Open doors.
The purpose and value of an education.
Universities are dead. College education is overrated. Save tuition fee dollars for something meaningful. No one cares if you have a degree. It is skills that count. Why waste 4 years of your life?
Why indeed?
What is the purpose of education?
Good education, undergraduate or otherwise, should change behavior.
Great education, should help you think clearly. It should show you how to approach problems and challenges in a structured, rational fashion. A gift of frameworks, for thinking.
The very best in education helps differentiate between rational and irrational thinking. It teaches the ability to challenge our own mindset, acknowledge our weaknesses, handle uncertainty and ambiguity, and accept scenarios with no right answers.
If you are not happy with the abstract description above, I also have simpler ones for you. As someone who spent 11 years taking self-study actuarial exams (no classes, professors, or campus), 3 years and 18 months in two separate fast-tracked formal study programs (college and university) and 29 years teaching formally, here are more, equally valid takes on the purpose of education:
a) Help discover, explore, develop and acquire interests.
b) Get comfortable with what you are capable of, your performance envelope.
c) Learn how to learn. Understand how to use that learning to make real-world decisions working from first principles.
d) Answer the who, what, where questions. Who are you? What are you really capable of? What is it that you want to do? Where do you want to be and will this path take you there?
All good starting points. Let’s explore.
Who are you? Where are you going?
The “who are you” question has been a core question in my life.
Self-awareness is a personal attribute that simplifies decision-making, goal-setting, and self-image. Once you have answered this, you can also answer where do you want to go and what do you want to do? Exceptional individual contributors in my professional network are often self-aware.
Knowing what you want to do changes how you approach life. For some, the desire to find this answer leads to adventures. For others, the adventures become the answers. Think of early decisions in college admissions and what they do to your chances of getting admitted.
What has education got to do with this?
Colleges and universities provide an open environment with a safety net where one can explore questions across 4 years we spend chasing the end of a degree program. Open because we can pose, ask, and follow questions inside and outside the classroom. Safe because if we stumble and fall seeking an answer, we won't fall for too long or too hard. There is no downside to asking questions or falling because everyone around us is busy doing the same thing.
Good programs provide ample opportunities to explore and experiment across interests, from subjects, domains, languages, frontiers and friendship. You are not limited by cohort, major, or minor. If studying smoke signals in the Stone Age as a communication medium lights your candle, smoke signals should be.
The most privileged within any society are those who get a chance to experience college or university life even once. The most unfortunate are those who don’t use that opportunity to grow and find themselves. Find answers to the questions posed above in the 4 years we spend in college. It helps in unexpected ways. We are more productive doing things we want to do, versus things we have to or don’t want to do.
Why won’t you do this? Because it isn’t who I am.
How I saw myself and what I wanted to do changed over years. At the start I loved numbers. I wanted to study, work and get paid based on my merit. In my part of the world, at that point, the only profession that gave me that shot was actuarial science. I became an actuary because I wanted it to define who I was. I didn’t want to give anyone else that power.
Much later, the getting paid and standing out bit got thrown out from my list. It didn’t matter if I got paid or not, stood out or not, I wanted to do the things I wanted to do. Sometimes, what I wanted involved numbers. More often, it didn’t. I still loved numbers, but they no longer defined my identity.
Capability and performance windows.
When I trained as a competitive athlete, training was uncomfortable. In my teens, I trained against competition. 30 years later, I trained against myself and the clock.
In distance running, the model we used for training was four days of base building. The training focused on speed, speed endurance, and stamina. A fifth day of light mobility training, capped by twenty minutes of pushing boundaries on the sixth day. The seventh day was sleep, rest and recovery.
The four days were hard. The recovery day was sore all over. The twenty minutes of testing boundaries on the sixth day? Death.
There is no other way of describing the feeling when you go beyond personal limits. It feels like death and dying. We did this repeatedly, week after week, month after month, year after year.
And some of us got faster and better. The ones who used self-assessment loops.
Training without assessment and measurement has no real impact. On the track, we used self-assessment - with handheld stopwatches. Going around the same cinder track again and again. The coaches didn’t check our time, we did. They tracked how we responded week over week, but the micro execution and tracking were our domain.
In performance-focused training, there is no incentive to cheat or take shortcuts because everyone on the track can see where you stand. You could see where you stood. You didn’t need a stopwatch to know you were in the zone or lost. When you ran a fraction of a second faster, you felt it in your bones, in your lungs, and in the wind brushing against your hair.
But it became possible once we understood why we wanted what we wanted and how to get there. No one pushed us to test ourselves. We did.
That is what undergrad education is. Understand what you want. Understand what it would take to get there. Then get there.
Instructors, courses, outlines, workouts, workshops, labs are facilitators. They are not coaches. They are bystanders on your journey who may sometimes point where the next turn is or if your shoe laces are untied. We, the students, are the curators.
What is the objective? The objective is self-improvement.
How?
The first year is understanding and learning to work with the schedule. Learning to work with being uncomfortable. To stay the course till the discomfort fades in the background and you stop noticing it.
The next three years are testing and pushing boundaries. Your sixth day of training.
Just that it is no longer measured in minutes or days but months and years. No improvement without pushing boundaries, testing limits and being uncomfortable. If it is comfortable, it is not transformative. If it is not transformative, it isn’t education.
You grow fastest when you test performance windows every week. You can still grow if you do it every month. Assessment isn’t forced, scheduled or external. It’s part of the package. For many, self-assessment is the only viable option. If it isn’t for you if your instructor won’t give you a homework assignment, go pick one up from MIT Open Learning.
A skill-focused course needs 3 hours of instructor contact hours in the class. 2–3 hours of prep/practice work with worksheets, lab, assignments. 3 hours of self-study, review, and self-assessment. Roughly 9 hours of allocated time for a 3-credit course.
This is the minimum. Sprinkle 30 minutes of office hours. 2–3 hours of additional explorative work, discussions, and free-form engagement with classmates and peers.
The point? Getting an education is a full-time job. 45–60 hours of committed, focused, directed work every week, every term when taking a full course load. For skill-focused programs, if you are not doing this much, you are short-changing yourself.
Like eating a frozen dinner, frozen.
If you have never felt uncomfortable, pushed, lost, confused, disheartened, or all broken up inside, you haven’t tested your limits. If you haven’t tested your limits across 4 years of college, you haven’t done it right.
Your program, your teachers, your university, can’t push those buttons. Only you can.
Don’t take the easy professors and the easy As, take the difficult ones. Don’t settle for being comfortable, push boundaries and limits out. The journey is the destination. Don’t rush to the check out lane, take the slower, scenic route. No, you won’t come back this way again.
We all think we will or we can. No one does.
I failed the actuarial statistics exam, the old course 110 twice. Life Contingencies, course 150, twice. Pricing Derivatives, course V480, thrice. The second F in 110 broke me up. 150 was much harder, but hurt less. The 3rd F in V480, nine years later was the last exam I failed. No one forced or pushed me to do any of this. I did it. Just like I clocked the mileage required to run the three half marathons before I turned 50.
The laps on the cinder tracks, training and competing showed me at 17 that I didn’t have what it took to be competitive at the city level, let alone the provincial or national teams. It wasn’t just talent. It was commitment, resources and time. The price for this specific dream was too steep. I didn’t have the heart for it. Good enough for bronze and silvers, never gold.
It was my first painful lesson in self-awareness. I wasn’t capable of something I wanted.
Assessments? A short detour.
As an instructor, my weakest point has been assessments. Crafting assessments that force students to think. Assessments that can’t be solved with Chat GPT or any other LLM. Assessments that are individualized, customized, and feedback-driven.
Notice the word craft. We craft assessments, we don’t create them.
Like level design in game design. Final assessments should be worthy of a boss level. The season finale that keeps you at the edge of your seats. Great boss levels require you to work up to them. Your character needs armor, potions, spells, tools, weapons, friends and partners. You acquire them by completing earlier levels. That is the secret of level design. It is also the secret behind assessment design.
Seed the key, the hack required to ace the next harder level of assessments in the previous ones. Build up the difficulty in stages. Give instant and frequent feedback. If your cohort struggles show them how to do it for the base case. Then show them how to extend that thinking. Give them a few practice cases. Then throw them in the deep end of the pool.
You can’t run a sub-120 sec 800m, a sub-60 sec 400m, or swim in the deep end on day one. You do it after a few months of training.
Standardized instruction, assessment and instant feedback. The three musketeers of higher education. Bring them with you the next time you to to war against ignorance, indifference or apathy.
The last time I tried to do this it almost killed me.
Learning how to learn.
My journey of becoming a spreadsheet model builder began in high school. At a summer internship, I plugged in a financial model in Lotus 123 on the original Apple Macintosh. Then, I linked it, projected it, and did new stuff with it. Over time the new stuff became fancier and interesting.
I didn’t do any spreadsheet modeling in college. I spent a lot of time in front of screens, testing, experimenting, exploring and programming. There were newer, fancier tools to play with.
But that first internship put me on a road where, in most rooms, I was the intern you came to with your spreadsheet troubles. At the intersection of spreadsheets and computer science I found macro programming. An exotic way of automating tasks in spreadsheets. With forecasting, I found optimization, operations research, numerical methods, and neural networks. This was also modeling but of a different kind. One that you did in your head, then on paper, then with code.
Every internship and job that followed focused on using that combined skillset. First with Lotus, then Symphony and finally Excel. Spreadsheets, macros, models and numbers led to finance, investments and risk, the focus of my actuarial specialization and fellowship. It was the sum of all paths that helped me find the final one.
I took actuarial exams for eleven years. The final four of those eleven were focused on specialized model building. Within that specialization lay the sub-niche of computational finance. Between spreadsheets, everything I had done prior to stumbling on computational finance, my computational finance exams, and the textbooks, papers, and class notes prescribed for these exams, I read thousands of pages and attempted hundreds of practice exam questions. On my own, at my desk, by myself.
Did that make me an expert? No.
In graduate school, three different courses by three different professors helped me connect multiple themes and fill gaps in my understanding. All three had worked on trading desks on Wall Street and one was still at it. It wasn’t the class room lectures that brought it together, it was the weekly assignments. We hated them but the models we built over the weekend, every weekend, is where the real learning happened.
I still wasn’t an expert.
It was only when I went back to work in the real world that I used what I had been taught to solve real problems it came together. The foundation you had built, showed you the way. Each problem we solved, used a different recipe. We hadn’t learnt any of these in school but we had covered first principles in sufficient depth. Enough depth that we could apply ourselves to craft a new magical spell. Making first-world models work in frontier markets.
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are a great example. I struggled with them in Calculus three, in awe of them in the Contingencies exam that used them as liberally as a chef uses marinara sauce in a pizza shop. They stumped me cold in the Continuous Time Finance, the one and only PhD elective I took before I came back to my senses.
Without the ability to read, decipher and decode PDEs, the models we built later in our professional lives would not be possible. Had I known that earlier, I would have paid more attention in Cal III.
From the day I saved my first spreadsheet in Lotus 1–2–3 to the point I took my last actuarial exam — 11 years. From my last exam to the last course I took as a graduate student in computational finance — 2 years. From the last course to the point when I became comfortable crafting new recipes — 8 years. From the new recipes to the point where it all came together — 4 years.
25 years. 25 years of learning, un-learning, and learning again. It has been a decade since then, and the learning hasn’t stopped. Every year a new piece falls into place and I realize how incomplete my knowledge, my understanding and my comprehension was. This is after penning two textbooks published by a Macmillan imprint on the topic.
Am I an expert now? No. I am very much a humble apprentice.
The point I am trying to make? There is no silver bullet. Self-study on your own won’t do it. It doesn’t matter who teaches you or how cool the tool is. 11 years of actuarial exams helped me get my 3 letters and a great education. All self-study, but it wasn’t enough.
A top-tier college and graduate education helped me build the right foundation and connect the network of concepts in my head but only solved a part of the puzzle. Work resolved another. It helped bridge knowledge with real-world applications.
Teaching exposed my own weaknesses. You truly need a different level of comprehension before you can explain why change functions behave the way they do using analogies that your grandmother would understand.
So when someone says college or grad school or work, or YouTube or MOOCs will fix it for you, that you don’t need one or more from that list I respectfully disagree. You need all of them working together to learn, to work, to compete, to grow.
Accepting that you don’t have all the answers is the first step. Empty your cup before you step into your classroom. More so if you are the instructor.
I read the primary textbook in my field 18 times to prepare for the V480 exam on derivative pricing. I took the exam 3 times across as many years. It took working at Goldman, one PhD elective, studying from three Wall Street traders from three different desks, 20 years of adapting, tweaking, and writing first-world models to work in frontier markets, teaching the subject to graduate students and trading desks for it to come together for me. Three decades later there is still stuff that I am supposed to know, but I don’t.
And then, after all that, I didn’t want it.
I didn’t want it because I had made it work. Knowing that I could do it, that I had done it, even once was enough. The money or recognition didn’t move my needle. Proving that it was within my performance envelope, knowing that I could it again tomorrow if I wanted to, was enough.
Why not? Interests and intersections.
In ’99 I enrolled in graduate school because of questions. Questions I hadn’t been able to answer at work or in the subjects I had studied. What does it take to make a business work? Why do ideas on the bleeding edge often fail? Isn’t technology enough? How do you get talent to stay with you for over a decade? What happens when you fail? How do you prepare for it? What is it that I really want to do? Over the next three terms the quest for answers led me to something I thought interesting and with potential to change a small part of my world.
The first professor I spoke to about the idea, said, are you nuts? His argument was simple. People better, older, smarter, sharper, more qualified and credentialed than me had tried and failed.
What makes you think you can?
An ice-cold shower on a freezing day in NYC. Colder because I wasn’t expecting it. So I went to John Whitney.
John taught Turnaround Management and Perfect Prince. 68 year old, legally blind and recently back from a double knee replacement. John had led a chain of stores to profitability in the 70's, was a retired runner, pastor and vice Dean from HBS, author of multiple books. I had taken Perfect Prince with him in the summer and was working through Turnarounds the course he had originally authored, designed and chaired.
John heard me out and then said, “David has his opinions. But only one way to find out who is right, Jawwad.”
That warmed me up. To break the tie, I went to Ralph Biggadike, the smartest, most accessible strategy Professor I had the privilege of knowing. Ralph had run Becton Dickinson North America, loved Golf and dry wit, and taught strategy as if he was teaching poetry. After walking him through the context, I asked:
“Chair of Finance thinks I am nuts, John thinks I should prove him wrong, what do you think?”
And Ralph, God bless his soul, said, “ Why not, Jawwad.”
Too many teachers say, are you nuts? This can’t be done, you won’t be able to do it, do something safer, take the smart route around the problem, watch out for the nettles, why take the risk?
Ralph and John changed my life by doing the opposite. Despite the fact that in the long run, the Finance chair, being the conservative Wall Street banker he was, won the bet.
Partly, that is. We did it, but we couldn’t make it work or last, then. Ralph and John helped me open that door, and it stayed wide open. It is still open 25 years later.
Ten years before the NYC conversation, at FAST Karachi, another instructor opened a different door by making us ship an operating system (OS) in 14 weeks. In 1991, it was the collective cohort telling him he was nuts. That nobody in their right mind would expect a group of CS sophomores to ship a functioning OS. That too after simulating an 8 bit simple instruction computer in the C programming language. Only one of us had any exposure to C at that stage. There were too many points of failure.
But Salman Quraishi was a driven man with a plan. He said we will. He would show us how to do it. If we wanted a passing grade in the course, we better get started. So we did. Started and shipped.
These may be heartwarming stories, but there is a catch. As teachers, instructors, and professors, we can open doors. It is the student who has to walk through them. John and Ralph opened that door but I had to walk through it. Salman opened another door for a group of forty students but only some of us walked through it.
As a student, when you find an open door, what should you do? Walk through it or ignore it? Not all open doors lead to meaning or results that you can write back home about. Some end up being disasters and stuff nightmares are made of.
I didn’t walk through all the doors I found. I only walked through the ones I wanted to. Like the sum of my paths, I found that the doors too were all connected. Even the ones where I only found darkness instead of light.
Seek open doors. Seek teachers who open doors. And when you find one you want to explore, don’t hesitate, don’t hold back. Walk through it. Even when you find darkness instead of light. The act of walking through will change your life.
We are back full circle.
What is the purpose of education? The purpose of education is to help us find open doors. To give us the courage to walk through them when we find them. The strength to find our way back when we find darkness instead of light.
As teachers, when parents send their children to us, to our classrooms, they don’t want us to brand them with our version of cynicism. There is enough of that in homes, in families, in neighborhoods, in life. They send them to us so that we can help them find the doors they want to open, and then open those doors for them.
It is not rocket science. It is a choice. A choice between “Are you nuts?” and “Why not?”. Too few teachers make the right one. Be the one that tilts that balance in the right direction.
Open doors, not close them. And when you are lucky enough to find your open door, remember. An education is what you make out of it.
Closing notes. You will only go to college once. An education is not just about academics, transaction optimization or becoming a bot. I found I loved theater, writing, conversations. Building, sharing, exploring common interests with my own band of crazy people, wherever I went. My own band of crazy people. I found time for investing and building relationships that lasted decades.
I wrote letters by hand to family members overseas. Read books, played games, ran simulations, and picked up table tennis, volleyball, and rugby. Track, training and running fell by the wayside because there wasn’t enough time. But I learnt what it took to keep two opposing ideas in my head, understand why diversity in opinions leads to better decisions and that like the sum of paths and the sum of doors, I was also the sum of individuals I spent the most time with.
Given my exposure to the flavors of learning, which one do I recommend. Self-study with the end-of-term exams — the certified practitioner model? Undergraduate college education? Graduate education? Working apprenticeship? Teaching?
I would say teaching helped me grow the most. But my role models for teaching were teachers who taught me. My teaching style is inspired by a fusion of approaches from teachers who broadened my mind and left an impression. Without formal education, I would have never met them, wouldn’t be under the influence of their gravity, wouldn’t know where to start as a teacher or instructor.
So yes, while you may opt to not believe it, a college education is underrated.
If you liked what I wrote above, there are two additional pieces I would like you to read.
One for my students, who may have found their way here.
One for my fellow teachers and instructors.
