5 thoughts about the purpose of an education
The Academy does (not) prepare you for industry
1. Don’t over optimize your path through education
The point of each class you take doesn’t have to be in the pursuit of a singular goal. Consider a practice of taking a nice walk in the woods. This likely isn’t as impactful for your health goals as a hard-core HIIT workout, but none-the-less services a delightful purpose. It can refresh and calm you in a way doing 15 burpees would clearly not. In a relaxed state it makes other things easier, perhaps even you HIIT workout later in the day. So be sure to allow yourself some small percentage of course work based on what you think might be interesting.
It’s also okay if you try a course and notice, “actually this is terrible” either due to complete incongruence with the instructor or the material. That kind of data is incredibly valuable to you. For example, you have a passing interest in Anthropology and you decide to take a course about the origins of man. Each lecture you keep falling asleep because you don’t care about the analysis of the 20 specimens of homo erectus found or how it is speculated that they are related to other early hominids. After reflecting you may find that you really care about cultures and ethnography not bones and DNA! (No doubt there are anthropologist with the exact opposite inclination). The point is once you reflect, you now know more about what you like. It’s even better if you can determine that there is literally no amount of money that could make you want to do something as a job every day. Perhaps no one will ever offer a blank check to work on your favorite anthropological niche since I doubt it is a subject due for extreme investment by venture capital, but we do indeed live in strange times so who knows.
2. Explore ideas to find something you are good at
Part of deciding what you want to do for a job is finding something you are good at. Which of course is horribly ill-defined. Good at!?! What does that even mean? I’ve mentioned no metric or notion of success. Be serious! Okay, I’ll attempt it. Here’s a quick thought experiment. What is a topic that you could talk on confidently. Let’s say someone is throwing a slides party (you know a party where people present slide decks to each other) and for whatever reason (even if it is completely against your nature) you decide to go. You need a topic to talk about for 5 minutes. Usually I think people approach this with the advice that you should allow yourself to pick any topic. And I think there is value but the reality of the business world, is how can you make that topic interesting to other people. This is of course a very difficult task if you don’t know the people at the party or their interests. But suppose you know half of them pretty well and know what their interests are. Take your topic (even underwater basket weaving, or that anime from the 80s that you are basically a world expert in) and try to gear your talk toward making it somewhat interesting to those folks. Exploring different ideas is somewhat easier to do while you are participating in education since you will have access to learning resources during this time that you may not in the future. You’ll also get a chance to meet various folks (some incredibly boring and others very interesting) that will also help you stumble upon new ideas. Among these you may find that thing which you are truly good at.
3. You are your best teacher
Teachers are more like gardeners or farmers than they are like technicians working on cars or computers. The fundamental relationship between student and teacher is defined by the fact that a teacher cannot perform the learning for the student. The student must do it on their own. Teachers then employ many tactics to varying success to construct an environment that promotes student learning. Many excellent teachers are masters at both creating conclusive environments and knowing how to stoke motivation. While having a great teacher is a truly wonderful experience take some of the onus on yourself and ask, “how am I supporting my own learning.” It wonderful when we connect with our teachers, but they’ll never be able to know us as well as we might get to know ourselves. Therefore, we can strive to help lay our own foundation to support our own learning environments with great success. That is, if you know that you will be more motivated to learn about finance if you relate it to your favorite video game with a simulated economy, then start explaining the concepts you are learning in terms of that game. While you are in education, even if you are forced to study a subject you don’t particularly like, try to use the opportunity to hone your understanding of yourself and to learn tricks to help you integrate new information into your worldview.
4. Learning new things will always be required
You will have to continue to learn new things if you hope to lead the good life that you have envisioned for yourself. However, the kinds of learning that you will be doing will look different depending on your choice. Consider that each time you moved between middle and high school, then later to college, you had to adapt to the new environment by learning about new methods of learning that were appropriate to your new environment and new kinds of education.
If you truly hate learning and expect to be perfectly static in your understanding of the world after you leave institutions of academia, then I have bad news. We all always have to adapt to our circumstances. Sometimes it will feel like a burden but other times it will feel invigorating. The key is to maximize the good kinds of learning that you naturally excel at and are naturally energized by. I think deciding on this is a major factor in deciding which path to take. Course work at university can be illuminating in this regard. If taking another comparative literature course of the works of the great Russian novelists sounds worse than other activities you hate, then this is good data! Reconsider your plan to pursue a PhD in comparative literature regardless of how many years you’ve been down that path. If on the other hand you feel like you can tolerate a few more classes and get to the kinds of readings and translations you really are interested in, then perhaps the trade off is worth it. Things can be contradictory so there really isn’t a clear and fool proof way to find out what you really want.
You can never quite predict how things will go. Sometimes something that feels meaningless and unhelpful to your final goal will provide the necessary conditions for one of your great triumphs. Other times you will make a mistake and fail and it will have real consequences which hurt you. In either case you have built a new layer of experience which can help you find out your path.
5. Wear a mask to audition life directions
In order to know how it would feel to choose a certain life direction consider taking on a role by asking, “if I was a person who was going to make the choice to pursue x then how I would behave?” For the first week continue with your normal schedule but when faced with a decision, wear the new shoes that you are auditioning. That is, when you are faced with the decision ask “how would I as a person who has chosen to go to be x (or do x) approach this?” This might manifest as you choosing to do that extra problem on the homework set that is really hard or doing an additional edit on your paper before you turn it in because this is how you view what good work in a certain field is.
Sometimes this might lead to down surprising and maybe not helpful paths. For me, when I decided I wanted to be a serious student of mathematics, I knew I wanted a way to keep all my homework assignments around in case I needed to reference them later (reader I tell you now, I have not once referenced these assignments! So keep that in mind as I proceed). The top student in the cohort I was in, typed all his homework in LaTeX, a type setting system for writing math. I did not yet know how to use this to typeset mathematical writing so I set out to learn this while putting off some homework assignments so that I could not only type up my assignments but also keep a digital copy forever and return to them in case I missed it. I emphasize that at the time this felt like a very important part of being serious.
I pretended to be a serious mathematician and learned how to use a tool people I admired used. I didn’t immediately become better at being a mathematics student but I did learn a skill which I used later in my degree and I gained some confidence about my competency. Overall, I would rate this experience as mostly positive and it gave me good insight in what to focus on. There are many kinds of experiences like this that can help you understand what path is best for you, it certainly doesn’t have to involve learning to type set mathematical equations with a programming language designed decades ago. But you will find out interesting things about yourself, and for me, it was one of the first forays in to programming (or at least programming adjacent disciplines) which made me realize I like programming.
Further thoughts on the purpose of education
Finding a job is a daunting task. This is true for me at least and the sentiment seems wide spread these days. This might be due to a disconnect between an expectation of education and the education itself. The expectation that college will prepare you for a specific set of jobs is reasonable given the anecdotes we’ve all heard. Perhaps you had a friend who majored in just the right subject. They easily landed several internships and immediately on graduated were offered a job in the field they desired. Yet, people are not train cars bound to follow the rail system exactly as it is laid out. After all, there is variance in the way people arrive at any given job. For every story of someone moving directly into the corporate world so too can you find one about a forest hermit that became an actuary after 15 years in the wilderness (I admit I’ve never something exactly like this but I hope my point is made).
Very few take the most direct route from education to career, but our expectation can be influenced by the appearance that there exists a ready made rail way from here to there. Many folks perceive a disconnect between what requirements a job posting has and the specifics of their education. The divergence between topics covered in the academy and job requirements is often further widened in graduate school. But expecting education to lead straight to a job can lead to the classic but very disheartening thought loop upon graduating, “I need experience to get a job, but I need a job to get experience.” Naturally, one may ask, “well why didn’t my education prepare me for entering into industry?”
I believe the core function of universities is not to prepare you for a job. In an extremely cynical sense, higher education’s primary objective is to extract resources from you! Time and money! (You should know that I am a major proponent of higher education and there is only a sliver of truth in this statement). In it’s idealized representation, higher education is an institution built to transfer rich traditions of learning and knowledge to new generations all the while being the core place where the pursuit of extending human knowledge occurs. To have a reasonable model of what higher education really is, we probably need to hold a little bit of each of these extreme visions simultaneously.
But for all points on this spectrum, Universities are not providing a ticket for a train that will take you straight to the job station. A somewhat natural question then is, why isn’t the academy specifically built to prepare one for a job market? This quickly sets us on a path in which one could spend a life time understanding the relationships between the market economy, politics, and the pursuit of knowledge.
It also has a sliding head long into how aristocratic life style choices are propagated to regular folk in our modern era. Consider a Victorian Aristocrat who studied a somewhat niche topic at university who then later took their position ordained by marriage or birth as an Earl or countess. Some of them even kept up their contributions to academic fields all the while performing duties in political and cultural upper crust of Victorian life. In our era, it’s perhaps a somewhat new phenomenon (only new given that human history is rather long so far) that the lower and middle class folk are engaging in the kind of education that centuries ago was meant for the aristocracy (I know there must be well known exceptions where commoners received access to university).
It’s interesting to notice which patterns appear to persist. It’s not the least bit surprising to find that the Presidents of the United States attended certain schools, or that the rich and famous send their children to top universities. After all these facts are commonly mentioned in media and feel like a rigid part of our cultural landscape. So it appears universities still function in some capacity as a way to perpetuate some notions of class and status. Simultaneously, I think it’s fair to say that at no previous time was it possible for so many people to access the fruits of universities. Indeed many people now have access to these top tier universities even if not graced by the circumstance of their birth.
All this to say, it’s no simple matter to find out “what the purpose of universities is.” It’s multifaceted and intertwined with many different systems and has been that way for hundreds of years. But where does that leave us, still there trying to decide if you should continue on the path of academics or branch out. Where does that leave someone who “just wants a job” out of university. To these people our current conversation should turn into an invitation to think strategically about what you want out of university and how it should align with a plan for you to obtain your version of the good life.