially, the “union” was “the people” –as in “We the people” and what should properly be considered the fundamental and most revolutionary American doctrine of popular sovereignty.
Professor Matthew Pinsker Look carefully at all of Lincoln’s wartime speeches and statements and you will see that behind the phrase “save the union,” Lincoln always meant to protect the results of the 1860 election which he believed had defined the popular will through a legitimate electoral process. That’s how he justified calling himself a unionist even though he led a sectional party. That’s why he refused practically all compromises during the secession crisis because he believed that they failed to acknowledge how much the election mattered. And that’s why he pursued increasingly “hard war” policies against the Confederacy, including emancipation, that ultimately turned the war into what he had once warned against, “a remorseless, revolutionary struggle.”
In other words, Lincoln was both anti-slavery and pro-union. In fact, he considered those positions one and the same, because he defined “union” as the popular will which by the 1860 election results had determined that the future of the country was to be free, or, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, to be “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He was always willing to reunify the country on those terms, and never willing to consider anything less. This is, by the way, exactly the question that Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Lincoln,” intends to examine by focusing on the last few months of the war and what the movie-makers present as the fundamental choice that Lincoln navigated during that period between pushing for a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery or pursuing potential peace talks with Confederates.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Nov 30, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET The RP sent the following op-ed to hundreds of college newspapers on behalf of No Labels.
You may have more in common with your member of Congress than you think, especially around this time of year.
Students and lawmakers alike want to finish up the year and head home for the holidays.
But there’s a final exam standing between Congress and Christmas — and America’s citizens are ready to give the body an “F” if it doesn’t pass. That exam is coming in the form of the “fiscal cliff” — the combination of arbitrary, automatic, across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases coming at the end of the year that could cripple the economy.
It all started last year when Congress picked 12 of its members to try to find a deal to secure America’s long-term financial future. Consumer confidence had dropped dramatically and a credit ratings agency dropped our country’s rating. It seemed the only thing that could make members of both parties work across the aisle was an alternative so terrible that it would be untenable to both parties.
That alternative is coming closer and closer to reality — and unfortunately, it is your generation that will have to pay the highest price. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that if we do not avoid the fiscal cliff, the $7 trillion combination of spending cuts and tax increases could send the economy hurtling back into recession for years to come. Unemployment, especially among young people, will rise even further. Education will suffer among the harshest spending cuts, losing about $4.8 billion in funding.
Our leaders have had more than three years to address these issues — imagine if you had that long to prepare for a test. Yet rather than hunkering down in the library, or in their case the Capitol Building, to solve this crisis, leaders of each side aren’t even meeting right now to talk about what’s going on. How is this going to solve anything? We need real solutions. These solutions begin with both parties understanding that they need to work together to stave off this crisis.
 No Labels — a growing grassroots movement of more than 600,000 Republicans, Democrats and independents — is working to facilitate just this kind of cooperation. Since last year, we’ve been advocating for leaders in all negotiations to put everything on the table and ensure all interested parties are at the table. You can be a part of this movement and sign on at NoLabels.org These solutions can also help fix the underlying problem: the way Washington does business. We need to find real and permanent ways for our leaders to come together to govern for the future. Because our nation’s financial situation is not the only problem America faces. We need our leaders to come together and find solutions in immigration, energy and infrastructure policy.
As Washington’s current stalemate has shown, we can’t afford to wait for Congress to find bold, pragmatic across-the-aisle solutions. Changing Washington won’t happen quickly. But even you would have a hard time cramming three years worth of work into one night. What we can do now is commit ourselves, and hold our elected officials accountable, to the idea that progress is only made when our common national interest is the priority. And that is what No Labels is all about.
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