Educate Yourself For Career-specific Success
Travel to the most urbanized parts of the biggest metropolitan areas in most nations
, and you will find a place where youngsters gain less education than those who live in the surrounding suburbs and small towns. While urban youngsters have long suffered due to less education, progress in improving educational outcomes for city-dwelling youngsters has been slow.
In the course of investigating what to do differently for urban youth, educational researchers have found some astonishing information:
--Many of the youngsters feel that their environments are so dangerous that they assume they will not live to reach age twenty.
--Some of the young people have no relatives who have ever held desirable jobs.
--Large numbers of the students have undiagnosed learning difficulties that make reading and math far more challenging than for the average youngster.
--Rarely do students hear encouragement about their scholastic work.
Let's think for a moment about how such life experiences might shape expectations and attitudes about going to school. Put yourself in their circumstances. You might conclude that:
--Going to school would have little value beyond being a place to hang out with friends.
--At school, humiliation would be seen as likely to occur in any orderly classroom where students would be expected to demonstrate what they had learned.
--The material that's studied is irrelevant to life, leading to disinterest and boredom in the content.
Now imagine that you want to do something to change all those circumstances and perceptions. What would you do? I know that I would want to turn the problem over to people who are a lot smarter and more experienced at helping urban youngsters than I am.
Fortunately, two such people are present and accounted for in improving secondary education, Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor. Based on their many years of success with helping students, Littkey and Washor decided a few years ago that the time had come to do something about the most discouraged high-school students.
The educators imagined a school where students would take responsibility for their education. Rather than sit in classrooms all day, students would spend regular time each week doing volunteer work in their communities under the direction of adults who perform similar work for a living.
Classroom studies would be tailored to enhance the effectiveness of the community work students learn to do. Students would be assessed on what they achieve in community work, their motivation to succeed, and the helpful habits that they develop.
The state legislature in Rhode Island funded a public school to test these principles, the Metropolitan Regional Center and Technical Center (popularly called "the Met"), that Littky and Washor were selected to direct. I had the great good fortune to visit the Met and would like to share a few lessons from their experiences with you that apply to anyone who wants to enjoy more career-specific success through gaining more education.
The Met's program has been deemed to be a success because the students are exceeding the expectations they had upon entering the school. Almost everyone who attends the school graduates, and almost all of the graduating class goes on to college. What's more important, these young people have hope and worthy dreams that they know how to fulfill when they finish their classroom learning.
As one indication of the value of this approach, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been providing grants for other schools to emulate the Met's approach. Some other state and a few national governments have also been inaugurating Met-style schools in their urban communities.
What are some of the lessons that high school students can apply from the successful experiences at the Met and similarly organized schools?
1. Learn more about what interests you.
2. Ask counselors, teachers, and other adults in your life for suggestions about how to engage in your interests.
3. Identify careers that relate to your interests.
4. Meet people who work in such careers and ask questions about what their work is like.
5. Volunteer and take internships connected to the careers that most appeal to you.
6. Discover what kinds of work and educational preparations make it easier to gain such careers.
7. Choose part-time and vacation-time jobs and further education that give you the best chances to learn more about the possibilities of a career in your areas of interest.
8. Use your experiences to narrow down your focus into one area.
9. Find a mentor in that field, and obtain at least the minimum education and experience needed to start your career.
10. Try out your choice for three to five years and continually think about what a lifetime of work in your field would be like.
11. Keep an eye open for interesting career opportunities that are just emerging.
12. Within five years of full-time work experience, decide if you want to stay in the same field or move to another one.
13. Whatever you decide, obtain more education and experience that will boost your career performance and potential.
14. Examine how you might employ more of your interests into your current work or your personal activities.
In following these fourteen lessons, be aware that universities are increasingly offering the kind of career-experience-based education that the Met has found can work so well for high school students.
For many years, one popular experienced-based method has been what is often described as a "work-study" program, where the length of time needed to earn a degree is lengthened to permit time to work at a career-related job that pays well enough to defray some of the tuition, books, and living experiences that college students incur.
Many colleges are encouraging students to prepare a major project before they graduate to provide an experience with playing a career-related role. During such projects, students can meet knowledgeable people who are potential sources of good advice about what opportunities exist.
Graduate and professional schools have long encouraged their students to spend as much of their personal and vacation time as possible engaged in work related to their intended careers. Students learn more this way, and employers gain opportunities to find more talented employees.
Many such graduate and professional schools encourage even more significant major projects that may involve accomplishments that can attract employers' interests.
In all cases, the need to learn grows even after someone has finished classroom-based education because new knowledge is becoming available so rapidly. Having discovered that you can increase your personal joy and satisfaction through working in areas that are of interest to you, you'll want to do more of such applied learning.
Many schools now offer evening and weekend classes that can make it convenient to update your knowledge and to further explore your passions. If you don't happen to live near such classes, mid-career students are increasingly undertaking online studies.
Let's consider the list of lessons from the Met again. Wouldn't it be great if your life-long learning could be a lot more like what the Met offers to high-school students? Be on the lookout for such opportunities. They are increasingly available. Here's a list of what you should search for:
--Study under professors and teachers who are among the most successful people in your field and who will work with you individually as mentors.
--Obtain opportunities to apply what you learn to your daily work for credit with your employer and the school.
--Have the option to define your own courses and projects so that what you learn will be more helpful, relevant, and interesting to you.
--Learn in a supportive environment where evaluation will be tied to work-related perspectives rather than to some abstract academic standard.
If you can find such opportunities, note that you will also have opened the door to making substantial career shifts into related and totally new career fields. In the course of a long life, this flexibility may make it possible for you to engage in quite a number of your different interests.
Let me leave you with a final thought. Many artists design works to stimulate the mind or to dazzle the senses. Contrast that with the careers of industrial designers who seek to make a product more exciting and easier to use, such as Jonathan Ive who designed the original iMac and iPod.
In this comparison, artists are like those who are following the traditional roads to education, where the purpose is simply to engage in the activity whether the results have much practical application or not. The Met-style education (and what universities are increasingly making available for career-related knowledge) is more like industrial design, combining passion with beauty to uplift large numbers of people. Which style appeals more to you?
by: Donald Mitchell
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