What are you going to do with THAT degree?
Now that I’m finishing up my undergraduate degree, it’s the perfect time for me to reflect on my early years at university. Actually, I keep coming back to my first lecture. I remember sitting there, feeling quite small in the seemingly massive lecture hall. The lecturer came out and amongst the agonising icebreakers and housekeeping matters, he saw fit to let us all know, just in passing, that our degrees would probably be invalidated by the time we graduated.
This was a pretty depressing thought, especially considering the amount of time and money I was about to spend on getting a Media and Communications degree (which has its own stigmas attached already). So, sure enough, I pushed this to the back of my mind and dove into uni life, with little thought as to how anything could change so drastically over the next four years with anyone noticing.
While I don’t think my teachers were right about everything (Kanye West isn’t a modern day Mozart) they sure were right about this one. I remember writing an essay, in my first year, on Twitter; about how phenomenal it is as a social media platform, transforming the way news is circulated. Twitter was the big thing and it was going to dominate media and communications into the foreseeable future. Flash-forward to three days ago, when I woke up to the news that Twitter has decided to ‘discontinue’ its subsidiary app Vine, the video looping service, cutting over 300 jobs in the process. In fact, earlier this year when I was doing some work experience in a marketing team, I was told over and over again that Twitter wasn’t worth investing their time in, that it was a dying platform. That sucks.
The knowledge that my lecturers all those years ago were correct is a funny feeling. It makes you think…
“what the hell have I been working towards over the past four years?”
If you’re reading this and starting to worry, don’t. Here’s three facts that I wish I had known back in that first lecture to quell the anxiety developing in the pit of my stomach. These are some facts that have helped to bring back that undergrad optimism I had, just in time for graduation.
- Change is inevitable
Trends come and go, technology evolves and new innovations change the course of all curriculums. I’m sure media studies students back in 2005 couldn’t stop raving about MySpace as the new face of the Internet. Change has come to define the twenty-first century and I could write a whole article about technologies which were going to change the world and fizzled into nothing. I’m looking at you, Google Glass.
However, witnessing the volatility of the modern consumer market through our tertiary years can inspire us to take our own steps to be part of that evolution. In fact, more than 28,000 scholarly peer-reviewed articles are published yearly, with the intention of expanding our breadth of knowledge in an expansive range of fields. Despite owning some of these trend fails, Google employs 4000 people each year, and a huge portion of these are eager graduates ready to innovate and create the next phenomenon. Essentially, our degrees have motivated us to get out into the work force and make that change happen and that’s because…
- University teaches you more than just ‘stuff’
We’re not walking away from our degrees with a rote knowledge of what has and always will work in our field. We will, hopefully, be equipped with a set of pretty sweet transferable skills. Education in the twenty-first century is all about giving students skills that they can apply in any context and any setting. Skills like critical thinking, effective communication, self-management, and those “higher-order thinking skills” they always put on CRAs, even though you have no idea what they actually mean.
This skill set, however conscious or subconscious it may be, is arguably the most important thing we take away from the years we spend at uni. In fact, having transferable skills develops your cognitive competencies, which are found to have positive correlations with education and career success. The more years spent working on these skills, through your education or career, the more this positive connection improves.
This isn’t a new concept, but, the increasing rate of technological and social change we are experiencing highlights the importance of developing these skills.
While I may have absolutely loathed those assignments that forced this sort of thinking upon me, I can be thankful that I now, hopefully, know how to utilise those skills. I may not be able to pitch Twitter as the prime choice of social media marketing in my future job, but hey, I may not end up working in marketing anyway, because…
- Most people don’t actually work in the industry they studied to get into
In fact, only 27% of graduates work in their field of study.
The thing is, heaps of students choose their degrees without having any idea of where they’re going. This is a trend that universities are aware of, and many have designed their curriculums based on this — remember those transferable skills? In fact, Google’s head of recruitment Adam Bryant has said that a person’s degree is not a primary consideration in recruiting employees rather, in his words “For every job, […], the №1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q.”
Along with those transferable skills that we discussed, they look for leadership, the ability and eagerness to learn. This is reflective of a shift in corporate culture in a number of organisations.
“For every job, […], the №1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q.” (Bryant, 2014)
Employers are finding that seeking a person purely because they fit their idea of an ‘ideal recruit’, can actually stunt the creative growth of an organisation. Essentially, if they’re seeking only those that fit into a certain criteria, the company will lack the ability to expand outside of that. That company won’t be able to leverage creative and differing points of view. Whereas, more companies are focusing on hiring a diversity of talents and fields of study as a point of difference to enhance this creativity.
What we’ve learned over the course of our degrees will set us up for a positive and, hopefully, successful career. As counterintuitive as it may sound, change is our only certainty. Thinking back to that first lecture, I can’t help but think that my lecturer wasn’t trying to scare us. He was trying to get us ready what was and still is ahead of us. So, while graduation approaches, it’s important to keep these points in mind and know that we are going to be okay… hopefully.
Originally published at The Isthmus.
