Hi I'm Toby and welcome to another video where I'm just going to share some of my
thoughts with you and today I want to talk about the idea of whether or not
university, or college as it's often called in the US, should be considered a
waste of time. Now I think University certainly can be a waste of time for
some people and it's going to depend on what you're hoping to get out of it and
also your attitude and your I guess learning style once you're there. So if
you are wanting to go to university because you want to gain the information
from lectures, you want to be lectured to and you think that's the only way to
gain information, then you're probably wrong and maybe university will be a
waste of time for you because it's certainly true that more and more
nowadays you can get information for free online. You can get quality lecture
notes, basically lesson plans, textbooks reading material all online mostly for
free so I think that the main value proposition of going to university
whilst maybe it used to be that it was the only place or the main place you
could access quality knowledge, I don't think that's any longer true and
universities do still have value but it's not just to be a provider of
information and it's not just to be a source to get lecture notes from. I think
that universities themselves are even starting to recognize that they need to
kind of change their business models and change their main value proposition and
their marketing to recognize the fact that they can offer so much more than
just providing information and they need to to stay competitive and to continue
to attract students or else they'll just completely go out of fashion. So what
else can a university offer you that would make it not a waste of time?
Well if you're a really active learner I guess
so you're not just passively going to lectures and sitting there and then
leaving when you've done what you need to do but instead you do things that
nobody tells you you need to do. So you engage with extracurricular activities
and all that kind of stuff at universities, that can be a much more
enriching experience for you and I think the main value of the university really
is the ability to learn alongside your fellow students who are at a similar
level and have the same interests as you. To learn alongside them, to work with
them, get ideas from each other and get experience working on problems in the
field of your interest with other people is extremely valuable and that is
something that I got out of going to university. It's not just your fellow
students that would give value to your learning but the ability to learn from
your lecturers and professors and get advice and help from them. They're
experts in the field that you want to go into, even just getting life advice and
mentoring from them is something that's extremely valuable but also getting
their help on problems that you think are especially tricky and wouldn't
otherwise have any way to be able to solve them. So to take your university
experience from something that's a bit of a waste and you don't need to be
there for, to something that you're actually getting a lot of value from you
really need to go from being a passive participant of the university to being
an active one and the quicker you realize what you're paying for and what
the value of your university degree is I think the better off you will be.
I myself only realize a lot of this value kind of in hindsight after
graduating. So I went to university I did physics and maths and I don't regret
going although plenty of the time that I spent there I guess maybe was a waste of
time, I did plenty of courses that I've completely forgotten now, I spent a lot
of time being stressed and cramming material and learning in a bit of a sub
optimal way to just get the grades I wanted and to get through but luckily
and I feel grateful for this, is that I was a pretty active participant. I was
engaged with lots of extracurricular things like clubs and societies at
university, I was involved in running the physics society at my university I even
did like a few sort of side projects while I was there. I was involved with a
video project going around interviewing various lecturers on physics topics and
I guess without knowing it back then I was preparing myself to be a youtuber
but it was experiences like that, the friends I made, connections I made
and the ability to understand academia that have been valuable for me. Otherwise
I guess the rest of the degree was kind of a waste of time, if I'd only just
wanted to become an expert in physics I guess there are other ways I could have
done it. Some of the physics ideas maybe I would have even enjoyed learning them
more online because it would have been less stressful and I could have relaxed
a bit and taken the learning at my own pace. I'm grateful that I was able to
gain an understanding of how the academic world works of how scientific
research is done, how academic publishing system works and basically
how science moves forward. I don't think I would have that understanding if I'd
only learnt the scientific ideas from a textbook for example and I think that
understanding of science and how it works will be really valuable to me
because it's the field that I'd like to make change in to educate people in and
to be a part of even though I might not be part of the conventional academic
community anymore. There are some cases where of course university is valuable
for other reasons for example if you want to do a qualification and the
university qualification is necessary. Like if you want to become a doctor or
an engineer that needs to be certified, various things that actually need
this university qualification I guess there's no other way around it and there
might even be other cases too like if you are in a country that you don't want
to be in and you want to go to a new country one way you can do that is with
a student visa and I think a lot of people use student
visas to pursue a much better life for themselves. So of course in that case
university could definitely be worth it and not a waste of time.
Same with going on to the PhD, a PhD can unlock doors to getting jobs in a
new country and getting a visa to move countries so if that's something you
want to do then definitely it could open doors for you and it wouldn't be a waste.
There is the whole question of cost as well and I think whether or not
university is worth it in terms of the money is a bit of a different question
because it kind of depends on what country you're in. I feel lucky to be in
Australia and to have gone to university across Australia in New Zealand where
university is not that cheap but it's also not as expensive as I hear that it
is in places like the US. If money is a huge barrier for you then of course you
need to weigh up whether it's worth it for you even more carefully because you
also need to weigh up whether it is financially worth it maybe even if
you're in the US and you have the chance to maybe you could get a student visa
off to Europe or somewhere where university is extremely cheap or even
free but I don't know how practical that advice will be for everyone. Some people
will go to university because they don't really know what else to do and there's
an idea that going to university is a great place to just figure out what you
want to do. Well sure you can do that at university but that is also going to
depend on how active you are while you're there. Are you making
connections with people in an industry that you think is exciting and you'd
like to explore more? Are you taking research projects? Are you actually
getting involved in some of the stuff to the point where you can figure out if
it's the right path for you or are you just endlessly floating around in the
breeze? Because I guess you can do that at university but you can also float
around and the breeze outside of university you can do that at home as
well. So sure university is a place of many opportunities it can help you figure
out what you want to do but only if you're kind of actively
thinking while you're there otherwise it's very possible to graduate from
university and on the day you graduate be just as lost as the day you
graduated high school, I guess it's possible to make no progress on that
front. There are plenty of clever and successful people who never went to uni
you'll find some that will say that it's a waste of time but you'll also find
some that say maybe they wish they went. Same with the university graduates some
will be doing well, some will be doing less well. I guess to summarize the
advice it's that university can definitely be a waste of time and it can
also be valuable so if you're going to invest in it and you decide that it's
worth the money for you then you kind of have to make sure that you also make it
worth your time and I guess you do that by either being active or being passive
and recognizing what you're paying for and what the value of university really
is. So if you're a student I hope you go out there and and make some good
connections and appreciate the people that you're working alongside because
that is what's going to be really powerful for you. Best wishes and thanks
for watching.