What You Should Do In College
When I was in business school, career center staff used a tool ( sorry I forget the name) to help each MBA student to decide what career might be a good fit. You answer a lot of questions and then the results are summarized into interest, motivation and skill set. The logic behind it is interest and motivation tends to stay stable, so pick career that fits your interest and motivation, and keep an eye on the skill set that you can leverage or need to develop. I remember my top list was management consulting, human resource, whereas product management and development was low on the bottom.
At the time, I doubt this tool would work. Now I can say from my personal experience and from scientific research perspective(Dan Gilbert: The psychology of your future self — https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_you_are_always_changing#t-212165), it doesn’t work. It’s actually very simple: if you know what you want to do, you just know it. If you don’t know, you need to work very hard to find what you want to do. Tools, other people’s suggestions matter very little. There is almost no middle ground.
From my observation, most my Chinese classmates, include myself, don;t know what they want to. They might claim they have passion for something when interviewing with companies, but by looking at their job application portfolios, I think it’s not true.
How come a 30-ish year old adult doesn’t know what he/she wants to do? I think the problem goes back to education, especially college education, during which one is supposed to develop life and career interest, discover various part of life, and try new stuff.
In Asia, especially in China, colleges are designed to teach students something, not to encourage them to discover something. When I was in college, I had very heavy workload of homework, all of them are problem sets, and none of are reading materials. I had to concentrate myself to solve problems by problems. I never ask why people would have these problems? Why they ask? Schools rate student by their GPAs. Extra curriculum activities are nice to have, but weigh little in evaluation.
Over the years, I developed high skills of solving problems but know nothing about the origin the problems. In other words, I know how to solve given problems, but don;t know how to find them. I specialized in each course, but don’t know what’s interesting in life.
What would I do differently? Or if my brother goes to college tomorrow, what advice I would offer? There might be a long list, but here my top answers.
Asking right questions
Asking right questions is more important than solving questions. Right questions are compass and maps. If solved correctly, will lead you to the right place. In school or early in the career, you will be given a lot of questions to solve. Most of them are right questions. In that way, schools and companies prepare you for the next level. You pick up skills, form habits, and grow. Once you get to the next level, doing research, or building a new product for users, or driving new business to grow, you are facing a situation that no one knows what the right question is. You need the capability to ask right questions to set vision, rally team, and solve problems. If you’re building a new business model, or leading a successful team, you need to invent problems and challenges to stay relevant. That’s where good leaders and average leaders start to diverge.
Working on interesting problems
If you don’t know what you want to do, how can you discover it? The only way I can think of is working on interesting problems. Pay more attention to how can you build something, how can you improve something to make people’s life better, how can you test an interesting hypothesis, where do you find the broken chain and how can you complete it, why people do things in a certain way, is that the right way? Pay less attention to scores, GPAs, pass or fail, repetitive and boring problem set, scholarship, fame, rewards. By working on interesting problems, you might find something worth digging and that could later become the stuff you want to do.
Don’t go to graduate school
Though you might get some freedom to work on your independent project, it’s still not worth it. Two years in graduate school rewards far less than two years in work place. Later on, if you really want to concentrate in some career, go to professional school, like Med, Law, or Business. I tend to think graduate school is just a product catered to sub segments. It’s not fundamental education like college, and it’s not advanced enough like PHD program. It servers the needs of some people. If you really want to learn something, go to PHD program. I bet people’s attitude towards graduate school will change in future. Companies are more likely to hire an undergrad with great internship experience than someone just fresh out of grad school. Life in workplace is harder and more challenging than in school. As an employer, I’d rather pick a wild animal instead of one in the cage. It’s more vibrant.
