So you are now 18 or 19 years old. You go to live alone in a place filled with strangers who will soon become your class mates, house mates, friends, friends of friends, and those familiar faces you see every day.
The first thing you going to do is to adapt, wait isn’t adapting a skill? You are going to be a good kid and meet a few good people who just happen to have their priorities stacked upside down. Now because most of those people are your peers you either going to be easily influenced, or stand your ground and protect your values, again isn’t standing your ground being responsible? There is a lesson in being easily influenced because ultimately you going to learn to stand your ground. A few life lessons down, and you have not even gotten in class yet.
Let us look at some of the lessons one gets to learn in university just to survive, (ok, I am not referring to formal learning). For the first time in your life (at least for for most of us), you are responsible for your own safety, you have to manage your own budget, you have to juggle schooling, all the little chores that we normally never think of at home, studying, and (if you’re lucky) having fun, and this is called time management (you know what they say about cruising your varsity years without having fun, it is called going to varsity instead of experiencing varsity). If you are a student, you know that there is not enough time for all the things you want to do, it takes great time management skill and a very organized person to use their time optimally all this while trying to study for 9 subjects in a day in some crazy instances.
I believe that all those years you spend staying up until late (discipline), studying a subject you don’t even understand (persistence), asking a lecturer questions that some students feel are not so smart(confidence. Yeah, it takes a huge chunk of confidence to admit that you don’t understand) should count for something. I think it should be worth mentioning in an interview.
Truth be told you had to learn these lessons and develop those many skills to successfully make it through university. So the next time someone asks you about previous experience point it out to him that nothing could have been more challenging than managing your life while you were in varsity.
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