It is a normal scene to see a high-school student anxiously opening an email or letter that hopefully contains good news: admission to his or her college of choice. This ritual has become a recognizable part of this new world culture, one that plays out in movies and emotional infomercials or advertisements. Most Professionals will agree that going to college matters a lot for future earnings. But does the sender of that envelope matter?

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, did his undergrad from MIT, Manipal Institute of Technology, India. Did it matter while he was being hired as a CEO? No.

There are quite a few career paths that allow liberty where a person got his or her education does not matter. But now in this real strong futuristic world, engineers who went to the most selective schools enjoyed only marginal earnings benefit over their peers at mid-tier institutions. And while humanities majors at the top schools enjoyed higher earnings than their peers attending the not so much in demand schools, there was no visible difference between top-tier and mid-tier earnings. For science majors, the prestige of a school did not matter either.

Does a top schools translate into a top career?

Has the education system taught how to deal with a situation or a work crisis in real world? Did you get so focused on preparing for the tests that you could not differentiate between real time applications versus theory or book knowledge?

We can study along with course syllabuses from Ivy League universities. It’s awesome. And best of all, no one can criticize effort spent on becoming informed.

I would never discourage someone from learning, especially extra-curricular learning. I’ll just say that it’s only an education (in the schooling vs. education sense of the word) where that learning is turned into knowledge.

And knowledge requires more than just books and instruction. It requires experience. It needs the interaction - the back and forth feedback loop–between theory and practice, hypothesis and results, ideas and action. Reading case studies or from text books alone is not going to get you very far unless you have something to practice the lessons on.

As the saying goes, non scholae, sed vitae discimus—not for school but for life we learn.

So how do you do it? How do you turn you turn lessons into action? Information into enriching insight?

This is simple yet hard - separate yourself from what everyone else does, Why? Because while everyone else is studying, you’re working, you’re innovating, you’re creating, you’re thinking beyond what the books ask you to. What makes it hard is, what we have always been told all our childhood, as a youth, as a teenager, as a freshman entering a prestigious college or a recent graduate from community college — you need a degree, you need prerequisites, you need to be properly trained. Do not be carried away with that, if you think it is not your time to follow the norm - drop out, get started.

Of course, your education is never over. Doing and learning feed into each other and the sooner you start, the better. As Plutarch puts it, “I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience of things.”

Do not wait till you finish your four year degree for your dream job or the perfect opportunity, START NOW! The perfect opportunity is the one that exists, that gives you any kind of experience, the one that allows you to put anything you’ve learned into practice. Schools never teach you THAT! Because in many universities, students are disengaged from the learning process because they’re not urged to get involved.

Due to developments in education technology and shifts in the employment market, the higher education landscape has changed a lot over the past decade; no longer the regimented classroom learning, or exams really teach students and evaluate their ‘success’; instead, valuable, applicable, hands-on methods of teaching have proved much more effective for this.

According to studies, students who practice what they’re learning first-hand are three and a half times more likely to retain that knowledge than when they’re sitting in a lecture room, writing notes or listening to them.

This problem has been recognized now and we are one of the disruptive academies implementing student-centered teaching which moves the focus to the student and gives them more control over their learning. We challenge participants’ intellect, stretch their creativity, and test their endurance by teaching and involving them in a series of tasks.

Every student gets to be a leader, manage a project, share their ideas and build their creativity into something real for a real customer use case. We are here to bridge the gap between school and real time experiences. At Siliconvalley4u, we mentor children to learn the applications of real-world using coding/Software as a tool. A high school student can start coding at an early age from our coding academy, learn java, python, manage projects and build mobile apps, fix real world problems using our platform and resources we have researched and built giving every child, youth, teenager a chance be successful not just in academics but beyond that you can read more on how Siliconvalley4u has addressed such situations through the links below.

Website: www.siliconvalley4u.com

Email: info@siliconvalley4u.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/siliconvalley4u/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Siliconvalley41

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/siliconvalley4u

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February 26, 2019

Written by Gurumurthy Yeleswarapu, CEO/Founder of Siliconvalley4u