4 things I realized after graduating from college
I must admit: college was a great experience for me. I acquired broad knowledge and I learned self-discipline. But, some courses were and remain useless to me. I also met really brainy people and some truly strange ones.
Life after college, however, is much more different. University life doesn't quite prepare for some cutthroat realities of the world. After some time roaming the school of hard knocks, these are some of the things I came to grasp with.
Your diploma can only get you so far
No one really cares about your GPA or your alma mater a few years after school.
A few years after college, I realized that college diplomas are only relevant at the very beginning of our careers when we’re just getting our feet into the job market, when we don’t yet have a strong network to rely on.
For most people, the prestige of one’s alma mater and academic performance only matter when you freshly obtain your diploma and need someone to give you a chance. With time though, the university you attended and your academic performance lose value rather quickly.
Experience, your ability to consistently deliver good work, and the quality of your network become the new basic credentials to grant you access to different realms of the business world.
For example, during events, people don’t introduce top managers by first mentioning the university they attended (GPA is out of the question). You don’t believe me? Check out the “Team” section on companies’ corporate website and you’ll notice that the academic detail of managers are often mentioned last in their bios. Why? No one really cares about your GPA or your alma mater a few years after school.
Your are not invaluable
The objective of firms is to maximize shareholders’ wealth.
Regardless how good you are, as long as you work for an organization, you could get fired. Heck, even if you own a small business, you could still get fired — that’s called bankruptcy.
If you graduated from a university where top companies recruit regularly, you’d recognize the amount of resources they spend on talent. Large companies spend serious money during campus recruiting season. Dinners and stays at 5-star hotels, paid pre-recruiting events across cities, corporate souvenirs, etc., the list goes on. They woo you and make you feel very special.
But are you really? The reality is that companies have objectives and they recruit people to help them achieve them. It’s a contract: they pay people to help them achieve goals. It’s that simple. This means that the day they believe you can’t help them achieve those goals, they will let you go. After all, the first principle they still teach during business school is: the objective of firms is to maximize shareholders’ wealth. It’s not a concidence then that a chunk of university endownment could be traced to businesses.
Nowadays, it’s not difficult for companies to find replacement talent, particularly in developed economies where there is a large pool of skilled labor. Nevertheless, companies seeking to survive in the long-term can’t simply pick and drop off employees like passengers on a subway train. Eventually, qualified and loyal people will naturally gravitate toward firms that can treat them better and support their career growth.
Still, you could still be forced out of any company for any number of reasons. It’s helpful to always keep that in mind.
Internships provide invaluable experience
Extracurricular activities shouldn’t just be about making one’s resume look good.
Before earning my bachelor’s degree, I interned twice during summer vacations in pretty good organizations. Honestly, I wished I had done more internships, even in modest companies. In hindsight, these internships prepared me much better for the job market than the student clubs I was involved in.
The campus activities were great for interacting with other students, but most students at the time were mainly engaged in them to beef up their resume and “differentiate” themselves come recruiting season. Internships on the other hand provide practical experience and introduce corporate politics to students — an inevitable encounter in the professional world. Internships could even help students to decide if they should pursue the entrepreneurship route instead.
No matter how smart you are, college can never quite prepare you for a real world experience in the job market. There’s always a steep learning curve that you must overcome. Being secretary of the campus finance club or yoga club is great, but it’s even better if this is paired with work experience.
Extracurricular activities shouldn’t just be about making one’s resume look good. They should help you fast track your career and decide on your career focus early on.
Corruption and organized crime start at university
University provided many students with good training opportunity to become future skilled corporate criminals.
During college, I observed students engage in activities that, in retrospect, had attributes of organized crime and corruption. Allow me to explain.
Many students engaged in organized cheating. For example, some professors had student assitants who helped them with grading and other miscellaneous things. Unfortunately, many of the student assistants provided their close friends with exam documents or hints to help them ace exams. This constitutes a breach of trust. As harmless as this may seem compared to billion-dollar white collar crimes, university provided many students with good training opportunity to become future skilled corporate criminals.
When I began attending the university libraries to study, I was impressed that so many groups of students studied and often into the wee hours. With time and much observation though, I discovered that many of them were exchanging exam documentation, sometimes by pitching in money to acquire them. In retrospect, this behavior looks a bit like insider trading. That’s how these sort of things start.
There’s obviously a lot more I learned post college. But you, what’s something interesting that you realized after leaving college?
