Learning Beyond the Classroom
College provides many valuable experiences and lessons that are supplementary to being successful after college. Not only do you get to learn about various subjects in addition to your major, but you also get to meet teachers and make friends, some of which will be in your life forever. You also experience some of the most memorable times in your life that you will stick with you for a while. Go to class, learn, study, go to extra-curricular activity, study again, take test, wash and repeat for four years…hopefully. This routine helps build a good work ethic and is very important to succeeding in college, which will benefit you after college. There are many truths to this theory, but there is so much more you can learn from real world experience compared to what you learn from books. I for one am a big proponent for learning from application/experience rather than learning from books.
I definitely appreciate what higher education teaches, but I personally think it is a common fallacy to directly rely on what you learn from school to properly prepare you for post-college life. Higher education should give you a foundation of whatever subject you are learning, but it is paramount to use that foundation and build upon it. If you think only getting that 3.5 GPA - 4.0 GPA will make you succeed in the real world, you are sadly mistaken. To succeed in the real world, it takes more than just being “book-smart” because book-smart will only get you through the door, but it is experience that will set you apart from the rest.
Some professional tracks such as medicine that have a “clear-cut” route will still benefit from real-world experience while in undergrad, but not as much as students pursuing to work in business. This is because “clear-cut” professions typically demand higher education after undergraduate (e.g. masters and PhD) to even work in their respective profession. But for business, young professionals gain a huge advantage from real-world experience because “real-world” finance is a lot different from what they teach you in your finance 101 class. Overall concepts are similar, but application is different.
Internships, internships, internships, did I mention internships. Internships are the best way to gain real-world experience in your respective field because of the hand-on experience you gain from day-to-day responsibilities and experiences. You will be able to apply some of things you learn in school, but more importantly, you will be able to interact with coworkers by asking questions and learning directly from professionals. You will also be able to build a “rolodex” or network of connections for later on in your career.
How do you get internships? There a ton of resources out there such as Indeed, careerbuilder, monster, and the most important of them all, your university’s internship portal. I can’t tell you the amount of hours I spent on the UIC internship page looking and filtering for internships that I wanted to do. Also, the earlier you start (i.e. sophomore year), the more time you will have to intern in the summer and during school.
If you read my article on “the biggest mistake that undergraduates make”, you understand that I think that making early mistakes is a big way to learn. During my undergraduate years, I interned at four different financial firms and learned more in those four internships than half of my undergraduate econ/finance classes. From two of those internships, I learned what profession NOT to go into (middle/back-office), which I think saved me years of opportunity cost (read my first article).
When you apply for real jobs and have internship experience, employers will automatically put you in front of someone has zero experience, everyone knows that. More importantly, if a UIC student majoring in Finance interned at an Investment Bank for 2 summers, an employer more often than not would take that person over a candidate from Northwestern or UChicago with zero or half the experience. In addition, having an internship can potentially lead to a full-time job at that employer, which actually happened to myself.
In the overall scheme of things, I am basically saying do not become a “book-worm” that is only good at taking tests. Employers value a healthy balance between academics, experience, and personality because at the end of the day, nobody cares what you got on your last exam.[1]
[1] BUT MAKE SURE TO ACE EVERY TEST!
