Edit desk: Preparing for the real world

Emma Faber

As a senior thinking about my next steps after graduation, I can’t help but fear what’s coming next. Since freshman year, I have always been told, “college is the best four years of your life,” “take advantage of it,” and “it will be over before you know it.” Now that I am in my final year of college, I understand what those phrases that I used to laugh at mean. College truly is an escape from reality — it’s nothing like the working world.

After reading the recent Washington Post article which praised Lehigh’s Mountaintop Program for its success at revitalizing the outdated structure of the undergraduate college experience, I now see more and more disparities between college and the reality of post-graduate life.

Since I’m a student who hasn’t participated in the Mountaintop Program, I am forced to conclude that my undergraduate experience was somehow inadequate and I may not be prepared to have a full-time job next year.

For several reasons, I can now see how the typical college experience does not reflect what students should expect the rest of their lives to be.

Firstly, the schedule of a typical undergraduate student does not match up to the demands of a 40-hour work week. Students tend to only have class for a few hours each day, which gives them a large amount of free time that doesn’t exist in the real world. Students also have the ability to choose when they take their classes and sometimes can even manage to bypass having class on Fridays. Unfortunately, the flexibility and freedom that many of us take for granted as students is something that will not exist after college.

“By the time students graduate from college, their brains are hard-wired to the cadence of the daily life laid out by the nine-month academic calendar,” Jeffrey Selingo said in the aforementioned Washington Post article. “They tend to think about their work in terms of 50-minute classes and five courses during 15-week semesters, with plenty of lengthy breaks in between.”

This is the hard truth. It is going to be a very rude awakening for many students who are used to sleeping in until 11 a.m. every day and only having to use their brains for a couple hours each day.

A second reason why I think that students are ill-prepared for the working world is the way in which success is measured in college. From my experience, it seems that students feel that getting good grades and boosting their GPA is their top priority, which is a concept that doesn’t exist after college.

Students’ success in college is measured based on how much information they can memorize in a short amount of time and then regurgitate on an exam. In the working world, there are no exams and there are no grades to measure understanding of topics. If you want to succeed in your career, you must genuinely understand how to do your job, not just be able to get an A on an assignment. Bosses and managers simply expect that employees will be capable of doing their job well.

Lastly, because students are primarily motivated by grades, I have observed that the joy of learning may be somewhat lost. How is it possible to enjoy learning a subject when you are told what articles to read and what topics are most important to focus on?

While a student may be particularly interested in one aspect of the subject they are learning, they don’t necessarily get the chance to explore that further since they need to focus on the course curriculum in order to get a good grade in the class.

One of the benefits to Lehigh’s mountaintop program, and other novel programs like it, is that students get to create their own curriculum. In addition to picking a topic that interests them, students at Mountaintop get to work on projects and develop their ideas without boundaries and by their own rules.

As Selingo said, the Mountaintop Program does a good job of mimicking the rigors and the excitement of the workplace, unlike traditional undergraduate programs do.

After reflecting on my own college experience and thinking more about how I may not be ready to start my career in just a matter of months, I believe that colleges must make updates to their current undergraduate programs.

Like Lehigh did with Mountaintop, other schools need to allow students to pursue their studies in unconventional ways.

The four years we spend in college are supposed to prepare us for the rest of our lives, but without breaking down the barriers and giving us a taste of what’s coming, we are not going to be ready to thrive in the workplace.