Have you ever been afraid of making the wrong decisions? Well, I’ve had this fear for about one year now and I had no idea why I felt this way until this week. During my psychology class, I opened Purdue University’s official page and I found myself reading the list of undergraduate majors. I skimmed over it a couple times, not being able to find the major I was sure they had; Human Resources Management. After a couple minutes, I came to the conclusion that they didn’t have it. My instant reaction was to email the Purdue’s admission office to make sure there wasn’t any mistake on their website. I patiently waited for their response but sadly, the next day Purdue University confirmed that there wasn’t a mistake. Later that week, I had a meeting with my counselor; Ms. Hibon. We talked about the limitations of the HR major, the biggest one being that very few universities offered it. We discussed the possibility of considering other schools or taking a similar major, such as Management or Business. She did have a point, but I nonetheless I wasn’t willing to let go. Ever since my brother Sebastian left to begin his career in Business at Northeastern University I felt the incrementing pressure of deciding what I would study. Where, when and what. So, at the age of fifteen I started looking for different careers in order to find the one that suited me best. Throughout the process my dad was an incredible aid, he suggested I do an online interests test to see at least what area I was most interested in. People. I had always been interested in working in a big company full of professionals in different fields such as marketing or finance. And that’s when my dad once again came in. Myself being a people person as well as a person interested in business, my dad suggested I research a little more about HR, but truthfully, solely by hearing its name, I already knew it was for me. After becoming slightly more knowledgeable in this area, I have never doubted my choice. I knew this was what I would love and what I wanted to do after graduating college. What I never realized was what a struggle the process would become. My mind was all over the place, considering all of my options, all of my possibilities and over flooding my brain with questions I couldn’t answer right there and then. I thought; “Should I go to Northeastern and do my co-ops in HR? Should I go to Purdue and study Management with a concentration in HR? Should I study Business with a minor in HR? Should I go for a HR major or is that too specific?” These became questions I asked myself every day, but getting the right answer for the main question overall, “how do I know which one of these options will set me in the right path?” was the hardest part. One day as my mind was once again being flooded with all my questions once again I had a realization. I’ve always been quite closed-minded about my decisions. That’s what I do, even though some problems may come from my decisions, I make them work but never let go. --- But I had come to deduct that majoring in HR was definitely not as feasible as I had believed it to be and for the first time I opened my eyes, mind and ears to other people’s suggestions. This is when I began thinking about the time Ms. Hibon suggested changing the major -- but I had been too stubborn to listen to her anyways. I finally became aware of all of the limitations HR brought with it. Finally making the decision to change my major and still attend Purdue because I knew it would still focus on what I want to study. Now I realize this is even better, by choosing a Management major with a concentration in HR, I am opening doors to more companies because I am gaining experience in a wider area so I understand more about the business in general. Thus, having this experience occur at this moment in my life actually helped me a lot for the future. I am now more open to suggestions and changes about my career, always focusing on my dream job, of course. I may not have the exact answers as to what major I am taking or what school I am attending, I just know I’ll study what I love and work hard towards achieving my goal: working in the HR department of a company.
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Have you ever had to memorize like twenty vocabulary words for a test in your freshmen year? Can you remember any of them? Probably not. And that’s exactly the problem. Parents are paying a lot of money for their kids to get a good education but that’s not happening, they are actually paying all this money for their kids to get a report card filled with some numbers that are supposed to define your life. Your life? It may sound like an exaggeration but think about… your school grades define the universities you get accepted to, which defines where you study, which then defines where you take an MBA, which defines where you get a job, which later defines the way you are going to live your entire life. It is a cycle. And the way I see it, those numbers can affect you and your life tremendously. This cycle starts with universities, since they get so many applications every year, the easiest and quickest way to revise them is to organise them by grades and SAT/ACT scores and then actually read and consider the top ones that have higher scores. After that, to make a final decision, they would consider your activities and sports and what else you do apart from academics. Now let’s look at the key part of this, these grades, these numbers, they are the ones that will define if they even consider your application, without those, they won’t even read it. But let me make some clear, it is not that I’m against grades, I believe they are a great guidance to see how somebody is doing in their classes. That’s not the problem, the problem is the power that society has given to them over the years and the effect they have on us. This is what happens, universities will only accept top students with the highest scores so now students will do anything to get these grades. ANYTHING. Have you ever asked someone for help in a homework or to study for a test because you wanted a good grade? Let’s go with a more direct question, have you ever cheated to get a good grade? You don’t need to answer out loud, you and I know exactly what it is. Well, guess what? This occurs on a daily basis because we all want to get the highest grade, we all want to be considered for our dream college and we all want to get a great job and live an extraordinary life, isn’t that right? In fact, my brother’s friend decided to cheat on a very important test, this was the SAT. He basically paid someone to take the test and get him a high score. Why did he do this? Was it because he was lazy that day and he wanted to sleep? Absolutely not! It was because he needed this grade to get into a good college like he wanted, because he knew that the grade was more important than showing his knowledge and his personality, which were both very strong actually. And him being accepted to his dream university actually proves how they just look at the numbers. So, how did we get here? In my opinion, the instructions manual for schools and universities wasn’t very clear on something very important. The reward. The reward of _________ is the grades. But I think everybody got it wrong, the mixed the order and now we think that the reward of grades is getting accepted to college. Well, it isn’t this way, the main factor and the one we are all forgetting about is LEARNING. Why do we go to school? To learn, to explore our passions, to become wiser and knowledgeable every day. We do not go to school to get as many high numbers as we can and a diploma certificate. Nowadays, grades have much more power than the learning experience. And now it is not only with the grades, but also with clubs and sports. Since we all want our application to stand out, we add a thousand clubs to our list of activities and we suddenly learn how to play all the sports just to add that word in the application. We no longer do it because of our passions but because we have to, it is the only way to survive and stand out from the other 20,000 applications. To conclude, I don’t think it is the students that don’t want this learning, I think we all do, the problem is that there are some situations were you have to choose, learning or grades? And we all know which one has more power, which one opens more doors and sadly that’s the one most of us choose. And this doesn’t mean we desperately want the high grade, I think it has become more of a need, we depend on it. So, now what? I know this is a huge topic and that society already has expectations for us and our grades. And I consider myself guilty, guilty because I sometimes go for the grade instead of the learning and because I have participated in an activity just because I wanted to add it to my resume later on. But finally my time of realisation has come and I want to encourage you to think about it, think about how much power you are giving to these numbers. And even if I am one or we are two people that are aware of it, we can still try to change. And maybe in the future, more people will become aware and we can put a stop to it. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2017
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