What I learned from business school... barely nothing.
Hi! This is my first article on Medium. In fact, this is my first ever personal piece of content. And to be honest, it feels pretty weird to upload and share something personal. But at the same time, it gives me this all new feeling, like if I found something that I was gonna love but didn’t quite know it for sure yet.
My name is Madison Leclef, I am a 22 years old. My father is Belgian and my mother is American. And I am thus, as you may have understood, a business student, here in Belgium. This is a photo of me, playing the guitar, just so you get an idea of who’s writing this ;-)
I am really passionate about Business. I love Entrepreneurship and the art of Management. So I naturally decided to pursue these studies so much people seem to go for these days. It’s been almost 4 years now, aaaand... I learned almost nothing.
Well let me nuance that a little bit. Of course I did learn some things. But I truly believe these 4 years could have been so much more efficient. Here are my main concerns with the university education system and more specifically business studies.
Everything that I will be writing about in this article is of course related to my experience here in Belgium. I believe most of these thoughts are applicable to many other countries but just keep that in mind while reading.
Through the years, I've structured my thoughts about this into two main problems.
1. The content of the classes
First problem: what is taught. Of course I had classes on every topic you’d expect a business student to have a class: accounting, marketing, finance,...
But some subjects - that I believe would have been very helpful for our future careers - didn’t show up on the program. We could have a class on negotiating skills or leadership styles, but this seems to be too practical for university, not theoretical enough.
Hopefully, getting into my Master’s, those kind of subjects start to show up, but often they are only optional and are not part of the main program. I don’t understand how that is possible. But the real problem is that they only start to show up now.
I understand very well that the Bachelor’s is to learn the basics, to be able to get into more complex subjects during the next years. But why couldn’t you teach negotiating to a first year student for example? A lot of super interesting topics don’t need prerequisites, they could be taught earlier and therefore free some time in the next years for even more interesting subjects.
2. The methodology
Even with great content, if the teaching methodology isn't adequate, it won't work. The problem of our education system actually is that we study to pass an exam, not to effectively learn. We memorize a huge amount of theory, that we spit out during an exam and then forget about most of it the next week.
The whole system is structured around a mentality of memorizing instead of learning, there lies the real problem.
Above that, our exams are often made in such a way they test our ability to recite all the theory of the class instead of testing our deep understanding of the topic.
For example, during my last session of exams, I was asked to list the 11 elements of an action plan of a certain author (I don’t even remember who, you see how bad all of this is). This is ridiculous to me. For every point of the list I didn’t remember, I was loosing a point. The teacher could have asked us to explain this action plan, how it was linked to another part of the class, and so on. But instead, he opted for an easy question to correct for him and that doesn’t show at all if I understood his class or not...
Now that I exposed the problem, I have to add that this is not me crying and complaining about the system without reacting. I believe when you complain about something, you have to act on it. This is exactly what I did and advise every other student thinking like me to do. If university isn’t going to bring you all you need, you have to go out there and find it on your own!
But great news, we live in a world where it has never been easier! Internet is full of resources. You can learn about everything on YouTube, Medium, podcasts, and everything else. So don’t wait for it to come to you, university won’t give it to you. Go for it, buy books, watch YouTube videos, listen to great podcasts and learn on your own! It’s even more satisfying in the end ;-) I will write another article on that subject in the coming days…
