Is Your College Diploma A Piece of Crap?

Professional success is a funny thing. For so many, we follow a traditional path: Graduate high school, go to college, choose a “responsible major,” graduate college, get a job, work hard, and then professional success will follow. Maybe, throw graduate school into the mix at some point. That’s the mindset that most people have. For a long time, myself included.

A lot of people assume a college degree is a ticket to being successful. While college is great for teaching the fundamentals in an industry, it is centered around memorizing facts and doing well on exams.

As I’ve come to realize, that’s not how the real world operates. How often do you take exams and memorize facts from a history textbook at your day job? The answer is probably never.

Professional success isn’t dictated by how well you do on a multi-choice exam. Real world success is about communicating effectively (both written and verbal), executing ideas, networking, managing up and solving practical problems in your industry and workplace. Those are things that you can’t teach in a classroom. You learn those by doing.

Now, this post, up until this point, may seem like I’m bashing colleges. It’s actually quite the opposite. I openly admit I loved college. The atmosphere, making new friends, the freedom to make my own choices, and learning new things from some great professors. All of it was great. But, my college diploma has done very little to propel me forward professionally. I’d actually say that my actual diploma is a piece of a crap.

After all, any bozo can get a diploma. You can even get a college diploma these days in your (cough cough) pajamas from an online college. It’s what you choose to do after receiving that diploma that really matters.

The only way you really learn and succeed in the workplace is by applying the skills that you learned in college. And oh yeah, making mistakes and failing. Now, this is ass-backwards from college, where the safe path of memorizing facts, cramming and regurgitating information back for a final are the norm.  Cramming isn’t going to help you once you enter the workplace. Because it’s not simply knowing the facts, it’s about knowing how to apply facts in a specific manner.

Success comes from real-life experience, time, hard work, networking with industry professionals and most importantly the amount of times you try something new and fail.