Building Something During College is the Best Form of Education

Mark Twain famously reminded us that we should never let our schooling interfere with our education. For all the time and money college students spend on a four-years bachelor’s degree, we would expect large benefits and demonstrated growth for the vast majority of students. Unfortunately, we aren’t seeing this in the modern-day higher education system. Let’s look at why this is the case and what students can do to combat this reality.

First off, we have a learning problem…

45 percent of college students do not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning from the fall of their freshman year to the fall of their junior year. 36 percent of college students do not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning over the entirety of their four years in college.

We have a lack of initiative and an increased passivity issue…

35 percent of students report studying alone five hours or less each week.

We also lack rigorous coursework…

One third of college students have not taken a single class that requires 40 or more pages of reading per week. 50 percent of students are not taking a single class that requires 20 or more pages of writing over the course of a semester.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t students that seek academic rigor and apply themselves, determined to make improvements in learning through traditional college classes. But it does mean that on average, college students are studying less, reading less, and writing less than they should be to learn the critical skills to land their dream job or start their own company.

As a student, I know these realities might be, for the foreseeable future, unchangeable.

Luckily, there is one way to make giant improvements in learning during your college years, regardless of your experience with college curriculum: build something of your own.

Building Something in College

One of the best ways to grow your skills, critical thinking abilities, and begin to make a genuine impact is building something of value during college. Finding a problem in your community and creating a solution to address this problem can help you overcome this passivity and sense of a lack of learning which you might be experiencing. Here’s how one student did it successfully.

Mac Bolak, a student at CU Boulder, is currently building his third company, Give and Go Film, which automates film editing for sports programs. Mac calls American undergraduate business schools “antiquated”, despite genuine efforts to adapt to the changing times. He believes that at this point hardly any freshman and sophomore business curriculum directly helps students begin to build businesses. In fact, he credits almost everything that has helped him start his companies to resources found outside of traditional classrooms.

Mac got exposure to a Boulder accelerator, Spark Boulder, as well as some influential mentors as a freshman. Every time an entrepreneurial speaker came to campus, he attended and listened intently to the message. Without mentors to help educate and inspire him, Mac said he would have had a much tougher time launching his businesses.

Not only has Mac learned from his entrepreneurial mentors, but he has also learned from the startup process itself. The three most valuable parts of starting something in college, according to Mac include:

1. Learning who you are. Mac’s first business, which he built with some dorm friends during his freshman year gave him an idea of what kind of person he wanted to be, especially in the business world.
2. Having the opportunity to learn about a vast array of areas. Mac mentions, “Most people aren’t going to give college kids opportunities that don’t include a majority of busy work, but starting a business in college will ensure that you learn how different elements of a business work, and even if you want to work in a larger company after college it will give you a sense of intrapreneurship.”
3. Just going for it, taking a risk, and setting a precedent for yourself. Mac believes students should prove to themselves that they CAN do what they set their mind to, as this attitude of confidence and self-assurance will follow you through college and into the working world.

This approach does NOT just apply for starting businesses.

In your search for resources to help you start your “something”, Mac suggests getting involved with other motivated students. In addition to building Give and Go Film, Mac started the CU Venture Club last year to give students the opportunity to connect around the idea of entrepreneurship in a setting beyond the classroom. Starting a club, like a business, can be incredibly beneficial and rewarding, but as Mac says, “What you put in is what you’re going to get out.”

If you start a club as simply a resume-enhancer and fail to put in the effort, you won’t create any genuine impact. However, if you manage your club with focus and care, as you would a new venture, you have the opportunity to create real value for yourself and other students.

Keep in mind, students don’t go to college for four years. Students go to college for 28 months. Seven months times four years. That’s just over two years of college…not four. It is your responsibility as a student to take control of your time not spent in class and put it to good use.

In the big scheme of things, learning in the classroom is easy. On the contrary, building something is hard. Embarking on an entrepreneurial experiment in college will make you realize how much you don’t know. It will teach you that you have the ability to learn new skills as quickly as you can read books and listen to mentors. It will teach you that much of your real education on business and life will not come from school but from trying to build something of value.

Building something in college, or at least making a genuine effort, will help develop a curiosity that will stay with you well after your formal studies have finished. Many of your peers will walk across the stage at graduation, receive their diploma and will not crack open a book for a year because they see no incentive to do so. Even if modern-day higher education is struggling to instill this intellectual and entrepreneurial curiosity in you, creating a new venture will provide the rigor and development that will help mold you into a lifelong learner.

By all means, stay committed to your classes. Study, read, write and seek out rigorous academics while you still can. Just remember Mark Twain’s advice that finding educational opportunities outside of the classroom, such as building something new, might actually provide the best type of learning.

So start building!