Intro

Higher education serves society in a large variety of ways and is essential to innovation and daily societal functions. Within each career field, higher education serves people in a different way. From a professor to an engineer, to a startup generalist, this post explains how I started viewing higher education in my life.

My Background

Now, in order to fully understand my perspective, I feel like the context of how I was raised and my background is very important.

I was born to two Indonesian parents, neither of which have gone to college, and with little to afford luxuries. They weren’t the “typical” asian parents. Not the type to always get on me about my grades, extracurriculars, or life, and rather more hands-off on that front. The pressure for me to get good grades or do well in my extracurriculars never really came from them.

When I had a conversation with my teacher about the idea of motivation, this came up. To this day, I never really knew where my motivation in school or extracurriculars came from.

This sounds very performative and very egotistical, but I really started thinking about this when my second semester of senior year came, and I could never really shake that feeling of wanting to do well in school and extracurriculars.

But anyways, hopefully that background of asian first-gen parents, yet not too much pressure, provides some context for my perspectives going forward.

My goals/experiences

I want to find and create or join a startup. So living in the world of startups, I realize that this field is unique in the sense that nearly anyone with any major could succeed in it.

Now, of course, there are a few majors that dominate the majority—business to learn how to be an entrepreneur or engineering to learn how to build—but there are plenty of math, english, music, or psychology majors out there that do just as well. People can join a startup, regardless of their background, and yet what really matters is the impact that they deliver while they’re there.

Sure, that can be true for many jobs, but in startups, it’s different. Startups are almost always in a state of scramble, desperation, and frantic speed to improve. In environments like those, what gets rewarded isn’t qualifications, certificates, or experience; it’s impact.

To that end, being within this world of startups, I started looking at higher education in a different way.

For me, I feel as if the main point of being in college is to prove that you can do a difficult thing, for a prolonged amount of time, and have the basic level of intelligence to be able to create impact.

Not to completely disregard things like intellectual curiosity, of course not. In fact, one of the most appealing things to me in college is the ability to discuss deep topics with others, while exploring completely new ideas that lead to even deeper conversations. A very big hobby of mine. But when it comes to main utility, it’s really just connections, credibility, and grit.

Now, again, I want to reiterate that if you want to go into a highly specialized field like medicine, research, or law, of course, the degree that you have and the things that you learn are extremely relevant.

However, I am willing to bet that in an environment like a startup, the main CEOs, COOs, or Head Generalists aren’t using the large majority of what they learned in uni. Excluding the engineers and technical staff, that is. Now, that may be a very biased claim in the small experience and perspective I have had in startups, but it feels like that is also true in many other startups as well.

College/University for me

Now, to the main point. College does great in helping make connections. And most importantly, how to seek and create them in the first place. Not just learning how to “network,” but also finding out what people value in your field and how to create value itself to leverage to connect with others.

College also does great in creating credibility. It’s just much easier to trust someone who graduated from college than someone who didn’t to do great work—even in startups.

Finally, it teaches you how to learn and how to do hard things. In startups, knowing how to quickly learn and adapt is extremely crucial. In college, you’re forced to adapt to an environment you're unfamiliar with, people you never knew, and subjects you have never encountered in your life.

Learning how to quickly adapt and persevere is what I find to be the most useful takeaway from higher education, at least for me. Things like what you learn in the actual business, engineering, or physics degree don’t have to be 100% relevant to your future goals. But the important things are how it gives you the background to be able to do hard and unfamiliar things.

End

Again, this is all within the context of who I am and what I want to do (startups). My point is, the degree you have doesn’t have to be entirely relevant to your future jobs, and from what I heard, most people don’t use 50% of the things that they learned within their major.

So as I move forward, I’m not looking at college as a thing to hand me a map to a career—it’s something allowing me to turn into someone who can draw those maps quickly. I’m not going to measure the value of my education by how closely my classes match my future job title. I’m going to measure it by whether I leave with stronger relationships, sharper judgment, and a faster ability to learn and ship real work. If I can do that, my major would be the thing I worry about the least.