What's Most Useful from College?
It depends...
We’re heading into a new academic year (a week or two into the new year at a bunch of places), which mean that it’s the time of year for college advice, in many different forms. Some of them are very direct advice, like Rhett Allain’s blog post on how to succeed in physics classes (which generalizes well to other STEM fields easily, and to other subjects with a bit of effort). Others are more indirect like this tweet that I responded to the other night:
This kind of flippant dismissal is another pretty common subgenre of how-to-succeed-in-college advice, which is why I quote-tweeted that and didn’t engage beyond that. It’s worth expanding on a little, even at the risk of taking it more seriously than the original tweeter did, because he’s not completely wrong.
On one level, this person might seem to be a prime example of a the kind of student I wrote about a week or so ago, who ought to have an option other than going to college, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that. Instead I would acknowledge that specific course content is only one piece of a college education, and depending on what you go on to do, it may not be the most important piece.
As I said, I’m a career academic, so I make somewhat regular use of specific content I learned in my college classes all the time, largely because my job involves conveying that content to new generations of students. (And that’s a depressingly literal meaning of “generations,” as a significant and increasing number of my classmates and contemporaries have children in college…) I revisit that stuff a lot, and while I’m not exactly trying to mimic, say, Prof. Jones’s presentation of how to estimate the hyperfine splitting in hydrogen, it’s useful to have that experience in my background.
But as noted last week, those of us who go on to become faculty are a tiny fraction of the college population, and not one to generalize from too widely. We’re also the tiny subset of students who will most directly use course content in our careers; for most of the rest of our classmates, what they draw from their college experience that proves useful will be more indirect.
For a lot of people, like the guy I quote-tweeted above, the list of things that proved useful may even be dominated by extra-curricular activities. While as faculty I’m probably supposed to act horrified by that, I actually think it’s fine, because what the college experience is really doing is shaping people. That’s a process that involves learning some specific content, but also has a lot to do with relationships— who you spend time with, and what you do together will have an enormous influence on your life going forward. The most obvious example of this is the large number of people who meet future spouses in college, but there are tons of other examples. This can even be professionally useful— lots of business opportunities come about through people with ideas knowing a guy who knows a guy with money, or vice versa.
Now, I would say that the original tweeter is probably under-selling the actual benefit of classes a bit— the point isn’t just the content, but learning to learn. That is, by taking classes in a range of different subjects, you get some practice at coming into a subject you know relatively little about, and figuring out how it works through a combination of direct instruction and work on your own. That promotes a kind of flexibility that’s useful well outside the context of a specific course, or even an academic setting. You learn to absorb and process information that’s presented in different styles and formats, and how to assess it and make decisions. You don’t necessarily think of that as a benefit of taking classes, but it is.
As long as I’m overthinking this, it’s sort of interesting to think about how I’d rank my own college activities in terms of how useful they’ve been in my post-college life. Off the top of my head, early on a Monday morning, I end up with something like this:
Undergraduate Research: I spent two of my college summers doing lab development projects, and the third working on my senior thesis, and those are what convinced me to become a physics professor.
Physics Major Classes: As noted above, my current job is to teach the same kinds of classes I took as an undergrad.
Rugby Club Secretary: This involved 1) writing game articles for the school paper, which was good practice for a future in blogging, and 2) producing the annual program for the homecoming weekend (writing joke entries about everyone on the team, selling ads, laying the whole thing out, dealing with the printers), which was good practice in wrangling complicated projects.
Other STEM courses: I took a bunch of math and computer science classes that have come in somewhat handy over the years. Less for the specific content than for a kind of baseline comfort with the ideas of doing math or writing code.
Playing Rugby: In addition to providing an athletic outlet, this was my primary social scene, and brought me together with people who are still some of my closest friends.
Non-STEM classes: Kind of a broad category, but good practice in different styles of writing, and learning bits and pieces about how the world works. A few of these were useful mostly in a negative sense— “Oh, yeah, I don’t want anything to do with this…”
Other Social Stuff: I was a core rugby guy, but sort of peripherally involved with a few other social circles (there were a bunch of us who watched Star Trek: TNG every night, and another group I’d play hoops and snow football with, and a couple of recurring party scenes, and I was friendly with folks on the football and ultimate frisbee teams, etc.). This was helpful for general social skills— I grew up in a small town, and was not especially popular for most of my school years, so learning to navigate a wider variety of different social settings was important.
Miscellaneous Academic Events: I wasn’t a big one for attending lectures and so on, but did go to a few things over the years, mostly because somebody else I was with expressed an interest. I got to see some cool talks and performances as a result; in retrospect, I wish I’d done a bit more of this, but I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, all in all.
Ask again in a year and the list might change, but you get the idea: course work was a big part of my college experience, but not by any means the whole picture. And again, I’m one of the tiny fraction of weirdos who ended up becoming a professor…
Again, I’m potentially overthinking this (almost certainly putting more thought into this than the original tweet that prompted it), but I do think it’s important to consider this stuff. There’s much more to the college experience than what goes on in the classroom, and some of those activities are among the most valuable to our students down the road. It’s important to keep in mind when I’m dealing with students for whom my class is not their top priority— as irritating as that can sometimes be, they’re not necessarily wrong to put more weight on something else.
One of the hazards of being geologically old in blogging terms is that there are very few subjects I haven’t written about before. This particular topic— the importance of non-academic experiences in college— is one that I’ve talked about in a bunch of other posts: in particular, “Four Things You Should Expect to Get Out of College” and “Four Important Things to Consider When Choosing a College” (both originally posted at Forbes, but I’m linking the ad-free versions here), and more recently “Sports and Academic Success” (written just before I launched this Substack). I’ll almost certainly write about it again down the road, but I like those pieces well enough to want to link them here…
So, there’s my annual contribution to the college-advice #discourse. If you find this interesting, and would like more of this kind of thing via email, here’s a button:
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If you’d like to take issue with my prioritization of college activities, the comments will be open.