College dominates the modern world — we spend our childhoods in school preparing for it and then we spend our adulthoods getting jobs based off of it. Some people look forward to it and love it, while others loathe it and rail against its existence. Is modern society a little too focused on college? Maybe it is, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, however, with my first two semesters of college in the books, I want to take a look at what college had to teach me.
1. Sh*t happens quite often.
In high school, it often felt like you got retries. There was always time to make up for your screw-ups, for the most part. In college, not so much. If you get a bad grade on a test, it wrecks your average on the class and your grade takes a chunk out of your GPA. This might, at some point in the future, come back to haunt you in a job interview. Or you’re just a few days late registering for classes and, all of a sudden, your schedule for the next semester is terrifyingly devoid of classes that you’re required to take.
However, here’s the thing. College is preparing us students to be adults. Legally, we are adults. Irreversible things go down in the real world quite often, so it only makes sense that we start learning that unfortunate reality now.
2. You learn how to think.
There’s that class that you sign up for and then, a few months in (usually just past the last day to drop classes) you realize that you don’t really know how you’re going to survive with a decent grade on it because you suck at the subject, the teacher is dicey and the textbook is indecipherable, you haven’t been paying attention at all and missed all of the fundamentals, you thought that you knew this already, but you really don’t, or all of the above. So, what do you do? You learn how to think. You learn how to figure out how the teacher asks questions on tests and what the most important lessons are that you should focus on. That way, when exam time rolls around, you don't totally fail.
Now, you may be sitting there, rolling your eyes and thinking, “Oh, that’s only useful while I’m in school.” It's quite the opposite — what I’ve found at my job is that being able to figure out what people are focused on and what the key problems of an issue are is a crucial part of dealing with clients and bosses successfully. If you can figure out how the boss likes things to be worked through, you can do it that way and impress them. If you can figure out what a client thinks is key, you can focus on that and make them happy. Both will lead to your success.
3. You accumulate knowledge.
Knowledge is power. Yes, it’s a cliché, but clichés are really phrases that catch on because they make sense. It’s true — the more that you know, the more intelligently that you can approach the world. I had a Greek mythology class this semester in which we learned about how the ancient Greeks would always represent each god with the same set of unique characteristics every time they drew them. Was this knowledge instantly useful to me? No, it wasn't. However, it does give a little bit of insight into how the human mind works — we like to represent things in certain ways and, once we get fixed on a certain pattern, we like to stick with that pattern.
Knowledge like that can again help you in your approach to everyday life, as can any tidbits of knowledge that you gain. The more that you know, the more that you’re prepared for random, day to day circumstances. Maybe you need to impress someone with small talk or you need to quickly sort out some numbers. If you have accumulated the relevant knowledge to do those things, your life will be much easier.
Is college perfect? No, it's not. The issues surrounding college and the way that we approach it could, as mentioned previously, be the content of another article. However, college has a lot of useful things to offer, which is probably why it has developed into such a crucial part of our society. All in all, two semesters in, I would say that college undoubtedly has the potential to teach important lessons about life and how to approach it.
