The Best of College Learning May Be Outside the Classroom

In M.B.A.s Don't Prepare Managers for Real-Life Challenges, I wrote:

The most valuable part of my MBA education was learning extra skills outside the classroom -- working with other highly-motivated people to accomplish a common task (without killing each other), managing my time to complete what seemed like an overwhelming list of tasks, and so on. These skills have served me well throughout my career.

I'm not alone in thinking that some of the most valuable aspects of an education are the skills you learn outside the classroom -- the abilities you develop just to get your work done and done well. For instance, Career Journal says that the ability to pull an all-nighter can be as useful as a B.A. Their thoughts:

In addition to expertise in a variety of academic fields, college provides "soft" skills that many employers seek. "Students have the ability at 2 a.m. to write a paper while instant messaging their friends and watching a TiVoed version of 'Grey's Anatomy,' " says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound.com, a career consulting group based in Chicago. And that's a skill that can come in handy at a company that values employees who can manage tight schedules effectively.

William Hankers says that when he interviewed for accounting jobs last May, he stressed to recruiters that he had juggled a full load of classes and held an executive board seat at an accounting fraternity while maintaining an academic scholarship. Now a staff accountant at Ernst & Young in New York, the 22-year-old says he's now using his time-management skills to perform his job as he studies for the CPA exam.

The ability to function on four or five hours of sleep and work late to complete a project is particularly handy in industries like consulting, banking, law and technology, says Lee Svete, director of the career center at the University of Notre Dame.

Here are some of the "soft" skills I learned in college that have helped me develop my career:

1. The ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously. It's a fact in the business world that you have to keep many spinning plates in the air and if you can't, you're toast. My MBA, in particular, taught me how to balance a tough class schedule, work (I had an assistantship), looking for a (new) job/career and my personal life in order to make sure they all ran smoothly.

2. Stamina -- and the willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Graduate school can be grueling and sometimes overwhelming. I'm convinced that the professors pour on great amounts of assignments on purpose -- to show students that they can accomplish much more than they thought they could. I certainly was able to handle much more work when I left than when I started graduate school. This came in very handy when I entered the "real world."

3. Setting priorities. Though I learned how to handle much more work, I soon realized that there was no way I could do everything -- no one could. So I quickly learned how to set priorities -- to do the work that mattered and leave the rest behind. I learned little tricks of the trade (such as reading the first part of a case study only and commenting early in class to get credit for participation) as well. I'm still using those skills in my career today.

4. Working in teams. In undergraduate studies, you can do most of it on your own. But in grad school, they force you to work with others to complete team projects. And, of course, the working world demands you work well with people (in most cases.) This also taught me to choose my team members carefully -- not necessarily friends, but people who I could count on to get their portion of the work done.

5. Discipline and determination. I was never the smartest in my class nor was I the quickest to learn -- and I was NEVER able to see a concept, internalize it in a moment, then recall it four weeks later on a test. But I was the most determined to do well and I was disciplined enough to put in the hours and hours of gradual learning (I was at the library or in my room studying every night for several hours) needed to be among the top students in the class. Of course, being disciplined and determined are great skills to have -- not only in work but in your personal life -- and these are probably the greatest skills I learned in my college career.

In short, long after I've forgotten how to solve a statistics equation, what date in history so-and-so did such-and-such, and how to design a factory for optimal production flow, the skills above still serve me -- helping my career grow and flourish and enabling me to make the most of my greatest financial asset.

Comments

[guinness416]

Good post. I just finished up reading Leslie Bennetts' (outstanding, by the way) "The Feminine Mistake" and one point she makes is the shock people who are pampered grade A students all their lives have when they enter the reality of the working world, where your academic history doesn't matter beyond getting you the interview. In some cases leading them to drop out. I wish more people were made aware of the points you make above.

[Anitra]

All of those can be learned at the undergraduate level, as well. Probably the biggest eye-opener for me in college was that being "smart" only got you about half-way. You still needed to be able to work in a team, juggle priorities, etc. I had several peers who were incredibly intelligent, but quit college because they couldn't develop one or more of these skills (determination/discipline was usually one of them).

I think some of my professors did their students a disservice by extending project deadlines or adjusting a grading curve. If you don't meet expectations, should you still be rewarded? That's not how it works in the real world.

[LotharBot]

One of my favorite blogs, Chicagoboyz.net, refers to these type of skills as "meta-skills". And, as people there like to note, they're not just learned in graduate school. Some of them are learned, or missed, far earlier in life. Some kids learn how to work with other kids in fourth grade. Some kids learn the value of working hard in fourth grade. Other grow into adulthood having never learned when and how to work hard or how to work together effectively.