College is where you learned to work with others in a sometimes difficult environment.
Before you got a job, you were in school and college. That was most likely the extent of your exposure to the ‘real world’ and that is where you learned everything that you needed to know to get by. It is hard to see those lessons as you are experiencing them, and even sometimes it is hard to distinguish them as you are reflecting on your time at a university. There are some critical lessons you learned there that you would do well to remember.
You are able to work and live in a difficult place. College students do not have much money, typically speaking, and therefore you learn the importance of a dollar. You learn how to budget and how to get by on a relatively tiny amount of money. Most of your money goes towards tuition and books and such and I doubt you realized how much your family spent on food until you were buying meals for yourself. You also learned to live in a dorm and get along with a roommate. Whether you were best friends or not does not matter. What is important is that you learned to compromise and deal with someone else in a very small, enclosed space. Thinking about that makes a cubicle look a little more spacey, doesn’t it? Next time you are paired up with someone that you do not like or you are a little short on cash, just look back to those four or more years you spent in college.
You learned the importance of independence and also how crucial it is that you use that independence wisely. Ramen may have sounded like exactly what you wanted every single night, and for a few years that may have been what you ate. However, you eventually saw that it was not doing good things to your health and you may have even missed vegetables. You realized that you had to pay for the consequences yourself even if it was hard. Staying out late was not a good thing to do if you had an early class the next day. Maybe you ignored your alarm clock once or twice just because you could, but you grew to understand that nothing gets done and that you are accountable for what was covered in that class you missed.
One key college lesson that you might look over is that you learned to network. At parties you learned how to talk to that cute person that you wanted to meet, you also learned how to talk to the not so cute person who had cute friends. You learned how to talk to people and make connections. You might still be in contact with those people. That is a skill that you use all the time at work and do not even notice because it has become second nature to an extent. You learned how to get what you want by talking to the people that would make it happen.
These are just a few examples of some of the critical lessons you learned in college that will continue to help you throughout your life.
