Get More Out of College by Prioritizing Learning
When priorities conflict in college, you can find yourself choosing between multiple good choices. At this stage of life, choose learning.
If you’re a college student like absurdly over-achieving intern M.G. (whom I do not resent in any way whatsoever), you have so much opportunity that you can easily make the wrong choices. M.G. is back to class after the winter break. When he’s not learning five languages, getting a black belt in Israeli Krav Maga, and comparing Moby Dick to classical literature—for fun—he actually does attend classes. And last week, he was offered yet another new opportunity: working as a paralegal for a prestigious law firm, making all-important copies for the partners. His semester is already jam-packed with classes, but it’s tempting. Very tempting. After all, the gig sounds great for his resume.
In college, you need to choose between activities where you learn a lot, activities that make your resume look good, or both. But not all resume-building activities are created equal. You want the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck.
So how do you make sure you’re signing up for the opportunities that will serve you best? Prioritize learning when making choices about how to spend your time.
Run, Don’t Walk, from Activities That Block Learning
First, don’t take the classes you think you won’t learn from. If you’re picking a class to look good on a resume, don’t. Recruiters won’t look at specific classes. Do you really think they want to know how your freshman Advanced Ambition for Upwardly Mobile Teenagers class went? Not likely. They’re far more interested in how you think, problem solve, and deal with people. When you take classes whose only redeeming value is the title, the only thing you’re going to get out of it is a title line on your resume. But even worse, your one-liner is using up a precious class slot that you could use to learn something that changes your life!
If life gives you a time waster that you can’t just drop, make time-waster-ade.
It’s the same with internships. Jobs that sound like they’d “look good on your resume” are a dime a dozen. Don’t do those either. Find out what’s really involved in that internship. Ask around. If it’s really just carrying coffee around and running a laser printer, don’t do it. A lame-o internship is just wasting your time.
Get Out If You Can (Make the Best of It If You Can’t)
If something’s a time-waster, get out! Some commitments, once started, can’t be stopped halfway through. So before saying ‘Yes,” think about whether you can gracefully switch paths if an opportunity turns out to be less than expected. Use your add/drop period to research, and drop a class if you’re not learning. Quit any student groups that are a useless burden. And if you’re carrying coffee at that internship, ask your sponsor to move you to projects where you can make a real difference.
If life gives you a time waster that you can’t just drop, make time-waster-ade. If your internship is teaching you zilch and you couldn’t drop it early on, look for nontraditional ways to complete it. Seek out special projects. Network with cool people in the office. If you’re spending over a thousand dollars a week for class, or 20 hours a week on an internship, get your money’s worth!
Do Your Research to Find Learning
Of course, we have interwebs! Before committing, you can do research and separate the wheat from the time-wasting non-wheat, like … potatoes … or carrots.
When picking classes, look on ratemyprofessor.com to find out how much other folks learned in the class and see if the reviews make you more or less interested. Look at the course description carefully, and check out a past syllabus.
Talk with people who have taken the class or internship you’re considering. Don’t just ask, “Did you like it?” Ask questions to tease out whether or not they learned anything. Ask, “How did this change your world views? What did you learn? How have you applied that learning?” If an experience hasn’t made a difference in someone’s life, that’s a strong hint that it isn’t worth your time and attention.
Seek Out High-Learning Activities
Once you’ve tossed out the time wasters that block learning, decide what kinds of learning you want out of an experience. Do you want to learn to work as part of a team with other students or coworkers? Do you want a boss or professor who can become your mentor? Do you want to learn to fold sweaters really, really well? (I’ve considered working at The Gap for a summer just to learn to fold clothes.)
List what will make a class or internship worthwhile to you. Then rate your different options on those criteria and choose the one that will give you the biggest leg up. Taking minutes for your boss’s meetings might be a low-value internship measured in learning, but if your boss is the White House Chief of Staff, then it might be great for networking. Plus, you can add an action item “prepare for Zombie apocalypse” at the bottom of the minutes and watch the fun when he gets back to the Oval Office.
Let’s recap: when you have competing commitments in college, choose the opportunities that give you the most learning. Beware of empty resume-building classes and internships. Get out of time wasters as soon as you can, and do your research beforehand to make sure you can expect an activity to be good for learning. You can be even more rigorous by creating an explicit learning score-card and using it to evaluate opportunities.
Now that he realizes that learning should be how he makes his decisions, Intern MG knows just what to do. “I’ve identified my high-learning goals as getting deep exposure to journalism practices, understanding entrepreneurship, and learning to manage projects. Operating a photocopy machine, even for a prestigious firm like Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, will not help me reach those goals.” So MG is going to keep working shifts at a major national newspaper as he co-founds a business and teaches himself MIT’s computers science curriculum … in his spare time. I’m hoping to make sure he goes up for a surprise black belt test his first day on the job—purely as a way of supporting his desire to learn, of course. I’m very generous that way.
I’m Stever Robbins. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins subscribe
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
