CMU III

Another entry about CMU. More will come about my fond memories of this place, but I decided to write about the benefits of college.

Today I was thinking, did I actually learn anything here? Was it worth over $150,000? I personally believe it was. My overall knowledge of business and finance has gone from almost non-existent to a level far beyond average.

I do not consider the actual business knowledge to be the most important aspect though. I think the most important thing I learned here was problem solving and critical thinking. Sounds rather trite, but its true. I find that I can tackle almost every problem thrown at me (at least in school) with relative ease. I don't stress as much, I'm able to study much more efficiently than I ever did in high school, and I find these mental processes working in the "real world" too.

Another thing I've improved with is group work and leadership. In high school we had some group projects but they weren't really effective at teaching group dynamics, they were just a way to let students work on a project that would be too overwhelming for one person. Here, I have had great groups, average groups, and horrible groups. I have also really started to take command of groups, delegate tasks, and manage people. I'm not an asshole at it, I just try to make sure that nobody feels cheated by other group members, keep everyone on track, and make suggestions. I also usually do more than my share of the work, because many things my groups do are my ideas, so everything has to start somewhere.

An aside on group work... I personally believe that to measure your success at group work, its not necessarily your leadership skills, delegation skills, or effort, at least not directly. I think the best way to measure the success is the number of projects that should have been failures and almost were, had it not been for you tireless working to get things right. If you measure it that way, I'd say I've done pretty well.

So, those are the two biggest things I learned in college. Both are extremely important to being successful, so I do feel it was worth it. Not to mention that getting a Bachelor's Degree is essential to finding good employment.

I probably could have gotten a comparable education at a state school for half the price, but private universities do have advantages, especially the small class sizes which really helped me. The few large classes I attended weren't very meaningful.

So, my advice: go to college.