Since education is becoming a necessary and routine choice for young people, many of us just take it for granted that education is part of life journey without really understanding the meaning of advanced education and college experience. In this sense, college experience turns to be three types of experience:
1) Hard working with a focus on excellent grades on exams
2) Optimize the opportunity of social networking and share good college times with classmates and friend
3) Balance the academic study and social life exploration
4) Live their own worlds, neither care about the exams or social networking.
So which one is your type? Which kind of type do you think that would benefit you most? For me, I would like to enjoy the balance between the academic studying with my social life exploration. My program is very intensive which is far beyond your imagination. Every week we have four 4-houts courses, besides of which I’m also doing my spring internship. I like the way to integrate the academic studying with practical works. At the same time, I think the engagements and interactions with my classmates, professors, or working colleges are great. However, one day I found it was too much for me and I talked with my advisor, about the pressure and frustration of tons of presentations, exams and papers. To my surprise, he didn’t force to me to drop the practical work, and he reminded me what Albert Einstein said before: “Education is that which remains when you have forgotten everything you learned in school.”
It really depends on your personality and your understanding of life. You might get a great grade in terms of exams but it doesn’t mean the things you write down in the exam will last forever in your head. Knowledge and information is updating everything, so what could benefit you most in terms of life time value? The studying ability, association ability as the part of life philosophy, after all of the knowledge fades with time.
College experience will also help you to build a value system, communication skill and it may ideally help to find what you love and what you could like to devote yourself into. Can you image what would happen if the college experience only provides your experience of lectures, exams, and homework? More students who are like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs, would choose what they love and cultivated their inside interests which also could lead them to be successful without the completed formal college experience. Education is more than that. Lectures, exams and homework are the ways to give you the impetus to study and up-to-date communications. They are the assisting tools to help you approach what is you as a human, and to find what you love and to find out the place where you could be the best of yourselves after graduation!