Pursuing Self-Improvement in College

Next, let’s consider the path of self-improvement.

What Is It?

We previously categorized three reasons under self-improvement: learning about things that interest you, gaining a general education, and becoming a more cultured person. Unlike our career prep reasons, these reasons are not centered on preparing for some specific time/activity after you graduate. Instead, the common factor between these reasons is that they’re all based on improving yourself for your own sake.

In practice, most people following this path choose to major in whatever interests them the most. If they choose a liberal arts major (say, history), it’s not because they necessarily expect to pursue a career in the subject; they’re just interested in it. Even some majors with strong career prospects (such as computer science) can work well for self-improvement if they’re pursued out of interest in the subject matter rather than interest in the resulting career. Thus, the key factor for our self-improvement path is having a personal interest in the material.

If you’re like me, it’s not obvious how studying things that interest you is likely to facilitate self-improvement. In fact, choosing a major based on personal interest in the subject often looks like wandering, especially to concerned parents who were hoping you would pursue engineering or medicine (or both). So, how does interest lead to self-improvement?

Interest → Self-Improvement

The recipe for self-improvement in your studies is simple: engage with challenging material. Let’s break down exactly what I mean by that.

Engaging with your studies requires two factors: diligence (do the work) and interest (want to do the work). If you have diligence without interest, you’ll end up doing only the bare minimum. If you have interest but no diligence, you’ll never make it past the easy stuff. Both factors are required to engage and make serious progress.

So, we’ve got the formula for engagement. The other factor that plays into self-improvement is challenge. Challenge can seem intimidating, because no one enjoys being overwhelmed with an impossible challenge. The key with challenge is for it to be at the right level for your current abilities. You’re already familiar with this approach, since it’s the basis for grade-levels in school. As you master the easy material, the curriculum introduces you to slightly harder material. You go from algebra to calculus not in one big jump but in many incremental steps. Gradually, over time, you become able to handle harder and harder material.

Along the way, your interests change and grow. What once fascinated you now seems too simple, maybe even boring. If you have any younger siblings or relatives, you may have observed this in action: The old toys and games that they used to love eventually are rejected as being “for babies”. Just like you, their interests deepen as their abilities develop. That doesn’t mean that they (or you) will become interested in everything that’s challenging, just that the process of getting better inherently leads to being interested in more nuanced material.

So, challenge is important for two reasons: It helps you get better by overcoming it, and it helps you grow your interests along the way.

That’s the formula in a nutshell. You improve yourself by engaging with challenging material, and you improve the most when you’re interested in that material.

But What Is Self-Improvement?

With all that said, we still haven’t nailed down exactly what constitutes self-improvement. To try to address that gap, let’s get more specific.

The Three Types of Learning

For the purposes of our discussion, there are three main types of learning in college:

Subject-Matter Knowledge
Transferable Skillsets
Self-Improvement

Subject-matter knowledge (type 1) is what you learn in your classes. It’s the facts you memorize, the concepts you understand, and the ideas you’re familiar with.

Transferable skillsets (type 2) are the specific things you learn how to do. Depending on your major, this could include learning how to write a novel, program a computer, translate ancient texts, or solve differential equations. These skillsets are transferable, meaning they can be useful in a broad range of fields, and they’re specific, meaning they help you accomplish a well-defined task. Transferable skillsets are usually not taught for their own merit but instead as a way to help you better engage with the subject-matter of your major. This is why computer science is called “computer science” and not “programming”. You learn the skill of making computers do things (programming) so that you can better study the science of what computers can do (computer science).

Finally, self-improvement (type 3) is how your studies change you as a person. This can be gaining an appreciation for ideas, becoming a more cultured person, or improving your critical thinking skills. In the context of college, self-improvement often involves “learning how to learn”, which means mastering the ability to engage with new material and pick it up quickly. The improvements you make to yourself in college will be applicable to almost everything you do in life, although they probably won’t be something you can list on a resume.

So, our categories are: what you directly learn (type 1), the skills you build in the process (type 2), and the personal growth that comes as a result (type 3).

Hypothetical Example

Let’s work through an example to make things more concrete. If you were to study philosophy in college, your learning breakdown might look like this:

Subject-Matter Knowledge: Schools of philosophy, historical basis for the field, and nuances of some of the branches (epistemology, metaphysics, etc.)
Transferable Skillsets: Symbolic logic, rigorous evaluation of arguments, and persuasive writing
Self-Improvement: Ability to digest a complex set of ideas and form an opinion, holding conflicting ideas in your head simultaneously, and awareness of how underlying philosophies affect everyday decisions

Which Type Is the Most Useful for Your Career?

Although the self-improvement path doesn’t focus on job-readiness, it’s still worth thinking about how well it prepares you for a career. If your priority is to get a specific job immediately after graduating, then you should concentrate your efforts on gaining knowledge and skills in a career-focused major. That’s the career prep track we discussed on the last page. Where things get more interesting, though, is considering which types of learning will best prepare you for your whole career, not just the beginning. In the book, In Defense of a Liberal Education, Journalist Fareed Zakaria argues types 2 & 3 are the most valuable to your career in the long-term:

Whatever job you take, the specific subjects you studied in college will probably prove somewhat irrelevant to the day-to-day work you will do soon after you graduate. And even if they are relevant, that will change. People who learned to write code for computers just ten years ago now confront a new world of apps and mobile devices. What remain constant are the skills you acquire and the methods you learn to approach problems. Given how quickly industries and professions are evolving these days, you will need to apply these skills to new challenges all the time. Learning and re-learning, tooling and retooling are at the heart of the modern economy. Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, has pointed out that a Liberal Education should give people the skills ‘that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.’

In the long-run, transferable skillsets and self-improvement are critical for career success, and the self-improvement approach to college is particularly well-suited to pursuing them. The combination of deep engagement, challenging material, and personal interest encourages you to take your education several steps further than strictly required for a degree, which means you’ll have more opportunities to improve yourself and develop diverse skillsets.

You can thus think of the self-improvement path as a long-term bet on yourself: Instead of focusing on creating a smooth transition into a specific job in the short-term, you work on improving yourself and your long-term career prospects. Plus, you get to study stuff that interests you in the meantime, which is pretty cool.

This framing of the different approaches to college lends itself to our final question: Is it better to prepare for your career in the short-term or long-term? We’ll be evaluating this in depth later, but I think the words of Paul Graham—co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator—would be useful to start pondering now:

Risk and reward are always proportionate . . . . So what you should invest in depends on how soon you need the money. If you’re young, you should take the riskiest investments you can find.

All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: They have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks.

So, if you’re willing to bet on your long-term career, and you’re willing to ride out any short-term discomforts that come as a result, then the self-improvement path could be a good choice for you.

Conclusion

College represents a rare opportunity in most people’s lives. To see what makes it so special, let’s consider the life circumstances that normally surround it.

Before college, your focus was on what others told you was important: Your parents, teachers, and the school curriculum guided what you studied and how you spent your time.

After college, the responsibilities of adulthood—the need to pay bills, support a family, etc.—will place restrictions on how much risk you can stomach, forcing you to make tough choices between financial security and pursuing your interests.

During college, though, you have a unique opportunity to invest in your long-term success. College can be your time to delve into interests, sample different life paths, and broaden your mind. The self-improvement path is a great way to do that, assuming you can stomach the risk.

I’ll let Zakaria take us out:

America never embraced the European model of specific training and apprenticeships because Americans moved constantly, to new cities, counties, and territories in search of new opportunities. They were not rooted in geographic locations with long-established trades and guilds that offered the only path forward. They were part of an economy that was new and dynamic, so that technology kept changing the nature of work and with it the requirements for jobs. Few wanted to lock themselves into an industry for life. . . . Those who seek to reorient U.S. higher education into something more focused and technical should keep in mind that they would be abandoning what has been historically distinctive, even unique, in the American approach to higher education. [edited for clarity]