What are some good alternatives to picking a conservative / climb-the-ladder-oriented career right after college?

The best option is to not go to college, avoid the debt burden of higher education and use your extra free time to learn practical skills and network for career paths that don't require credentialization to succeed. Most college kids don't have much of a choice because they have large financial obligations when they graduate, and a fairly sheltered view of what career options are available to them since college exposes you to the job opportunities that college is good for. IMO the college-career ladder handoff works on FOBO principles: For big Organizations, by Big Organizations.  You graduate through hierarchy in order to earn the priviledge to continue graduating through hierarchy when you get out.  After the war and the GI bill was passed valuable economic activity was centered around monolithic organizations that had well defined job roles, so college solved a matching problem that allowed big organizations to cost effectively identify people who were intelligent, concientious, and conformist......three very important traits for organizational success. The nexus of valuable economic activity has now been inverted, and what's valuable is what people don't know.  But in my opinion the modern university is very poorly suited to solve this problem, and the poor outcomes you see from college graduates are symptoms of this underlying disease.  So attaining success through college usually means one of two things: 1).  Securing yourself a spot in the credentialized economy.  This is basically a tournament where 1000's of kids enter in to win a small amount of "good-job" tickets that are given to the highest qualifiers at the end of 4, 6, or 10 years.  Lawyers, doctors, teachers, consultants, etc. 2).  Use your college degree to crowd out non-graduates for jobs that could be done without a diploma, but a degree still signals a professional advantage.  These are entry-level jobs at most organizations.  You'll learn most of what you need to know on the job, but all else being equal a college graduate is a safer bet for an employer than a dropout or someone who never went in the first place.  The common denominator among these two is that your occupation will have well defined job descriptions....some are just more economically valuable than others.  So to avoid these options you have to skip college, skip the debt, network with smart people in other ways, and use your nights and weekends to learn an economically valuable skill that businesses need where excellence  can be signaled in ways that don't require a degree.  These include but are not limited to: programming media creation insider knowledge of a particular industry probably more but I can't think of them at the moment

Right after college most people will need a job. The alternative of picking a conservative career is the opposite --not picking a conservative career. A few things you need to have: 1. Learn to know what you want to achieve in your life. 2. After know what you want to do, learn everyday to become an expert in this domain. 3. After a year of learning everyday, go ahead and take risk because you are now an expert in this domain. 4. At this time, you will know exactly how to answer this question based on your own circumstance. Most people pick a conservative career because of fear. Overcome your fear by building up knowledge p.s. Make plan to learn weekly and list out what you want to learn this week.