When I was in high school, I opted to take aquatic biology instead of chemistry for the sheer fact that cutting into the head of a shark seemed much more appealing than studying proteins and molecules. I took science classes only to fulfill graduation requirements. It’s not to say that science wasn’t interesting because it was at the time. I just never found the relevancy to integrate it into a future career.
Before we got to use our scalpels to cut open our sharks, we had a project that revolved around water and organisms. The assignment was to find a pond, lake or reservoir and collect jars of water and scum from it. Fortunately, there was a small pool of water that formed in the fields behind my house from recent storms and my lab partner, Erin, and I were able to collect three jars of the stagnant water to bring to class.
There was a lot that happened in those jars over the next few weeks. At first it was rather mild – an organism or two emerged from the bottled scum; but by the end of the second week, new bugs were all over the place. And the jars smelled. Really smelled.
It was a cool assignment. Every day we’d come into class to see a new type of bug floating or flying inside the jars and we were able to identify them all. But what lesson did I learn from it? It’s been 25 years since I took that class, so how has it been relevant to my life?
Here’s what I know:
1. Don’t have a pond or stagnant water near your property.
2. Don’t swim in a pond.
3. Don’t open jars of pond water/scum in an enclosed room.
There’s a lot of what our kids learn in school that has life-long relevancy, especially when presented in such a manner. When it isn’t integrated into everyday life, understanding the usefulness of a topic becomes lost. Math is an excellent example of this. I haven’t had to prove a right angle since leaving high school, but I also know there’s probably a lot more I could have done and products I may have been able to invent had I found a connection to those earlier lessons.
In the world of entrepreneurship, there are people with great ideas who lack specific skills to fully develop those ideas and there are people with great skills who lack the ability to foster ideas and take them to the marketplace. They’re dependent upon one another. For those who can do both, you’re a diamond in the rough.
Just think of the ideas and inventions our society as a whole could come up with and develop if we simply understood the relevancy of our early education.
I don’t remember how I came upon Bianca Fortis’s blog, Young and Unemployed, but I was empathic enough to send her an email. Bianca is a relatively recent journalism graduate from the University of Central Florida who most likely had high hopes for easily pursuing her career once she completed her education. Like many, she just happened to have graduated during a period of high unemployment. She got the short end of the stick.
Bianca began chronicling her employment search back in May and has not yet been able to land a job as a reporter of sorts. She’s given up the independence she gained in college to move back home with her parents; it’s estimated that nearly 54 percent of college grads today are doing the same.
The short-term outcome looks rather bleak, especially in those states like Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida that are having a tough time rebounding from the recession. For places like Arizona, the AZ Department of Commerce estimates that it will take approximately seven years to get back to 2005 employment levels. (To put it in more perspective, in AZ the private sector added 700 jobs in September; the pre-recession average was 6,900.) For those of us with kids who will be entering the workforce then, you might want to delay converting their bedrooms into that second den or exercise room. Chances are they will be coming back home.
The long-term effects are even worse. If the young cannot get significant work experience until their early or mid-twenties, their entire careers are delayed. Experience is a critical factor in professional advancement.
We can prepare our kids for jobs all we want, but if those jobs aren’t there, they just aren’t there. Employment needs to be created.
As I went through Bianca’s blog entries I couldn’t help but think, “What if that happens to my own kid?” Would it be prudent of me to simply tell her to study hard and go to college because when she’s done, there will be a job waiting for her? It’s akin to telling her Santa brought all of her Christmas gifts – at some point we have to fess up that we lied.
I’m doing more for my kid. I’m instilling skill sets through entrepreneurship training that will give her options as an adult so that she doesn’t have to be financially dependent upon someone else. Besides, I don’t want her to be that adult child living in the basement because one day I’d like a craft room.
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