We Learn Useful Stuff in School

Before I entered university, I used to think that in University, we will only be learning very academic theories and not gain any useful knowledge. In fact, I was still thinking in the same way after one semester, but I finally started to open up my mind to new possibilities this semester. The first instance was after I attended one of my marketing lectures, when I found out that the marketing process closely matches what’s being used by top internet marketers. Then, a thought struck me that perhaps we don’t learn useless stuff after all.

Just recently, when I was learning more about investing indicators, I was exposed to statistics in finance. Well… they do have more fanciful names for each of these indicators, but they are basically using Statistics. It shows that professional traders are out there putting what we learnt in University into practice and making money off them. Then again, I think back to other modules I have taken, such as Business Law, Information Technology, Accounting, Organisation Behavior and a couple more. Some time back, I also blogged about how OB can help us in our lives in this post: The Study of Organization Behavior

Think about it, Business Law helps us to know of our legal rights and obligations, which is important. It’s never fun to get into any court case and having some knowledge of Business Law can help us avoid that. Accounting is useful if you plan to invest on any companies and do fundamental analysis. I don’t really need to talk about Information Technology, everybody knows the importance of it. My whole point in this post is that University students are not learning useless stuff, but many University students do not appreciate academic theories and totally eliminate the possibility of applying it. It’s not whether what we learnt is useful, because without doubt, it is. It is whether we put what we learnt into actual use, which is something the school does not teach.

Applying what we know could be one of the most powerful things we can do to bring success into our lives. We can’t possibly expect our bosses to act like tutors and lead us hand-in-hand through each step, therefore we got to relate information by ourselves. The higher we go up, the more we’ll be expected to be self-sufficient and the more decisions we will be expected to make. If we don’t start to cultivate a habit of thinking beyond the obvious, I think no amount of education will be useful.

With all that said, I got to say I really respect one of my friends, who happened to do very well in his studies in University in our first semester. His dedication in studies stems not only from his desire to do well in paper, but he also wants to apply those knowledge he gained to his job scope in future. He even told me once that he might want to study another year, just so that he can take up more modules and learn more from school. His attitude and diligence is one that all university students should adopt, myself included.

I hope that through this post, more university students will be appreciative of what we learnt in school, because the next information we hear in lecture might just give us the right to print money. In one of the teleseminars I listened in to, someone said something like “it’s not how much the person knows, but how much action he takes based on his knowledge that determines his success.” So, as we can see, actions will get us success but our actions depend on how we relate what we learnt in the first place. Is our textbooks useful? I leave it to decide for yourself.