I am a college student. I want to work as a freelancer. I can only work 2 hours in workweek and 4 hours in weekend. I know python, java and little bit C#. I learn this languages from youtube, udemy. So i only make simple things. I want to go deeper and learn some skills to earn money. I have interest about machine learning, data analysis, bug hunting and pentest. Which is my interest make more sense to considering my working hours and which one is make more money?
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This question comes up a lot. You’re not likely to have a huge amount of joy making any money from what you currently know while you’re learning. You might get incredibly lucky, but people hire freelancers because of their skills, which means it’s very difficult to get hired if you don’t actually have the skills in the first place. Just think about this logically: if you needed to any of the tasks you mention carried out, why on earth would you hire someone who was not skilled/experienced to carry them out?
This is not to say you won’t be able to make money: you may be highly skilled at a certain thing. But being a freelancer involved running a business to sell your skills. It’s not really a trivial thing
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Thank you for the response. Yes, i have no skill right now. I want to learn some skill to make money. I have basic knowledge to advance next level like being data analyser or data scrapper. I think i didn’t explain myself sufficiently. I have some interest but it is hard to choose one of them. Because even choose my favorite one maybe it is impossible to make money. For example i choose machine learning but i can’t make money because i must work more than 15 hours/week.
Umm, this is another thing. Freelance !== Part-time work. What do you think you’re going to be able to do here? People don’t go “oh we’ll hire a programmer specialising in {X} for a couple of hours”. A couple of days, possibly, for a specialist consultant. A couple of weeks or months, sure.
As far as I can see the timescales you’re suggesting simply are not feasible for programming work
Get a job in a bar or a restaurant or whatever, that’s far more sensible as it’s actually feasible
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Oh this is exactly what i looking for. Thank you for your time. Have a good day.
With this timespan you’rer essentially looking at part-time work, as the “primary job” is being a college student. There’s two main things to focus on here.
- The amount of time you have available to actually work
- The amount of cash you can/want/need to make.
With these hours you are looking at a job that is more flexible than well paying. Having a hyper flexible high paying job basically doesn’t exist as an early career option, and depending on the profession it doesn’t exist at all.
This leaves jobs that can support flexible work schedules. Freelancing isn’t one of those, as clients have their needs that need to be met. Working with your schedule automatically makes working with you a hinderance. In the game of freelancing starting off as a hinderance due to availability basically means you wont find work.
So this leaves other “flexible” jobs. As said above getting a normal part-time job locally should be the way to go. These sort of minimum wage jobs will work with your schedule, (most of the time), will get some cash in your pockets, and teach you a few key skills.
The one thing I’d like to throw out there that I found to be really beneficial.
See if you can find a job on campus, this eliminates any cross-commute you’d have and most on-campus jobs automatically go to students already enrolled and are knowledgeable about class schedules and are usually pretty low stress.
The jobs might not be as high paying as other jobs, but working where your studying will save primarily on time and have other extra advantages other jobs wont have, like extra networking with your peers and further access to faculty.
I worked on campus after working a normal job for a year. I found the experience to be really great. Not only was I allowed to study and do homework in my off time, but I had 0 commute, and got to interact with a multitude of professors for different jobs and problems. Furthermore there are more specific jobs where you can leverage your skills either directly or indirectly so you could even program something (!)
I’d really look into it if you have the opportunity.
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