Three simple rules for your college student
Though many students overlook the great trade school opportunities available to them in high school, after high school, and via the various trade union apprenticeships, deciding whether to go to college, where, for what major, and why can all seem like bedlam. The reports of America’s college educated population makes it seem like millions of students have wandered and wondered too much for too long and not to much effect. In the future, can we better guide more students?
Here are three simple rules for your college student. They are not specific advice, but they might give students some guardrails as they seek to determine their purpose for doing so. They will not decide the big fight between whether a college education is a liberation of the mind through a pathway in the classical cultural arts and literature (or maybe the sciences) or an advanced job-training program.
1.Develop expertise 2. Expand your field 3. Always network
1. The three steps of a collegiate education [associates degree excluded] are about becoming an expert.
A ‘bachelor’ is a term without many roots other than a ‘young man’ or today’s ‘a rookie without much else.’ So, a bachelor’s degree is about as odd as the mortar board hat.
Obviously, a master’s degree makes my point of having expertise.
A doctorate degree is supposed to be given to people who perform credible research; thus, they are newly minted ‘top’ experts in their own right.
2. The doctorate degree is also the most formal manifestation of someone ‘expanding’ their field of expertise in order to make it even larger.
Research is the most direct route to knowledge expansion. A doctorate is preparation for just such an expansion of knowledge.
Much of this ‘expansion’ today is done outside of and/or after a doctorate degree is earned, and it really shows that this professional level is somewhat antiquated. It is a relic like the use of mister (Mr.) as an honorific title.
However, in the collegiate setting there are many important formalities that are demanded within research and such training can be very helpful.
Formal research will continue to have a formal training place at the top of the collegiate model even if the world is starting to travel much faster than universities seem to be able to contain it. These researching doctors are often very ably armed with large crews of undergraduate and graduate research assistants.
Pseudo-research seems as vibrant as ever (and populist markets capitalistically consume their outputs), and it often entangles stodgier university research in credibility battles.
Diogene’s cynicism and skepticism of Greek stoics are hallmarks of research. Maintaining a balance of openness and skepticism [or optimism with skepticism – which I like to call skeptimism] is an expert’s expanding craft.
No matter what level a student is in college, they should be working to expand the field’s knowledge base. No, most students will not work to be or become ‘doctors’ of any sort, but all collegiate education has traditionally been on that pathway in general.
3. Knowledge grows fastest in Scottish coffee houses, British Royal Societies (science academies), French soirees, Greek symposiums, and German beerhalls. As people mix ideas mix, and these are examples of my SYN Thesis — the thesis that all things are a mixture of other things.
People do not have enough time in their lives to become experts in all things, so they need other people to do that for them.
Many, if not most, seemingly (totally) unrelated elements of society just haven’t been mindfully combined in a useful way yet.
We all live in networks. Colleges collide into universities. Companies have the ‘company’ of many people with many expertises. Nets work to gather ideas. We are fishing for them in the minds of others that we ‘sea’ each day.
Students should always network as they work with others to expand their fields and their own expertise.
College can and should be more than the liberal arts expansion of the mind or the seemingly current job-training professional boot camp, and it can lead one’s soul to the edge of the knowledge-verse where it can grow itself and humanity; therefore, establish a fully-engaged and enlarging self.