a post-college Justin

This week’s wiser today Wednesday featured blogger is Justin from The Freshest Oat. So please pull up a chair, grab a [healthy] snack and enjoy the wisdom.

Academic lessons you learned in college

• When in doubt, or when having trouble, don’t beat your head against a wall, go and ask for help!
• Time management, I stopped procrastinating altogether Freshman year
• Never trust anyone – always double check your work and verify information on your own. Unfortunately a lot of people will lie and cheat to get ahead in class.
• How to study and retain the information

Lessons you wish you had learned in college

• Networking – the only contacts I made were intradepartmental. Not helpful when job hunting.
• As stupid as it may sound, how to write a basic computer program.
• I wish I had learned something more specific and more practical for the job market. My major prepared me for a lot, but not enough depth to have any expertise.

Important life lessons you learned during college

• Have time to study, but also have time to decompress or you will slowly erode to nothing
• The value of friendship
• Hard work doesn’t always yield good results, but persistence is essential to ever moving forward
• Get help when you need it. Not just text book help, but in the case of depression, etc. Because without help your work will suffer and you will slip through the cracks.

Important life lessons you wish you had learned during college

• Success is largely based on chance, not just hard work
• How to approach an interview and the interview process
• Sometimes we have a planned out course of what is supposed to happen when, sometimes that gets derailed and we have to accept the changes and move forward with a positive attitude

To me, college was a time when the greatest lessons learned were not from a textbook or a lecture, and more-so were not recognized until after college. It was a time when you could have many friends all in close proximity – meeting up wasn’t an ordeal; maintaining friendships was as easy as showing up to lunch. College was also a time when responsibilities were at a minimum. Where I went, most people lived in dorms all four years, so there were no bills to pay, just the semesterly waiver for your student loans.

It wasn’t until after I left graduate school that I realized it’s not easy meeting people. Not out in the suburbs. I also came to the sad realization that most of what I learned is now forgotten, I would really have to refresh my memory to be able to do some of the math I was capable of doing with my eyes closed before. But one thing I have fallen back on is maintaining contact with the professors who helped me through college, as now they often email me with questions based on my experience.

So now in these days of thousand dollar per month loan repayments, car payments, rent, utilities, upkeep, etc. I look back to see just how I got here, and think of the memories tied together with college and grad school. I tend to remember the good things, but I do remember some of the bad – the stress, the insomnia, the pressure. I don’t know if I could handle that intensity anymore – I now work in a different environment, with its own stress and pressure, but I feel prepared for it. I feel prepared because of what I learned how to do best in college, which is to be able to quickly and thoroughly learn something.

Thank you Justin!