I Learned More than my Social Security Number in College

The old joke is that the only thing most people learn in college is their social security number.  It’s just that you’re asked it everytime you do anything in college that you quickly memorize it. When you go to the records or cashier’s office, it’s the first thing you’re asked. When you go the library, you’re reciting it. If you have a food account tied into your scholarship, you have to sing it to get your food. Often I wake up in a flop sweat and the first think I can think to say is my social security number.

Whereas I do dream about my social security number the same way you dream about Tetris blocks after playing that blasted game for hours, I did learn a few other things in college. Because so much of academia is centered around tests, most people assume that what you’re learning is the answers to those questions. Naturally, when they go out into the workforce and realize that those answers aren’t helping them any, they assume their college years were a waste.

The key is that what they teach you in college, goes far beyond the facts and figures you were tested on. Well, I guess if you were studying to be a doctor knowing what the spleen does is pretty important, but for those of us who majored in a more esoteric field, the knowledge was only half of it. What you didn’t realize was that you were trained to think. Most of education is training you to think. When you were in High School, the solution to the riddle of a northbound train racing head on towards a southbound one wasn’t the end goal. It was learning processes and deductive reasoning. It was training your mind to solve problems.

In the end, you learned a lot more than you think you did, and that’s why your mind is so much more valuable to employers than one that can remember all of the hidden rooms in a given level of “Super Mario Bros.” It’s not the facts they’re interested in, monkeys have been known to memorize things like that. It’s the way you think that counts.