I've been to a lot of school. Elementary school, high school, college, and two graduate schools (for a master's and for a PhD?). And, unlike almost everyone else, i liked school. I liked taking classes and learning stuff, i liked reading stuff. I didn't like taking quizzes and tests but i didn't mind them too much and i was pretty good at them (I didn't like homework, though).
But i'm beginning to think that maybe going to school conditions you in some harmful ways; that there are some thought patterns which are implicitly rewarded by the educational system that are suboptimal for the rest of professional life. By "the rest of life", i include many but not all careers, including some but not all parts of academic careers. Not too sure, but just want to get these down:
- Learning is valuable
- in other areas of life, it's what is accomplished that is valuable. If you accomplish less but learn more, you are considered worse than someone who accomplished more but learned less (now, learning can be a STRATEGY to accomplish something later; e.g. if you accomplish less but learn more now, and that allows you to accomplish more later, then that is considered a good thing; however it's hard to predict what kind of things you will need to learn for your later tasks, and many things that take a long time to learn don't generalize to help many sorts of different tasks.)
- Really understand things through and through. It's more important to understand the basics than to get through all of the material. Focus on learning, not on the test; if you learn the stuff, the test will come naturally. Don't try to just learn what is on the test in a shallow way.
- This is a habit that really resonated with the way i think anyways. But when i try to do this in most areas of life, other people say i'm indulging myself and that it's not okay to put off getting stuff done just because i don't completely understand what i'm doing.
- You get ahead in life by being a great person. People judge you, and if they think you are better than your competitors (in whatever ways they are focusing on), then good things happen to you.
- In some areas of life, this is true, but in others, what matters more is what you have done and whether people need something you can give them. Professors are hired partly because other professors think they are smart and interesting people, and possibly based on whether they seem like nice people to work with and to have around. But entreprenurs succeed if other people choose to buy what they're selling; when people buy a product, they don't care if the CEO of the company producing that product is smart, talented, or good people to work with. In such a situation, you win by getting things done, not by being an impressive person, and you can win even if your competitors are smarter than you. In other careers it can be a mix of these two extremes.
- Focus on being good at what you do, not on meeting people
- As a student, you are tested on what you personally know; your do sometimes have to work with others but only other people who are taking the same course, so finding these people is not hard.
- In the rest of life (and even for being an academic professor, although some professors pretend this is not the case), networking, that is, the activity of meeting other people, is very important. Whether you even find out about a job opening or other business opportunity often depends on who you know, and in addition you need to meet people so that you can find the right people to collaborate with for particular projects.
- The system is setup to help you progress.
- In school, if you do what you're supposed to, which is the same thing that everyone else is being told to do, you'll optimize your progress.
- Outside of school, some systems are like this (e.g. some large corporations have systems to try to help their employees in their careers), but many are not. In many cases, the systems are actually set up to take advantage of you (often this is happens implicitly rather than some evil guy making a plan to abuse you), and you have to be very skeptical of the path that the system encourages you to take.
- It is clear what your options are
- In school, there is only one, or a few, clear paths to choose from.
- In the rest of the world, this is often not the case, and there are some high-value paths that a lot of people don't even know about.
- It is clear which choices to make if the goal is to optimize your career
- In school, it is clear which choices will lead to better or worse academic performance.
- Outside of school, there is a lot of uncertainty and controversy about which paths are valuable. Furthermore, which choice is best is highly dependent on your individual situation, and there are so many different ways that situations are different that advice from others isn't right for you.
- Your superiors know what's good for you
- In school, your teachers understand the system and tell you which choices are optimal w/r/t academic performance.
- Later, your superiors may unintentionally give you bad advice, simply because, as noted in the previous issue, their situation was/is often different from yours.
- If someone in a position of authority is telling you to do something, it will probably help your academic career to do it
- A teacher has no ulterior motive in assigning homework. But outside of school, there are situations where your boss may encourage you to do something (e.g. work longer hours here rather than spending time networking outside of the company) that are in their interest but not in yours
- The key factors are talent and hard work.
- In much of the rest of life, the key factors are strategy and hard work.
- Do it yourself
- In school, you have to learn to do things by yourself.
- In the rest of life, in many situations, it's just as good if someone else helps you, as long as it gets done (unless you are unfairly offloading your work onto others).
- You don't have to face the serious dilemma of big risk, big reward
- In school, you might choose to take the risk of taking a class at a level that may be too difficult for you. But if it turns out that it is too much, you don't lose too much; you can usually stick it out and work really hard and get a not great but okay grade, or you can drop the course or transfer into an easier level, or you can even fail the course but retake it. In any case, provided you actually try your best, people will often be proud that you took on a challenge. Furthermore, if you aren't too sure you can handle it, just choose not to take the hard class -- the potential reward that you are giving up is not huge.
- In the rest of life, if you decide that e.g. you should switch careers into a totally new area, if the switch doesn't work out and you want to go back, you could be much worse off than if you had stayed put, especially if you can't find work for awhile and burn through all of your savings and have to move out of your apartment. People will not be proud of you if you fail in such a severe manner. But if you never try, you'll never know if you are in the wrong career, which is a big thing.