This frequent little exchange seems innocent enough, but it points out one of the great misunderstandings about how a college education relates to a career. Many people see a college education simply as vocational training: you choose a major, study it, graduate, and then go into the real world and perform what you've been trained to do. Many students seem to prefer this apparently straightforward relationship between major and eventual career. It seems so clean and simple. It gives students some comfort while they are attending classes, writing papers, and taking exams to feel that at a stipulated time they will be able to get a job and earn a living by using what they're learning. But this comfortable connection between major and career, in most cases, does not match the real world of work.
A major is an artificial and convenient construction of the academic world. The real reason that courses of study are organized by major is to provide a focus for each department in a college; majors provide common ground for the work of faculty members in each department. Majors, however, are not created by colleges in cooperation with the labor market. Sometimes the field you study may correspond to available jobs, but often it is difficult to make the translation between an area of study (e.g., biology or chemistry) and the fields of work you might apply it to (e.g., product development in industry). Or you may study a field that has no apparent relationship at all to the workaday world (e.g., classics, mythology, or comparative literature). Or in another common case, students take a particular major expecting to get a job in an associated field (e.g., teaching or civil engineering), only to find that the job boom that had attracted them to their field has peaked and passed in the four or five years it took them to get the degree.
The major you choose may help you to establish a tentative career direction, and you certainly should work hard in it. But clinging to your major as if it were a guarantee to future success is both shortsighted and self-defeating. Keeping the major career myth afloat may lead you to believe falsely that the courses you take are sufficient currency to buy you a job. Students who rely on course credits to carry them to a job are like athletes who depend solely on natural talent to succeed. Just as athletic success comes from a combination of natural talent, coaching, training, teamwork, and mental preparation, so does career success result from much more than the courses that appear on your transcript. You can use your major as far as it will take you, but you must be ready and able to draw on other resources when the major does not close the sale. These other resources are available to you during all of the years you are in college.
PLAYING THE CAREER GAME WITH A FULL DECK
What are the resources available to you in college, and how can they help you prepare for a career? Consider the remainder of this chapter as describing a deck of cards from which you may choose as many as you like. Each card has potential value for you in a job or career. The more individual cards you hold in your hand, the better you will be able to play the career game.
Like a real deck of playing cards, your college-to-career deck has four suits, each of which contains numerous cards. These four suits are called Knowledge; Generic Skills; Experience; and Personal Contacts.
The more suits you hold, the stronger your hand. And the more cards you have in each suit, the better are your chances to win (i.e., get the job and career you want). In the Generic Skills suit, for example, the more skills cards you have, the more marketable you will be when you graduate. As with kings and deuces, some skills are more valuable to a particular career than others, but all skills have some value. Many times, people find that a skill they thought was not particularly useful for their work turns out to be valuable; an example is the microcomputer software programmer who discovers that his or her artistic skills are immensely useful in constructing visually interesting yet understandable flow charts for people learning to use computers.
No one expects you to build up the maximum number of cards in each of these suits while trying to be the best student-athlete that you can be, but gaining some combination of Knowledge-Skills-Experience-Contacts during college is highly desirable. After all, if you were hiring a college graduate, you would prefer the candidate who had some relevant courses (Knowledge), showed evidence of being able to perform the relevant job functions (Generic Skills), had some direct exposure to the tasks and problems involved in the job (Experience), and knew people who could vouch for his or her character and future potential (Contacts). Knowledge + Generic Skills + Experience + Contacts = Career Preparation.
USING YOUR DECK OF CARDS TO HELP FIND A CAREER DIRECTION
Most college students want to be able to say that they are headed in a particular direction after graduation, whether or not they really have a preferred direction yet. This need is clearest whenever somebody asks a college student, "What are you studying to be?" You want to be able to tell them something, just to have an answer. But it would be so much better if the career you mentioned were something that you really might want to pursue. Even better if you feel reasonably confident (not necessarily certain) that you have what it takes to be a success in that field. Choosing a major is one way to head down that path, so long as you realize that it is perfectly acceptable to eventually turn onto another path. Remember, also, that majors do not necessarily equate with careers. The knowledge that you gain from both major and other courses will be important in your career, although in many cases this is so primarily at the beginning. The generic skills that you learn and refine in college will help you throughout any career that you try. Both your prior experiences and your personal contacts are most helpful at the point of getting hired.
The more cards you accumulate in each of the four suits-Knowledge, Generic Skills, Experience, and Personal Contacts-the greater the number of choices and the better career alternatives you will have. The best time to gather these cards is while you are an undergraduate. Paying attention to your cards will give you a sense of direction as well as strategies for further exploration. Even if you are not yet ready to pick a career direction, gather your cards and build strength in your suits. They will pay off regardless of your major or the career choices that you eventually make.
A WORD ABOUT GRADUATE SCHOOL
There is a continuing movement toward professionalization of various fields of work, which often means that a master's or even a doctoral degree may be required for entry into the job market. Often, there is a particular undergraduate program (either a major or a specified combination of courses) required for admission to a graduate degree program, but do not assume that this is the case until you find out firsthand from the graduate school that you'd like to attend. Sciences represent one extreme (a science major or many science courses are usually required for entry to graduate science programs), while law school represents the opposite extreme (in that no particular undergraduate program is required for admission). Although many people assume that a master's degree program in business (an MBA) requires an undergraduate business major, this is seldom the case. Liberal arts majors and others are equally welcome in most
MBA programs, though some schools may insist upon a certain number of math or economics courses.
Admission to graduate school generally depends upon the courses you take as an undergraduate, the grades you earn, and your ability to score well on graduate school admissions tests. Graduate and professional schools vary so widely in terms of how these requirements might be combined (even two schools offering the same graduate program will differ), that you must inquire directly of each school that interests you. Your safest assumption is that each school will have somewhat different entrance requirements than the next.
In certain professional areas-graduate business schools being one of them-applicants who have had some full-time work experience in the field have a better chance of being admitted to graduate programs. Applicants with experience are regarded as more highly motivated, more mature and committed to a career in that area, and more knowledgeable about the field. While this is a growing trend, it is far from universal, and thousands of recent bachelor's degree graduates are admitted directly into professional schools each year.
Graduate school may seem like a long way off, and you may prefer to work for awhile before applying to an advanced degree program. But if you really want to work in a profession in which an advanced degree is required (or in one which gives advanced-degree holders a clear advantage over other job applicants), you should begin preparing for graduate school as early as your junior year. Check with advisors and graduate school catalogs to see what skills are required (statistics? a foreign language? familiarity with computers?) and what particular undergraduate courses are prerequisite to the graduate courses you are interested in.
