Hey, how you doing? I know you also want to become a graduate like those before you. You just can’t wait. You just cannot stand any form of delays in your bachelor’s degree programme. COVID-19 has also come to delay your stay a bit longer but what if it also presents you an offer to get better before you resume school again?
Your primary reason for going to the higher institution is to learn, then obtain your certification degree. But no one tells you that you are required to learn beyond just the books. If you are already in university, you may have realised this yourself, that there are many things you should and must learn from the university.
Universities and other tertiary institutions are structured in such a way that they become rich environments for learning more things than just books.
You may already have realised that you need to learn something more from the university but you may not have known all or some of these ten. But I have taken the pain to write them down here so that it serves as a reminder to you and everyone else that sees this. Here is the list I will use:
- Managing relationships
- Managing finances
- Entrepreneurship
- Critical thinking
- Love and marriage
- Respect
- Leadership
- Learning how to learn (acquiring new skills)
- Diplomacy skills
- Character
Managing Relationships
Relationships are of different types; romantic relationships, business relationships, simple interpersonal relationships, etc.
There is a very common tale that every student have witnessed. There is always that new reserved person, who loves being by themselves and talks to no one but their only seatmate. But a few years down the line, this extreme introvert becomes transformed into a lively, free-going person who can relate well with people.
The truth is, the educational institutions present a fertile environment to learn how to interact with people. You must take advantage of that opportunity to learn how to manage and effectively handle relationships with people, including people of the opposite gender.
Relationships with the opposite gender are very important. They help you understand and better manage your future relationship with your spouse.
Managing Finances
The moment you leave home, most of the time, you begin to receive monthly allowances from your parents or guardian(s). This is the time when you need to learn to manage your finances from the different sources as may be applicable to you.
Many people do not learn accountability because they realise that they already have a steady source of income from their parents, but it will be a total disaster if, on graduation, you still do not know how to source money for yourself, to save or invest.
Entrepreneurship
In this new age when entrepreneurship is topping the game, it will be out of place to leave the university without adding the feather of entrepreneurship to your graduation wig. To further buttress its importance, the economy of most nations of the world have dwindled to the extent that stable employment has become extremely difficult for graduates, and the economies not rest on the shoulders of entrepreneurship.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking ensures that you are able to think things through, verify the truths in the vast array of information you would receive. It requires you to verify facts before you take them as true. If you do not acquire this skill before leaving school, I could actually doubt if you really attended any tertiary institution at all. Quite unfortunately, there are many such people who still pour blunder with their mouths without even giving more critical reasoning to them first.
Love and Marriage
If you did not learn about love and marriage while in school, where else will you learn that? You would spend four to six of your valuable youthful years in the university depending on your course of study, and the least you could do is not make it look like lost years as far as learning about love and marriage is concerned.
You need to buy some time to learn and read about other things like marriage, love and emotional relationships too. You will regret it greatly if you graduate without knowing much about these things.
Respect
Respect forms part of life and it is the element that makes you journey through life easier and faster than some others.
Leadership
I am a big fan of leadership too because leadership obviously affects almost every other aspects of life. Whether you will be active in public leadership or not, developing your leadership skills will positively affect the success of your family and corporate affairs.
The high school presents with many different opportunities to acquire and build up your leadership skills, ranging from class leaderships, student politics, school religious and socio-cultural leadership, etc. That means you must try to get involved in one way or another. And you should consider reading some leadership books too.
Many people come out of school without building their leadership skills and as you already imagined, they always regretfully wished they did.
Learn How To Learn
As simple as it may sound, this is especially important for every student. As you progress through school, you begin to realise that there is more to a school than just passing exams. In short, passing exams is a skillset on its own and no matter how knowledgeable you are, things could get a little unexpected sometimes.
Many students only know how to pass exams, at least, they are good at that skill. But they do not really know how to learn other things about life. The difference between a university graduate should not just be the certificate. There should be something more.
You must learn how to acquire and apply specialized knowledge in everything you do. Learning to learn means that you can comfortable learn anything outside your current field of study and do excellently well when given the appropriate training time.
You must learn to acquire new skills that relate to your passion, interests or field. This is important because, without the patience and ability to learn new things, you would be literarily scared of learning new things.
Diplomacy Skills
Diplomacy is considered a leadership skill because it involves trying to handle conflicts peacefully and successfully between two or more other parties. As long as there are students in the school and they share classrooms, laboratories, there are bound to some form of conflicts or the other. Even if students of the higher institutions try to keep their social distance and mind their businesses as much as possible, incidences of conflicts and all such things still arise. To a prepared mind, this is a huge opportunity to expand their diplomacy skills. As a rule, even if you do not know how to handle two people in conflict, just learn not to do no further harm.
Character
Everyone has that saucy classmate who is arrogant, proud, boastful and who seeks to ride over everyone else. That could be general bad news, couldn’t it? But the good news is so many of those people have left school transformed into the most saintly individuals you would ever meet. One of the best places to learn character is in school.
If you are willing and open for change and development, the university is a great place to develop your best characters and improve your reactions to people and events.
It may not be done so consciously as trying to carefully measure each of every one of your steps and actions, although that is great too, that would be too great a task to keep up with. Developing your character involves reflecting on your responses to certain people or their activities with the aim of finding better ways to do it.
Every one of these things has their limits though. The balance you must learn to achieve as you do this involves realizing you need to get better and simultaneously, knowing not to let your past actions get to you too often.
The bulk of the work in school carries with them the temptation of leaving out other things that are also essential to your life. But you must find ways to balance out the equation, be proactive about developing other areas of your life aside from your school curriculum. It may involve a great deal of sacrifice but it is possible and it has been exemplified by very many different people out there.
Hey, how you doing? I know you also want to become a graduate like those before you. You just can’t wait. You just cannot stand any form of delays in your bachelor’s degree programme. COVID-19 has also come to delay your stay a bit longer but what if it also presents you an offer to get better before you resume school again?
Your primary reason for going to the higher institution is to learn, then obtain your certification degree. But no one tells you that you are required to learn beyond just the books. If you are already in university, you may have realised this yourself, that there are many things you should and must learn from the university.
Universities and other tertiary institutions are structured in such a way that they become rich environments for learning more things than just books.
You may already have realised that you need to learn something more from the university but you may not have known all or some of these ten. But I have taken the pain to write them down here so that it serves as a reminder to you and everyone else that sees this. Here is the list I will use:
- Managing relationships
- Managing finances
- Entrepreneurship
- Critical thinking
- Love and marriage
- Respect
- Leadership
- Learning how to learn (acquiring new skills)
- Diplomacy skills
- Character
Managing Relationships
Relationships are of different types; romantic relationships, business relationships, simple interpersonal relationships, etc.
There is a very common tale that every student have witnessed. There is always that new reserved person, who loves being by themselves and talks to no one but their only seatmate. But a few years down the line, this extreme introvert becomes transformed into a lively, free-going person who can relate well with people.
The truth is, the educational institutions present a fertile environment to learn how to interact with people. You must take advantage of that opportunity to learn how to manage and effectively handle relationships with people, including people of the opposite gender.
Relationships with the opposite gender are very important. They help you understand and better manage your future relationship with your spouse.
Managing Finances
The moment you leave home, most of the time, you begin to receive monthly allowances from your parents or guardian(s). This is the time when you need to learn to manage your finances from the different sources as may be applicable to you.
Many people do not learn accountability because they realise that they already have a steady source of income from their parents, but it will be a total disaster if, on graduation, you still do not know how to source money for yourself, to save or invest.
Entrepreneurship
In this new age when entrepreneurship is topping the game, it will be out of place to leave the university without adding the feather of entrepreneurship to your graduation wig. To further buttress its importance, the economy of most nations of the world have dwindled to the extent that stable employment has become extremely difficult for graduates, and the economies not rest on the shoulders of entrepreneurship.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking ensures that you are able to think things through, verify the truths in the vast array of information you would receive. It requires you to verify facts before you take them as true. If you do not acquire this skill before leaving school, I could actually doubt if you really attended any tertiary institution at all. Quite unfortunately, there are many such people who still pour blunder with their mouths without even giving more critical reasoning to them first.
Love and Marriage
If you did not learn about love and marriage while in school, where else will you learn that? You would spend four to six of your valuable youthful years in the university depending on your course of study, and the least you could do is not make it look like lost years as far as learning about love and marriage is concerned.
You need to buy some time to learn and read about other things like marriage, love and emotional relationships too. You will regret it greatly if you graduate without knowing much about these things.
Respect
Respect forms part of life and it is the element that makes you journey through life easier and faster than some others.
Leadership
I am a big fan of leadership too because leadership obviously affects almost every other aspects of life. Whether you will be active in public leadership or not, developing your leadership skills will positively affect the success of your family and corporate affairs.
The high school presents with many different opportunities to acquire and build up your leadership skills, ranging from class leaderships, student politics, school religious and socio-cultural leadership, etc. That means you must try to get involved in one way or another. And you should consider reading some leadership books too.
Many people come out of school without building their leadership skills and as you already imagined, they always regretfully wished they did.
Learn How To Learn
As simple as it may sound, this is especially important for every student. As you progress through school, you begin to realise that there is more to a school than just passing exams. In short, passing exams is a skillset on its own and no matter how knowledgeable you are, things could get a little unexpected sometimes.
Many students only know how to pass exams, at least, they are good at that skill. But they do not really know how to learn other things about life. The difference between a university graduate should not just be the certificate. There should be something more.
You must learn how to acquire and apply specialized knowledge in everything you do. Learning to learn means that you can comfortable learn anything outside your current field of study and do excellently well when given the appropriate training time.
You must learn to acquire new skills that relate to your passion, interests or field. This is important because, without the patience and ability to learn new things, you would be literarily scared of learning new things.
Diplomacy Skills
Diplomacy is considered a leadership skill because it involves trying to handle conflicts peacefully and successfully between two or more other parties. As long as there are students in the school and they share classrooms, laboratories, there are bound to some form of conflicts or the other. Even if students of the higher institutions try to keep their social distance and mind their businesses as much as possible, incidences of conflicts and all such things still arise. To a prepared mind, this is a huge opportunity to expand their diplomacy skills. As a rule, even if you do not know how to handle two people in conflict, just learn not to do no further harm.
Character
Everyone has that saucy classmate who is arrogant, proud, boastful and who seeks to ride over everyone else. That could be general bad news, couldn’t it? But the good news is so many of those people have left school transformed into the most saintly individuals you would ever meet. One of the best places to learn character is in school.
If you are willing and open for change and development, the university is a great place to develop your best characters and improve your reactions to people and events.
It may not be done so consciously as trying to carefully measure each of every one of your steps and actions, although that is great too, that would be too great a task to keep up with. Developing your character involves reflecting on your responses to certain people or their activities with the aim of finding better ways to do it.
Every one of these things has their limits though. The balance you must learn to achieve as you do this involves realizing you need to get better and simultaneously, knowing not to let your past actions get to you too often.
The bulk of the work in school carries with them the temptation of leaving out other things that are also essential to your life. But you must find ways to balance out the equation, be proactive about developing other areas of your life aside from your school curriculum. It may involve a great deal of sacrifice but it is possible and it has been exemplified by very many different people out there.
