Ready Up Freshers
This past week in South Africa, the 2020 cohort of matriculants started on the road toward the rest of their lives. This week’s edition outlines three fundamentals for anyone lurching out into the big bad world of tertiary education.
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(1) Get Ready For Your World To Turn Upside Down
We all think about the world in a certain way. We have beliefs and opinions about the way things are. This unique way of understanding the world can be called a paradigm.
A simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We all know that “the map is not the territory.” A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory. That’s exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else.
- Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The mental maps we have are heavily influenced by our geographical location, the prevailing social and economic culture there and the people we get to interact with regularly.
Universities are melting pots of incredibly diverse beliefs, philosophies and worldviews. People with wildly diverse backgrounds from all corners of the globe come together. Suddenly, the pool of people, experiences, and thoughts that influence the way you see the world becomes much, much larger.
Who are you? Who do you want to be? The open-to-discussion environment cultivated at tertiary institutions often sparks deep personal reflection. You quickly realize what parts of you are contingent on your upbringing and community. You are free to reevaluating everything you think you know about yourself, your opinions and your beliefs. It’s a journey that can be as uncomfortable as Troy choosing between Basketball or Singing but it is the first step toward building an identity that feels truly like you; you might even get a breaking free moment or two.
The paradigm shift is intense. But it’s also beautiful.
(2) Get Ready To Fail
Here’s a fond memory from my first semester at university.
My very first Engineering test awarded a mark for writing your name and the course code. Walking out the test, I wasn’t even sure I wrote the right course code.
University is really difficult. Don’t underestimate it.
Additionally, taking classes online might be even more challenging than taking them in person. Check out the ‘learn more’ section below for more on how to manage remote learning.
Learn how to deal with failure. Failure in some part of the university experience, is inevitable. This is also a mirror for life. It’s crucial to learn how to deal when everything is falling apart and you have no idea which way to turn to make it better - most especially if you were a high performer in High School and have become accustomed to peak performance.
So how do you deal with failure?
Understand that failure is literally integral to learn anything.
We’re all used to micro-failures - learning factorization by trying different combinations, hitting a note just half a step too high during band practice, dying at the same boss fight a gazillion times. In these situations, we intuitively understand that to get closer to solving the problem, we have to learn from our shortcomings that are made explicit through failure, adapt our strategy and try again.
In fact, I’d argue that Call Of Duty Zombies is, in a large part so successful, exactly because it’s ridiculously difficult. The only way to win is to keep trying.
However, when it comes to macro-failures - flunking an entire course, getting relegated a division down, getting rejected from the degree you wanted to study - its easy to let the failure overwhelm you.
Although macro-failures are more consequential, we should try to treat them the same as micro-failures. Understand that they are inevitable, use the experience to get better and move forward.Create a support structure. Make friends.
Having people to relate with and give you an assist during challenging times was crucial to the evolution of humans into apex predators. Find your people.
Also, get acquainted with and make use of, the formal support structures that your university offers - academic hotseats, counselling sessions, financial guidance seminars etc.
The stress is real. Prepare for it.
(3) Get Ready To Pivot
You’re probably going to change your major
In high school, severe emphasis is placed on figuring out exactly what you want to study - down to a specialized major at a specific university - and working your way toward getting acceptance for that. In order to figure that out, we often consider our likes and interests, what school subjects we have a natural inclination toward and the third-party accounts of our friends, families and community leaders about what different professions are like.
Problematically, school-level internships, summer programs and professional vacation work is really hard to come by, if at all. This means that until we actually begin university, we don’t have any first hand experience of ‘doing the work’ to test out any of the assumptions we might have about our chosen study route.
However, when you get to university, you get flooded with new information and experience. You actually take courses from your chosen field and get hands-on experience of what that work involves. You’re exposed to other degree programs, other paths to graduation, other options. You learn much more about yourself and what you enjoy based on the experience of actually doing the work.
Thus, its completely natural to revise your opinion about what you want to study. The numbers are quite telling - a US study found that about 30% of undergraduate students in bachelors or associate degree programs who declared a major, changed that major at least once in three years. I started studying Mechatronic Engineering in my first year, then pivoted to Computer Science when I realised that I’d prefer exploring the pool of knowledge in a variety of STEM subjects first, instead of focusing on design principles and engineering applications. In fact, I think students should be encouraged to regularly check in with themselves, asking “Given what I know now, am I still sure this is what I want to be doing?”
Why are people hesitant to change their major?
I recently chatted with my friend Avthar, author of the Avthar’s Weekly Wisdom newsletter, who schooled at Princeton in the US. It’s interesting that changing a major is far less of a big deal there than it is here, in my home country, South Africa. His idea is that the cost of switching majors here is far higher. And that makes sense. Consider the various costs associated with switching majors:
Financial costs - The monetary implications of administering the switch, wasted cash on courses that may not count toward the new major, higher fees for courses in that new major.
Time costs - Depending on how different your new major is from the one you’re moving away from, you may lose a semester or year of time. This can be difficult to justify in a culture that places priority on getting into the working world as quickly as possible.
Social costs - Some communities are rife with stigma around changing majors. This is especially true if you’re switching from one that is ‘highly respected in society’ to one that doesn’t carry as much weight. What, ever, will the neighbours say?
These things make many people reluctant to follow through with a pivot. However, being impervious to change and new input is far more consequential in the long run. You might end up graduating into an industry that you don’t care for much.
The idea here is that, like most things in life, your feelings and opinions might change over time. The point isn’t to seek out and blindly commit to one sterling degree. Rather, you should keep evaluating whether you are truly taking the path that enables you to be the best version of yourself.
Thanks for reading
Delano
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