Worry not what you study but the wisdom you come out with

By EUGENE WANGECHI eugenewangchi@yahoo.com

Posted  Monday, April 22   2013 

If you are nearing completion of your first degree, you find yourself riddled with doubt. Does the course matter? Is my degree marketable? Will it be enough to sustain me economically? Did I choose the right major? Am I ready for the world? Do I even want to be at the university to the end?

Some days you walk into campus and feel purposed and in full control of your path. On other days, the familiar classes and routine plunges you into profound anguish. You find yourself confronted with a form of knowledge that to you offers no landmarks; nothing specific to hold on to.

You are faced with the fear that all the knowledge you acquire at university might not be very useful in your life. After all, is it not said that learning happens naturally and school mostly just gets in the way?

In between these fears and your determination to justify them, the walks of despair and the thoughts that the idea of university was oversold to you, you talk to people — school mates and others. Most of them seem to have a general idea of the greater outcome. Yet others, and a good number of them, just like you, do not.

The idea that a college degree might not be as important is becoming fashionable. The returns of a college education appear too uncertain. After all, Steve Jobs, one of the most iconic people of our times, dropped out of Reed College.

He would later say, “After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Closer home, a young man has opened a studio in the plush Karen area of Nairobi. Down the road from the studio, you see the newly constructed vice-president’s residence. The studio is, therefore, at a nice address.

Kioko, one of its owners, was once a university student, albeit briefly. In 2006, he did one semester and decided to quit in favour of entrepreneurship. Judging by his address and the Mercedes Benz E240 he arrives in, things did not go very badly for him.

Charles, a Fourth Year student at a local university, was originally an IT major student but the doubt bug bit him and he changed to broadcast journalism. He has two semesters to go and he does not necessarily think his degree will be of help. He feels that his major focuses more on video than photography, which is his main interest. He intends to go to Turkey for his Masters.

“I don’t know which Masters… and it doesn’t matter. In my family, everyone holds a PhD. It’s not a choice. It’s a duty,” he says.

Then there is Steve. He has a passion for multimedia and intends to start his own advertising company once out of university. His major, however, is International Business Administration. He says he needs it to manage his business when he finally gets to it.

Steve is in no hurry to graduate. “University provides me with much-needed networking for my new business. I don’t feel I am quite ready to step into the professional world.”

In the view of Prof Ngure wa Mwachofi, a lecturer at USIU and a man who has taught for over 30 years, “a degree is like a driving licence.” Adjusting his baseball cap, he explains: “You learn most of your driving after you’ve got the licence, and therefore a degree is a licence to learn some more.”

Learning institutions are partly to blame for the confusion among university students, he says, adding that there is not enough career counselling and young people are not encouraged to explore.

“At the same time, people are different,” he says. “Some people, even at the age of 60, will not have made up their minds what they want to do.”

The trick, he says, is to not judge what you are learning as right or wrong, but to enjoy it instead and diversify your thinking.

His advice then? “Assuming half-way you figure that what you are doing is not necessarily what you wanted, it is not a crisis. As long as you have built confidence and have a clear understanding of yourself, you can still move on. Consider the first degree only as a starting point.”

Regardless of your doubts, fears, anxiety, or even excitement to graduate, at the end of it all, when the degree comes, the overall education will have at least nurtured critical thought, exposed us, the learners, to the accomplishments of humankind, and developed in us an ability not just to listen actively but to respond intelligently.Because it is from this that a charcoal burner, no less than a college professor, might derive a sense of self-worth.

The writer is a student at USIU in Nairob
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