Education

I've been thinking recently about what a college education really says about a person. The further I get in my studies here at BYU I've been coming to the conclusion that a degree says more about what kind of person you are than what knowledge or skills you have. I find that most of my time at college is spent doing assignments and projects and readings that have little or no relevance to what I'll actually be doing for most of my life, and all the details that I'm so meticulously examined on disappear out of my head the minute finals are over. However, I'm determined to get my 4-year degree because of what that degree says about my character and my work ethic.

I would never hire an employee for an important, long-term position in a company I owned unless they had a college degree, but in all honesty I don't think I'd care very much what they got their degree in. If it was a skilled position I'd want to know what real-world experience they had with those skills. The only purpose for the degree would be to tell me that the person had time-management skills, and could stick to something and accomplish it. The degree would also tell me that the employee knew how to take an assignment and complete it satisfactorily, and that he or she could manage some level of stress and handle some level of responsibility.

Sometimes I get a little frustrated in my studies when I don't see any value in what i'm cramming into my brain to satisfy an assignment or a professor, but I figure that it's because of the unpleasantness of the task that my degree will mean something and actually have some value.

Damon

School Online?

This morning I woke up to my alarm at 7:30 and considered getting up and starting my day, then I smiled and pulled my covers in tighter and slept till nine. My Accounting 200 class (which starts at 8) was doing a software day, where we watch an accounting lecture on our own time, so attendance wasn't required and I'd done the work last night. I'd also read ahead in my math text and completed my online homework, so I decided to skip both the math lecture and lab that I have scheduled on Tuesdays. It felt so good to catch up on my sleep, and because I was rested when I got up I studied hard for an ISYS test and just got done taking it.

I love having flexible schedules where I can choose when to study and when to not, I feel like I get so much more out of the experience that way. I've sat through so many lectures when I was so tired that I could hardly keep my eyes open, just because my attendance was required. I always end up having to review the textbook and slides and whatever other resources are available, and since the information on tests usually comes from those resources as well I end up not paying full attention in class. I like the idea of having hybrid classes, where a professor offers once or twice a week to cover the material in an optional lecture, and have as the main bulk of information video lectures from the same professor that the students can study on their own time, following the schedule of tests and course outlines. Professors would have so much more time to do their own work and research and whatever else they do, and students would actually get more out of their classes and not just have to cram all sorts of information into short-term memory for tests and then forget it all. Wouldn't it be nice. :)

Here's a YouTube sales pitch for these kinds of classes, it's a little bit stuffy and academic sounding but has some good points.