It Doesn’t Matter What You Study: It’s About What You Learn And What You Solve.

Choosing a University program is often very stressful for students. Many receive seemingly contradictory advise.

“Follow your passion” vs “Study something employable”

Instead of these two lines of thought, I’d like to offer a four part approach to picking a program and choosing what activities to focus on:

1. Pick a problem you are interested in solving
2. Brainstorm the skills and resources you’ll need to succeed
3. Use University courses and supplementary projects to build skills
4. Meet people in your field to work with and learn from

Let’s go through an example.

Say it really bugs you when you walk through a store, and see alot of wasted plastic.

Hmm

You think it’s horrible for the environment and you want to fix it! There are many ways to potentially solve this problem.

1. Create better plastic
2. Make consumers more aware of issues
3. Create more appealing minimalistic packaging
4. New packaging material
5. Optimize packaging in stores

These are just a couple ways to solve this massive problem.

Now for each possible solution, let’s list some core things we’ll need to solve the problem. We’ll look at two possible solutions:

Create better plastic

1. Knowledge on plastic and industrial chemistry
2. Corporate knowledge of plastics industry
3. Lab equipment for R&D
4. Manufacturing equipment for commercialization

This is a simplicfication and can be broken down into a more actionable list. If you are having issues coming up with the skills, skip to step 4 and go chat with someone who makes designs commercial packaging!

Let’s take another example that is less technical.

Create more appealing, minimalistic packaging

1. Understanding marketing and consumer psychology
2. Design skills (hands on & digital)
3. Knowledge of existing campaigns and costs
4. Knowledge of materials and distribution channels
5. Access to materials and distribution channels

Again a simplified version, but a start.

Now that we’ve done some thinking on the skills/resources we need, let’s make a couple plans on how to get the skills.

Two rough planning lists

These are two plans with very different ways of trying to achieve your goal. Typically if you met these two people, you wouldn’t connect how they could be aiming for the same thing, until you talked to them about their goals and dreams.

THIS IS VERSION 1

As you continue on your journey you’ll have to change and adapt, either because you set unreasonable expectations, your priorities changed or even your interests. So make sure to keep revising the key steps.

Meeting Knowledgable & Relevant People

We brought it up briefly in step 3, but you need to make sure you are meeting people in your industry. You’ll about things you didn’t even think about and if they believe in your goals, they might help you out by making introductions or providing actionable advice you.

Without meeting people and learning from them outside, of structured events (such as University) it is difficult to get enough perspective to be successful and the social capital.

Once you have the plan, the hardest part is putting in the work to succeed.

Without the necessary studying, networking and curiosity, you will not achieve your goal. Period. So you need to take action.

I’m Already In An “Unemployable” University Program, What Do I Do?

The first question is asking, why are you here?

This can be a difficult conversation to have with yourself ,but it needs to happen. Sometimes the answer is easy, because you love what you study.

Sometimes it’s harder; you went into your program because you followed the “standard path”, you wanted an “easy” program or you went to university to make friends and party.

Once you understand where you stand, you can use the same four steps from above, but now you have a head start!

Let’s make a list of problems for some of the most “unemployable” majors.

Art history:

How do we translate the aesthetics and beauty going into the digital world?

How do we preserve the memories and lives of our relatives after they pass away?

Sports and Recreation:

Sports and Recreation are one of few remaining ways that people connect in real life, how do we preserve it?

How do we make sure people get a healthy amount of exercise in a digital world?

Psychology

Mental health affects us all, how do we prevent issues and help people cope?

How do we stop social media from making us lonely?

How does technology affect childhood brain development?

Gender studies

How do we increase the number of healthy marriages?

How will marketing campaigns change with evolving gender norms?

These are examples of big, billion or trillion dollar questions that will impact millions or billions of people.

By thinking about big problems and understanding what you know and what you don’t know, you will have a path forward to be successful, whether in research, a company or your ventures.

Two Fundamental Things For The Future:

1. People Skills
2. Digital Technology Skills

You need to have a foundation in both and excel in at least one. Here are two examples on either end of the “extreme”.

Example One : Social Worker

You love helping people. You can make the most lonely person smile and change lives. But you also need to be able to identify areas of need so you know where to focus your attention.

By understanding data trends and potentially doing a little bit of statistics and modelling work, you can identify neighbourhoods or issues to focus on. You leverage your strengths, become good enough in what you previously considered a weakness to make a true impact on the world.

Example Two: Programmer

You can make computers sing. You understand data and can automate almost any task. But you need to share how you did this and what limitations it has. Without presentation and writing skills, you can show off your inventions. By learning how to present and clearly communicate your work, you can work on more interesting problems and communicate their impact. You leverage your strengths, become good enough in what you previously considered a weakness to make a true impact on the world.

To Recap

1. Know yourself
2. Find a problem
3. Figure out how to solve it with 4 steps
   a. Pick a problem you are interested in solving
   b. List the skills and resources you’ll need to succeed
   c. Use University courses and supplementary projects to build skills
   d. Meet people in your field to work with and learn from
4. Study hard, meet people and be curious.
5. ???
6. Profit

Goodluck!