You`ll Never Work as a Freelancer While You're a Student
Confessions of a Student Who Tried to Work as a Freelancer
I`ve been trying for more than 6 months to work online and it has been a nightmare.
It has been a nightmare because as students we have everything against us.
I never thought that studying and working online would be so difficult.
I thought it was a matter of creating an attractive profile and waiting for job offers to come out.
I thought that I would organize my work schedule myself. I thought I would work when I wanted to.
How deluded am I?
I thought everything was going to be easy.
But it’s not like that.
The world is crap and you`ll never be able to work while you are a student.
There are many reasons why this happens. You only have to keep reading the article.
We don`t Have any Personal Brand Built
Everyone who reads Gary Vaynerchuk will know that there is nothing more important than building our personal brand.
Kevin Kelly says that we only need to have 1,000 true-followers and our life will be resolved.
The problem is that we are 20 years old. We don`t know any adult who is willing to pay for our services.
The only adults we know are our parents who will hire our services just because we are their children.
Building a personal brand at age 20 is somewhat overly complicated.
The first reason is that our customers will be much older than us.
and let’s be honest. Nobody wants to follow advice from a teenager.
And second, our environment doesn`t help us.
Our environment doesn`t care about our personal brand. Our environment is 20 years old like us who are only waiting to have sex and drink.
We don`t Have a University Degree
As students, we will face the sad reality that no one will trust us. Nobody will trust us because we do not have a university degree.
Nobody will hire our services because we aren`t graduates
Nobody will hire our services because people seek professionalism. People are looking for someone with years of experience in the market.
Nobody is looking for a student who is beginning his working life.
We Demotivated very Fast
As students we`re very emotional. We start projects believing that two weeks later we`ll become the next Steve Jobs.
What usually happens to us is that we leave the projects because we don`t see short-term results.
At our age, thinking long-term is impossible.
It`s impossible because at 20, every year counts.
In our environment it`s unlikely that a 21-year-old woman is on a date with a man of 19.
If you are 18 years old there are possibilities to continue in school. If you`re 22 you should already be a graduate.
In those ages every year counts.
That makes it hard for us to think long term.
At age 20, I think that I have to publish 3 articles a week to be successful in 3 years. That is unthinkable at that age.
We don`t Have a Built Portfolio
In addition to not having a personal brand. We don`t have a portfolio either.
Maybe we’ll start doing SEO jobs. But we have nothing to show our customers.
Maybe we start designing for social networks. But we don`t have anything to prove our ideas.
In fact,
As students we have a practically empty CV.
It`s very difficult to get income working online because we don`t even have a CV well done.
Then imagine everything else?
Our Social Environment doesn`t Help us
Our surroundings are waiting for the gossip of the university. Our only think of Mia Khalifa, Miley Cyrus or Lebron James.
There are few chances of finding a group of students talking about SEO positioning.
That makes our work environment more complicated. Virtually no one will understand that we`re trying to make a living working on the Internet.
We don`t Have Money to Invest
People say that working online is free. Only open a profile in Fiverr or UpWork and wait for them to hire you.
Well, none of that is true.
Currently you`ll wait for 6 months and you won`t have received any job offer either in Fiverr or in Upwork.
The only way to get work online is by redirecting traffic to our job profiles. And the only way to redirect that traffic is by investing time and money.
We`ll have to open a profile in linkedin, start writing in medium, answer questions in Quora, and even take advantage of our social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
And as much as they tell you that social networks are free, in the end they are not.
You`ll have to increase your followers in each social network and that has a price.
Facebook Ads costs money.
The bots cost money.
Even medium costs money.
We Have little Financial Education.
As students, we aren`t used to saving money for future expenses.
We aren`t even used to reinvesting our money.
When we win our first 100 dollars. We are more likely to use that money in video games, alcohol and beach trips. We will not spend that money on things like facebook ads, books, courses, etc.
We are Bad to Organize Ourselves
As students, it`s very difficult to organize ourselves. It`s not impossible to keep the pace of studying. Do our homework. Go out and work.
As students we always have distractions. There are always activities that we didn`t remember. There is always a friend who invites us to leave. There is always a test to pass.
And if you add to that freelancer jobs, our time becomes chaotic.
We will be a disaster
Conclusion
With this I`m not saying that while we are students we can`t work online.
Of course we can work online. I continue to work online.
The goal of writing this article was to teach them that we students have a longer way to go.
Our path will be more difficult than that of others.
However, if we can overcome this great challenge. Our benefits will be greater.
At 24 years old we can do whatever we want. We can work in any country in the world.
We can become backpackers and live every 3 months in a different city.
And all that thanks to that we started working on the Internet from a very young age.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 373,685 people.
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