Homeroom with Sal - Is College Right for Me? (Part 1)

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our special homeroom edition on "College: Is College Right for Me?" or I guess, "Is College Right for You?" We have a very exciting group of panelists: young people who are maybe a few years ahead of many of y'all who are experts in several domains but especially experts in thinking about college—when it's right, what other options there are, and how to make the most of it.

But before we jump into that, I will give my standard reminders. First of all, we are a not-for-profit, and if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. It's because of your donations, if you're in a position to do so, that make Khan Academy possible to reach hundreds of millions of folks around the world.

I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that have gone above and beyond in supporting Khan Academy, especially since the seemingly never-ending pandemic started over a year and a half ago. Special thanks to Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, General Motors, and the many other supporters across the board who have contributed to Khan Academy to allow us to do the work that we do.

And final announcement: there is a podcast version of this live stream, wherever you get your podcasts, "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast, so I encourage you to check that out as well.

So with that out of the way, I am super excited to introduce our panelists, and I will actually ask them to introduce themselves. But we have Delisha, who is a cybersecurity expert and also a recent college grad. We have Madison, who is a designer artist associated with CNN+, and also a recent college grad. And we have Ernest, who is a software engineer at Google and founder and president of Code House, and also a recent college grad.

But Delisha, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about who you are and your journey into becoming a cybersecurity expert.

Delisha: Yes, Sal, thank you! I'm so glad to be here. Hi everyone out there! I am Alicia Hutto, an undergraduate cybersecurity student advisor at South State. In my career, I have the pleasure of advising as well as supporting students and future defenders in the cybersecurity space. In that work, we're making sure that they are trained so that they can not only defend our world in the cybersecurity arena but also defend you and the different things that you love to do.

When I'm not advising, I am the chair of our SANS HBCU team, where our goal is to support juniors and seniors at historically black colleges and universities to receive free child security training and certifications as well. Honestly, what led me to this path of cybersecurity was by chance. I actually majored in psychology and got my bachelor's in psychology. It’s one of those majors that allows you to go anywhere and end up anywhere. Cybersecurity found me, and I wouldn't have it any other way, as it allows me to watch other students and other individuals achieve greatness while also defending the world from cyber attacks and bad actors, as well as supporting others and hopefully inspiring more of you out there to help us defend and become cybersecurity experts as well.

Sal: I love that, Delisha. I'm going to ask you many more questions about it, especially because, at least, what you're advising these undergraduate students to do makes it seem like they get to live in a Tom Clancy level. They get to defend the country in the cyber world, which is obviously only becoming a bigger and bigger thing. But let's go to you, Ernest. Tell me a little bit about your journey and how you ended up both as a software engineer and also what you're doing at Code House.

Ernest: Sure! So thanks for the introduction. I'm glad to be here. Hello everyone! My name is Ernest Holmes. I grew up in New Jersey, and I made it all the way down to Atlanta to attend college at Morehouse College. Morehouse College is a historically black institution serving all black men. While at Morehouse, I was very aware of the many opportunities that exist in the tech industry. When I was just a freshman, I actually wound up getting an internship at Google to be a software engineer.

I spent every summer while I was at Morehouse interning at Google out in California. They flew me out, and I got to work on amazing projects from advertisements to mobile development to artificial intelligence and machine learning on these robotic flowers. That eventually allowed me to become a full-time software engineer at Google, working on the Fuchsia team. So that's my day job; that's what I do, and I'm very passionate about being in the tech industry.

But I also realized that there was a need for more people of color to be exposed to, especially at an earlier age, the different opportunities that exist in the tech industry—whether it's engineering or design, product management— and that allowed me to get together not only with my sister but one of my best friends, Thomas Thompson, and the other person on this call, Madison Tivier, and a bunch of other great individuals to make Code House, which is all about exposing students in college to the tech industry.

So we expose middle and high school students to different careers in the tech industry, but now we also support early college students with scholarships—that's right, scholarships—so we can actually pay for your schooling if you're interested in going to the tech industry and attending an HBCU. So that's a little about me, and I guess the last hat I wear right now is that I'm also actually a professor at Morehouse College, teaching freshman computer science. So I'm wearing a few different hats right now.

Sal: I want to ask you more questions about that. We actually already have questions coming in through YouTube, and I encourage everyone watching to start putting your questions for any of these very impressive young people that you see in front of you. But I have one question before I move on to Madison: what does the Fuchsia team work on? Is, you know, Fuchsia just a color? What is the Fuchsia?

Ernest: I'm glad you asked! Yeah, Fuchsia is actually an operating system that we're building from scratch—completely open source—and it's actually one of the first large developments of operating systems that's non-Linux based. So, a little background: every single thing that works right now—computers, phones—they're all derived and based in this thing called Linux. We decided to make an operating system that is not based on Linux, so it's rethinking how computers work and how eventually different devices can interact with one another. Super cool project, super cool team, and hopefully, you see a lot more Fuchsia. I'm still wondering how it's connected to the color, but maybe we'll get into that another point.

Sal: But Madison, tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are as a designer and an artist.

Madison: Yeah, well hey everyone! Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you are. My name is Madison Mativiere. I am a proud and loud 2019 graduate of Howard University, earning a bachelor's in fine arts with a design and a double minor in art history and German.

So that love for art actually brought me to my current position. I am a graphic artist/production designer at CNN+. For those who may not be familiar with CNN+, it's totally okay. It actually launches next year. It’s CNN's streaming platform, so kind of like an HBO Max, a Netflix, but CNN. What that compiles is a couple of things I can't talk about, but very generally, it's a bunch of unique TV programming that you can access on a streaming platform.

Well, that's my day job. After, you know, after 6 p.m., I kind of switch hats, and I'm not only the creative director at Code House Corporation, as Ernest so eloquently explained, but I'm also the owner of my own creative agency, Audrey Creative, where we work with brands such as Ruby Ruby Rose. It's been a crazy, wild ride with the amounts of clients and types, from small businesses to larger ones such as Quality Control Music, Universal Music Group, as well as community centers within the Dallas area. Yeah, my love of art really brought me here to be quite honest with you.

Sal: That's incredible! You know, I like to think that I was doing pretty well for myself in my early 20s, but y'all are making me feel somewhat insecure about what I was doing with myself given all that y'all have already accomplished. But the topic of today is college: Is it right for me or is it right for the folks listening? You can imagine there's a lot of young people—some of them are saying, "I want to go to college," some folks are saying, "I'm not sure," there might be other paths, and then even amongst the people who are thinking about college, they're saying, "Can I afford it? How do I figure out how to navigate it? What types of colleges should I go through?"

So I'd like to go one by one through all again and say how were you thinking about it when you were 16 or 17 years old? Did you have some of these doubts? How did you navigate these doubts? Was it random chance? Were there certain things you did that helped you make better decisions? And actually, I'll go in the same order. Delisha, I'll start with you.

Delisha: For me, I was a first-gen student, so first in my family to actually attend college and graduate. It was a lot of exploration, a lot of thinking. I initially wanted to go into audio engineering and music production because I love music, and I’m a very creative person. I soon discovered, which you mentioned too, the financial piece. I sadly discovered that financially, the school wasn't a fit for me.

That's when I made the pivot to my plan B, psychology, and haven’t looked back since. But for me, I’ll say it’s a unique path, especially if you are a future first-generation student out there in the world and you’re the first in your family. There are a lot of resources out there; there are a lot of people that you can lean on. What I will say to you is life is not a straight path. So don’t be worried if you do not end up in a career in your major. That’s pretty normal right now in the world we live in. But that doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. What it means is you had the bravery to take a chance, and you still have light years ahead of you to discover what your passion is and to do something that makes you happy.

Sal: And I understand you were originally thinking about audio engineering, and you decided to move out of that because it was at a different school and that was too expensive, or you were thinking that the career might be harder to attain. How did you make that transition initially?

Delisha: Because I'm in the state of Georgia, it was only one college that actually offered anything near to audio engineering, and that college was Savannah College of Art and Design. It’s a private college, so with that, it was extremely expensive. Again, as I said before, I’m first-gen, first in my family; we’re not the richest in the world. So when I received that financial aid package, I realized, "Wow, even with a scholarship, I can’t afford $30,000 a year," or however much it was.

So I had to make that conscious decision to say, "You know what? I do like psychology, so let me pivot." My plan B is going to be psychology, and I’m going to see where it takes me. If it's meant to be, I’ll always find my way back to music, whether it's through audio engineering or just finding ways to express myself in other ways—whether through spoken word, which I do poetry, or just enjoying listening to music and analyzing it. You can still find those joys without initially going into that major or ending up in that career. So that’s kind of how I was able to pivot and change my mindset about it. Quite frankly, I didn’t really have a choice because of the financial situation, but looking back on it, it was the right choice to make.

And not going into that, as much as I’m doing that. And as always, because I'm still young, if I really wanted to go back to audio engineering, I'm sure I could.

Sal: Thanks for sharing that story, because I think students don’t hear those stories enough. Because so many times in a forum like this, people are like, "Oh, just do whatever you want." And then there are students thinking, "But how am I going to pay for that?" And you know, I remember being in a similar situation. My family—we grew up without a lot of resources, and I remember my sister applying to a school that I’m like, "How are we going to pay for?"

And I think at the time, you know, this was in the '90s, it was $25,000 a year. I’m like, "That’s more than my mom makes! That’s twice what my mom makes in a year! How are we going to do that?" And then my sister explained to me about the whole financial aid system and all of that. But to your story, it sounds like you did the right things. You said, "What am I interested in?" But you explored the options. You said, "Okay, now what are they offering?" They might be offering a little bit of scholarship, a little bit of financial aid, but it still was not practical.

But there were other really good options, and obviously now you are helping other people defend our country against cyber threats and whatever else. Ernest, how did you think about this when you were 16 or 17? Did you always know you were going to be a software engineer? Did you always know you were going to go to college? Did you always think it was going to be Morehouse? How did you navigate that?