One of the best ways to hone your mind will be to get your eating and exercising habits properly aligned. If you eat right and exercise regularly, you’ll be able to flourish with greater success. You want to remove any impediments toward learning you can. This is something much easier to say than to do, but if you’re healthy and in shape, it’s less difficult.
Also, you may want to look into tangential means of acquiring your education. Going with ivy-league schools may get you in the “good old boys” club, but they’re not necessarily going to do a better job providing you with an education.
Theoretical And Applied Disciplines
Consider this scenario: you’re involved in a community college with, say, a theatrical program that is only possible because local patrons come to see the shows. A run of twenty shows will profit the department around $40k. That allows the college to spend $40k on production and rehearsal.
Meanwhile, an ivy-league school gets an annual donation of $200k for “the arts”. As a result, the theater department doesn’t have to worry about providing a show people will pay to see — their funding is continually secured. So they focus on more “arthouse” performances that aren’t realistically practical to the post-collegiate alumnus.
When someone has a degree in a performance art, they must have some acumen in business in order to apply it. In terms of art, people buy what they like; not what the bards believe they should have. So to make it, if you have an education from some community college, you’re more likely to be equipped for earning money, than if you go the ivy-league route.
The advantage of the ivy-league route is primarily in contacts, not in applicable skills. If you don’t believe that, just look at some of the student protests that have characterized schools like Harvard in recent years. It’s ridiculous, appalling, and certainly not educational in any traditional way.
The Community College Route
These are some of many reasons that community colleges are becoming sought over traditional universities in terms of acquiring higher education. While you’ll definitely need a specialized school for some aspects of something like, say, a medical degree, you can lay the groundwork with perfect effectiveness through a community solution.
With degrees like law and medicine, there are usually preliminary studies necessary before final examinations provide you with the requisite certifications for some private practice.
Law is often supported by pre-law, and degrees in surgery, applied medicine, or other specialties commonly have some nursing or pharmaceutical beginnings bracketing them.
Diverse Skills
By going the community college route and then transferring when the local institution you’ve obtained preliminary certifications at has been exhausted, you additionally diversify your portfolio. Remember: not all institutions are ivy-league affiliated, and most hiring managers understand the reality outlined earlier — that the kind of certification you receive may not necessarily represent the kind of education you’ve acquired.
It actually looks good on a resume to have multiple fields of study in multiple institutions under your belt. This makes you more well-rounded, and indicates that you’ve been forced to think critically during varying shifts between institutions, and successfully done so such that you managed to secure the degree you sought.
But even if you do everything right, you will still need to search for jobs carefully, and in the right places. The more choices you have, the easier it is to narrow down the right one.
The Necessary Groundwork
When you’ve obtained degrees from multiple institutions, you’ll be a prime asset to diverse employers, and so have a greater likelihood of acquiring the position you seek. You’ll need to establish good learning habits early to do so, however. So keep in shape, eat right, and find an educational institution focusing not on who you know, but what you know. You can get into the networking side of things when you’ve truly got something to bring to the table!
Ashley Lipman
About the Author:
CONTENT MARKETING SPECIALIST at The Blog Frog.
Ashley is an award-winning writer who discovered her passion in providing creative solutions for building brands online. Since her first high school award in Creative Writing, she continues to deliver awesome content through various niches.
