5 things you should forget when you finish uni
It’s that time of the year again when a whole bunch of students are finishing uni, and a bunch more are looking forward to spending the holidays of freedom. They are also, probably, stressing about internships and jobs. I was a grad myself 5 years ago, and I interview heaps of students now. Based on those experiences, here’s 5 things I wish everyone who went to uni would forget as soon as they finished.
1. Stop echoing other people’s opinions
Education systems rarely teach you to form your own opinions on things as much as they teach you how existing systems work, and maybe how to re-implement them. In the real world you need to be able to analyse things critically and say what you believe. It breaks my heart every time someone says “I don’t really get it, I’m just doing it this way because X said to”. Take the time to understand!
2. Stop working independently
At uni they call working together “cheating” or “group assignments where 1 person carries the team”. In the real world it’s called collaboration and it’s a lot better. Don’t be shy about asking for feedback from everyone around you early and often (just remember to make up your own mind about which feedback to listen to!).
3. Forget about criteria sheets
When I was at uni we used to joke about the marking sheets being vague. Man, I would kill for that level of clarity in the real world. In a lot of cases you are figuring out what the problem is half the time, then working as hard as you can to solve it. Don’t assume someone else has the answers, or that the answers even exist.
4. Stop trying to be perfect
A uni assignment typically involves up to a semester of tweaking a bit of work until it’s, in your eyes, perfect. Then submitting it moments before the deadline and hoping that whoever marks it will agree. In the real world there’s no prizes for submitting at 11:59 the night before, and in fact you are always better off sharing around something imperfect sooner and getting lots of feedback early on. Depending on your industry this might be feedback from customers or from co-workers (customer feedback is always better, don’t be shy), but either way you need to get over your perfectionism and proudly show off something shitty so it can improve.
5. Don’t live in a bubble
When I studied software engineering, we never learned about design, or product management, or sales or marketing. It was sort of implied that those things just happened as long as you wrote good code with correct data structures. What a lie! In the real world, any job worth doing will encourage you to think about all those things. If you are making software that’s hard to use, or that you can’t easily explain, or that nobody wants, nobody’s going to care if it has nicely formatted comments. Step outside of your bubble and figure out how you can have the biggest impact.
