This thought comes to my mind on occasion and I can’t recall if I’ve written about it before.  I feel like colleges do not do a good job of preparing their graduates for the real world.  Actually, long ago, I read this article that talked about how high school students are more prepared for the real world than college students are.  In high school – you stick to a strict schedule of being at school starting at 7 or 8 till 3 or 4 and if you have athletics, you usually are practicing till the early evening.  There are rules to follow and things to do.  In college, you get to select your classes – only a few hours a day, you can schedule them late in the day, or not at all.  You can even skip class or even fall asleep with little consequence.  There’s a lot of freedom.  So, when you first get to the real world, I think it’s hard for people to adapt to such rules and scheduling.

Aside from schedules and rules, I feel like college does a poor job of giving students a full or at least wide spectrum of possible careers available out in the real world other than the more commonly known occupations like doctors, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, engineers, etc.  The working world is wide and vast with jobs people probably never knew existed.  College also does not prepare students on how to get a job, how to set up a resume, how to network, how to get internships, how to go to an interview.  Sure, they offer these things in the career center, but that is only useful if you go there on your own.  Instead, they should have mandatory classes on these topics.  They should partner with businesses around and set students up to intern or shadow to learn about all the different types of jobs out there.  This will give them a better idea of 1) what is available and 2) what it actually entails.

Maybe some majors are better than others.  I feel like maybe the science field is good but others aren’t.  Also, college needs to be more hands on.  (Actually, now as I’m writing this, I feel like I already wrote about it before, haha – oh well, I don’t to dig or delete this.)  A large part of new grads having difficulties getting a job include the lack of experience.  Well, it’s a bit circular here, some internships or jobs require previous experience – well you can’t get experience if no one will hire you – and on and on it goes.

I think my line of work is pretty awesome and it’s pretty neat.  Does anyone in college even know about it?  Probably not.  Do normal consumers even know about it?  Probably not.  How did I get into it?  Well, not through college! Haha.

Anyway, college needs to improve so that students can be better prepared for the real world.

The end.