November 18th, 2008
The Best Advice a Grad Student Ever Gave Me
What’s the best way to get through college? The answer came to me from a grad student friend of mine, and it has been the best advice ever on the subject of doing well in college. Think of the school part of college as your job. Your most important job.
What good will that do me, you ask. How is school like a job, you ask, citing the obvious that you aren’t making money, you’re spending money—and a lot of it on books, and rent, and pizza. My tuition pays the teacher’s salary. He works for me, you say. Well, you’re right, and you’re wrong.
First, most full-time teachers make between $50-90,000 per year, so it takes an awful lot of students to pay salaries. In fact, most salaries are covered by taxpayer subsidies. But that’s not the main reason you should think of class as a job, and your teacher as—yep, you guessed it—your boss.
Let’s get right in the head, perspective-wise. You go to class, do the work, and then you get a grade. That grade is your pay for all your hard work, and the teacher signs your proverbial report card: your paycheck. Just like a boss at work who pays you, they add up how hard you work and figure out what your paycheck should be.
Now that you’ve got the right perspective, how does thinking of school like the most important job you’ve ever had really help? Well, chances are, up to this point, most of your jobs have been for fun-money or at least something you didn’t absolutely need. You need good grades. There are more and more people in the world, and technology is minimizing the number of workers required to keep the world going. Job competition is tough and only getting tougher. Some industries already require transcripts in their hiring practice, and admittance to any kind of grad program is directly tied like a ball-and-chain to transcripts. Transcripts may not end up being required of you for your post grad goals, but in today’s world especially, you can’t know that for sure now.
There are also a few other ways thinking of class as a job and the teacher as your boss can help you out. To do well in a job, your boss wants you there on-time, and expects it all the time, allowing for the occasional tardiness. Your boss probably wouldn’t be too happy about you sleeping in class. Your boss expects a certain amount of actual labor for the money they pay you. So does the teacher.
Class sizes range from 15 to 120 people. Imagine for a moment that you are a manager at a business with 50 employees, and everyone is late. You’re going to be cranky. Granted, it never happens that everyone is late at the same time. But teachers probably have just as many class sessions as you do, let’s say on average 12 per week. More often than not, one or two or more straggle in late for every class. That would be a lot of crankiness for most bosses, who usually deal with only 5 shifts per week.
Teachers don’t see everything in a classroom, but they always see when someone is sleeping during class, so don’t do it—it’s not the kind of memory you want the teacher to have when they are grading your essay or in the event that you end up right on the cusp of a B- or a C+.
Finally, the work. The homework. The studying. It’s all labor baby. And in this case, a teacher has even more power than an employer. An employer has to pay you your hourly rate, regardless of hard you worked, but a teacher has grades. The hardest work gets the best grades, which is usually pretty fair. The guy who spent 10 hours on an essay probably doesn’t deserve the same grade as the guy who threw it together in 1 hour, right?
It’s pretty simple: show up on-time, be respectful, as you would to an employer, and remember that hard work will actually get you a much fatter pay-off. And that might be the deciding factor between you and someone else with the same exact degree when you’re trying to get the job you really, really want once college is in the rearview mirror.
As always, if you have any questions, comments or funny stories you'd like me to share about college or the blog, email me at stu@stuvu.com
