Your Job Title: Educated Person

Lots of buzz on campuses these days about careers.  Everyone, it seems, is eager to graduate with a job title in their back pocket.  Across the country, enrollment in computer science, business, engineering, and nursing programs is booming; on the flip side, the number of students majoring in liberal arts shrinks by the minute.

Given the economic disasters of the past few years, it's hard to fault students for trying to increase their chances of finding a job after graduation.  Majors that translate into "hot" careers seem to make sense in a tight market. 

But besides careers and paychecks, college can (and should) prepare you for other rewards, including some that can impact far more than just your future earning power.  If you let it, college can widen your world.  It can help you gain a better understanding of yourself and inspire an appreciation of life's richness and complexity.  A college education may sometimes be about finding correct answers, but it's also about asking questions--the same questions educated people have been wrestling with for ages.

Engaging the world is as important a part of your education as preparing for a career.  And interestingly, the two activities are not at all at odds.  If you're well informed--if you're curious about life and (as one of my students recently put it) "know about things"--you're more likely to make better choices, including those about your work.  And more often than not, the most successful people out there are knowledgeable not just about their field but about the rest of the planet.  As always, knowledge rules.

This isn't a pitch for the liberal arts, business, or any other curriculum, but instead for the importance of being open to learning and the promise and possibilities of college.  Clearly, you should study what you enjoy and find interesting.  And you should, now and then anyway, look at the link between your coursework and careers.  

But it's a mistake to go through college with your head down, focusing only on courses and knowledge you think will make you marketable and ignoring everything else.  Doing so shortchanges your life big time--a terrible thing.  Whether next semester is your first or last at NCC, work on becoming a well-educated human being, by far the best job title of all.