

Ask HN: How to join a startup after college as a liberal arts major? - deafcheese

It seems like everyone is looking for rockstars. What if you're just "hacker friendly"?
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gyardley
It's not impossible but pretty unlikely that you're going to be able to join
something really early-stage as a liberal arts major fresh out of college.

Join a larger startup that needs people to do joe jobs - customer support,
account manager, etc. Suck it up, work your ass off, learn all you can, and
get yourself promoted to something interesting. (Larger startups are still
fairly fluid - at least compared to the broader corporate world.) Product
management worked for me, but your experience might vary.

Once you've got a couple years of experience, and you've done something a
little more meaty than entry-level work, you'll have something more to offer
an early-stage startup.

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vitovito
Liberal arts like geography, anthropology and philosophy give you an excellent
foundation for information architecture, business ethnography, user research
and business analysis. A startup that's doing customer development instead of
building something arbitrary should find those skills invaluable as long as
you present them the right way.

EDIT: I graduated as a Geography major, with the pitch being that cartography
is a very skilled form of information architecture and interaction design, as
we use maps both as art and as a useful, tailored tool; geographic information
systems mean I have experience working with demographics, statistics and
spatial analysis; multiple anthropology courses mean I can research and
present analyses on both the developing internal business structure and on our
customers; philosophy means I can think critically.

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jasonshen
Hey deafcheese, I wrote a pretty comprehensive post on this topic a while
back. It's specifically geared toward helping students find non-technical
jobs. [http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/get-a-startup-job-out-of-
colle...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/get-a-startup-job-out-of-college/)
Also, here's some more info about the kinds of non-technical jobs you could
get: [http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/what-kinds-of-jobs-exist-at-
st...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/what-kinds-of-jobs-exist-at-startups-for-
non-technical-people/)

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RiderOfGiraffes
As an employer, the question I'm always asking is this: What value do you
bring to my company?

When I get a generic CV I'm getting told what qualifications the person has,
but rarely am I told what they might do for me to justify their wage. What
skills do you have? Why are they useful to my business? Why will employing you
make my company more valuable?

If I take funding for my company, the level of funding indicates a valuation
of the company. If I take on an employee I'm saying that the value of the
company rises by about 5 times their salary.

It's the same with a startup. How do they know you can do things that they
will need done? Answer that question, directly, without hesitation, and with
convincing examples, and there's a good chance they'll take you.

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mapster
I think a liberal arts major can be an exceptional strength to a growing
company. Great code monkeys/hackers are quite common, but if you have a
liberal arts background, with science background AND are hacker friendly, imho
is a great asset for an established company.

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derrida
If you have a major in philosophy try your hand at programming. After all, an
undergraduate degree in philosophy usually comes with familiarity with a bunch
of different logics and logical languages, you will have an advantage in
understanding programming languages at a much higher-order level than your
average computer science student who bashes through their degree for reasons
economic.

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guynamedloren
Bring something to the table. It doesn't really matter what it is as long as
it is valuable to the team in some way, shape or form.

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maxharris
What do you want to make that other people want enough to pay you? This
question is important no matter how large the company is.

