Know Thyself
It has been a while since I last formally attended college; actually, it is over a decade since I was a registered student in a university. Nevertheless, I can still feel what I felt during my final days before start looking for a job and the questions I had about how good (or bad) I really was, for the industry back then. Because the only gauge of success or failure before entering professional life, are your grades, your GPA and (at times) your impression on your batch mates.
To give you a slight background, I am a graduate of the golden days of IT industry, when the total number of registered IT firms easily out-numbered the total number of graduates being produced every year. So the question whether I’d get a job was no criterion on gauging my technical ability or the value I had as a prospective employee for the industry. The employers at that time have lesser choices.
Today, it is different. A lot changed since late 1990s: the industry grew, telecom companies came in, outsourcing to Pakistan increased, more companies registered, call centre we set up, demand for technical resources augmented, more and more universities started CS and telecom programs, more and more new universities were built etc. etc. So, does this mean that today’s head-hunters are able to fulfill their Human Resource needs? The answer-unfortunately- is NO! The core issue for the industry remained the same. For Software and telecom industry, even today, it is as hard to find good graduates as it was a decade back. What is the problem then? Where are we lacking? Is it the curriculum? Or is it the faculty? Or is it the rapid change in industry requirements? Or is it simply a gap that exists between the local IT industry and the technology institutes?
All of the above mentioned factors have a part to play in the situation we are discussing; each has a different set of proposed resolution, however, there is one factor not stated above, which deserves a more serious attention from students is that ‘today’s students really need to raise their bar of excellence.’
We, as a nation, are suffering from an attitude of appreciating mediocrity. We even celebrate being mediocre and promote the idea across. We have started believing that we actually are a great nation with fantastic people who are incredibly gifted and anything and everything that has stopped us from becoming exceptional is either a fault of USA, India, Israel or something done bad by a previous government, wrong political party or a bad faculty member, harsh marking decisions, out of course questions, difficult assignments, industry situation, recession in the US ……. and the list goes on. But the only thing we never admit as individuals and as a nation is that the fault lies within, that we need to raise our productivity, our level of output and reduce our shortcoming today, without blaming it on anyone else but ourselves. This is what can bring in the change.
I’ll quote one of my favorite motivational speakers Ruben Gonzalez here:
“When I was in the third grade, I had a teacher I will never forget. Whenever we started whining about an assignment being too tough, she would always say, “It builds character.” Back then, I didn’t know what character was and if I had to do more homework to get it, I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want life to be challenging. I wanted life to be easy. As I got older, I started to admire people who did challenging things. I wanted to be like them. And today, believe it or not, I actually get bored when life starts getting too easy.”
Humans, in their nature, try to avoid challenges. Some of them then build this ability to get excited by challenges and an effort to conquer those. From Ruben’s story above, it seems that we have to first build a character to take on tough tasks and stop whining about life being tough. As a student, once you have this ability to positively confront a difficult assignment, a competitive exam or a strict faculty member, you’ll start enjoying the hard work that follows.
Building a character also means understanding the meaning of ‘no free lunches’. Life does not reward people based on how well they perform a task or a project. Life has a skewed method of rewarding us. Whenever you do something that ‘just meets expectations’, it may not even be recognized. Whenever you do something ‘very well’, life may give you a good reward. But whenever you do something extremely well, life truly opens up for you. Take an example of playing street cricket, you won’t be appreciated much. Even if you are a great tape-ball hitter, you can even be reprimanded by some people. If you play professional cricket for representing your city team, well, may be yes you can skip an internal exam, both your teachers and parents will allow it, no real appreciation there either and the commitment will have to be huge as compared to your street cricket. But if you can become Javed Miandad, who cares whether you have ever been to a school or not, the world is yours. Is this fair? Probably arguable. But the truth is, people don’t want a street cricketer or a Karachi city team opener. People want a committed player like Javed Miandad; a player, who raised the bar for himself and helped his team get some of the most astonishing accomplishments ever.
So, let us zoom-in for a moment and look at what an individual, a student can do to raise one’s own expectations:
While doing any assignment, never submit until it does not pass your own quality criterion and then keep on raising your criteria yourself. Review it again, have it reviewed by a senior, a faculty member, fix and then submit. An interviewer or evaluator needs 5 minutes to figure-out your capability of doing a specific task.
Don’t copy (from a friend or Wikipedia), work things out yourself. Copying is faking yourself to be good, while you in fact, are not. Remember, out of all the students called for interviews in tier one organizations for their grades, 80% are rejected for their actual knowledge.
Be an expert, identify an area of interest and build you expertise around it. 4 years is a long time to be best in a position to be really good at something of your own choice.
Read more, read articles, read business trends, read about technology and be a step ahead of the rumors. Do not follow the myths of recession, myths of IT bubble blasts, myths of telecom industry doomsday, read yourself, contact experts and make sure you know the news not the word of mouth.
The industry is waiting for many or most of you to join in. There is a lot of room, but there is room for the fittest only. Raise your bar, raise your standard and enjoy the rewards.
