What Should We Do in College 2

Next Wednesday we'll have the final exam of Discreet Simulation. Mr. Yang is going to Melbourne, Australia for further education or else, so the exam will be taken two weeks earlier than scheduled. I hardly turned in any homework by now because of my internship, so I have to start from the very beginning, it's really tough…Arena is a common program in simulation area., I wonder if I will ever use it again after the exam, actually there are many courses we may never use or even remember after our graduation. But we have to learn it well, which sounds like boring, and it truly is. What we should learn in college? It's an old topic, but worth every college student to think seriously about it.

We always do things for no particular reason; we just do it because there are many other people doing it. We never stop to have a little thinking of what we should do and how to do it. We learn by reciting instead of doing. There's a joke said that a Chinese student answers regular interview questions like "why do you want to join us" quite fluently in English, but when the interview asks "what did you do this morning?" he becomes speechless, because he recited the "standard" answers to the all possible regular questions that could be asked but unable to speak daily English. I think before we start discussing what should be learned in college, we have to distinguish knowledge from ability. I heard a lot about the difference between Chinese class and American. In China, students just sit down there listen whatever the teacher is saying, even when they have questions, they barely say it out, most of them will keep their questions in their mouth until the class is over. There is almost no communication or interaction between the teacher and students. Students who pop up a question without raising his hand first will be considered impolite, even rude. The situation in America is right the opposite, the class is more active and open. They don't have to recite so much, but they think and act much more than Chinese students. It's widely accepted that Chinese student are much better at taking exams than solving practical problems. I think the main reason is that we gain too much knowledge, but few ability and skills in class. If we want to learn more soft skills, we have to take part in extra-curriculum activities, because we know there is little possibility we get it in class. That's the reason why students more active with social activities generally perform better in society than introversive study-only students. I think we should put more attention on developing our social skills before we jump out of the tower of ivory into the real society.

As extend of my last blog: learning extensively may provide us with more knowledge while learning intensively could make us expert in a particular industry. It's been a wide spread controversy over China for a long time. Some people say that China are having too many undergraduates who can do nothing but talking about theories when they graduated, China needs more professional students graduated from technical schools. The others claim that Chinese undergraduates should learn even more widely than they do now, because the world is getting smaller and smaller with globalization, we need people with more comprehensive skills and knowledge backgrounds. Well, from my perspective, we should not confine ourselves too much in a particular area when we are still in college, because we may still be unaware of our real interested industry, we should not get ourselves into an unknown industry just because we major in a relative topic. We have to figure out what is our real interest before we make the second biggest decision in our life after the college entrance exam. So, my opinion is, we should try our best to know more about our interested industries if working is the first option after graduation, auto, finance, capital, operation, logistics, etc. We can make the right decision when seeking for a life long career beginning job only when we have a right insight vision of the industry and where our interest and passion lay.