How to Make Your College Experience Prepare You for the Working World
Summer is long gone, and for many of you, you are deeply entrenched in your fall semester of college. You finalized your schedules, paid your tuition, bought your textbooks, and are attending classes bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; ready to learn! Well, at least that’s what you tell your parents, anyway.In reality, you’ll be swapping classes until mid-September, filing for loans, and lapsing into a coma the minute you sit down in your lecture hall Monday morning. Thus is college – a series of formative personal choices that usually result in profoundly unwise decisions, and hopefully, a bit of higher learning, too. Rest assured, my fellow collegiate, that most people tend to make it out of college alive, sane and sometimes, even with degrees!
The workplace, on the other hand, is a completely different, far less forgiving beast. Can’t stick to a schedule in a professional environment? You’re fired. Show up unprepared? You’re fired. Fall asleep during a board meeting? Guess what – you’re fired! No matter how impressive your academic achievements, there are some aspects of professional life that the typical college environment simply does not prepare you for. A little common sense and a bit of preparation, however, can make your college experience work for you once you have graduated into the working world.
A lot of people embark on their post secondary journey with absolutely no concept of how to keep a schedule and stick to it. Those who wish to graduate quickly learn how to do this. Calendars, PDA’s and laptops keep us focused and can often mean the difference between acing an assignment and being laughed out of class. If you can develop effective time management techniques by your second or third semester, you’ll have a marked advantage over your less-organized peers that will carry over into the workplace and beyond.
Organizational skills come naturally to most, but the finer points of business etiquette can take even the best and brightest by surprise. If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re mature and canny enough to know that presenting benchmark reports in cargo shorts and a Thundercats T-shirt is a definite no-no. You might not know much beyond that, though. Business classes are a good way to get a feel for professional attire, lingo, and composure, so taking a few, regardless of your major, will help you get your foot in the door and your head in the right place. Keep in mind, however, that corporate culture varies widely from field to field and office to office, so a little research on your part is advisable. If you’re lucky, it could transpire that a prospective employer is just as laid-back as you are… And quite possibly, an even bigger fan of Thundercats!
The most important skill to be taken from your college experience is, naturally, the most elusive and difficult to perfect – the nigh-inscrutable art of responsible independence. Most thirty-something’s haven’t even mastered this yet! In fact, most people, in general, haven’t either. College, careers, everything between, and everything beyond are what you make of them. What you learn and what you do in the educational world determines, to a large extent, how everything else down the line will pan out. Make the most of the opportunities available to you now and doors will open up in places you never imagined. Diligence and an open mind will lead to wonderful things, in business and in life. There’s no telling what the future holds!
Learn how to play your cards, and learn early… You’ll only increase your chances of a winning hand. And who knows – you might even land a gig that encourages you to wear your beloved Thundercats t-shirt!
Labels: college experience, professionalism, real-world knowledge, the future
Posted by Seymour Jobs on 10/10/2008 03:04:00 PM
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