What Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and 21 other highly successful people were doing right out of college

Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla

The first few years after college can be the launching pad for the rest of your career — it's why successful people often advise young people to start doing what they love as soon as they can.

But while some tech geniuses and business tycoons took this route to success, finding the optimal career path right away is easier said than done for many, and others found career bliss many years down the road.

To show that no two paths to success are alike, here's what 23 highly successful people were doing right out of college.

Aaron Taube contributed to an earlier version of this article.

Donald Trump worked for his father's real-estate-development company.

After graduating from Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a degree in economics, Trump went to work as a young real-estate developer at his father's company, Elizabeth Trump & Son.

In 1971, he was given the reins of the company, which he later renamed the Trump Organization, according to Bio, and soon became involved in large, profitable building projects in Manhattan.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college, but kept learning.

The Apple cofounder dropped out of Reed College, an elite liberal-arts school in Portland, Oregon, where he started doing lots of LSD and learning about spirituality, after six months, according to "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson.

Jobs said he didn't see the value in paying for an expensive college when he didn't know what he wanted to do. But his edification didn't end when he dropped out.

For the next 18 months, he would sleep on the floor in friends' rooms, live the bohemian lifestyle, and return soda bottles for spare change, and drop in on the creative classes he wanted to take at Reed College, like calligraphy.

"If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," Jobs said during his commencement address at Stanford in 2005. "And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do."

Marissa Mayer became Google employee No. 20.

At 24, fresh out of grad school, Mayer became the 20th Google employee and the company's first female engineer. She remained with the company for 13 years before moving on to her current role as CEO of Yahoo.

Google didn't have the sorts of lavish campuses it does now, Mayer said in an interview with VMakers. "During my interviews, which were in April of 1999, Google was a seven-person company. I arrived and I was interviewed at a ping pong table which was also the company's conference table, and it was right when they were pitching for venture capitalist money, so actually after my interview Larry and Sergey left and took the entire office with them."

Since everyone in the office interviewed you in those days, Mayer had to come back the next day for another round.