7 things you need to learn in college - part 1

I recently was asked to speak for 30 minutes to students in an IT class at UVSC (UVU soon). The topic was open but was supposed to help give the students some idea of what I did for a living, what they could expect in the future workpalce, or what I thought they should be learning.

The topic I came up with was "What I wish someone would have told me back when I was in their shoes" or something like that. All of these things are things I learned 'the hard way', and for all I know some past teacher of mine is out there somewhere saying "I Tried!". In at least one case, I at least tried to learn the message. I'll be presenting these one at a time as I get time to write.

1) Learn how to communicate (especially with non technical people!)

I took an undergrad English class (for engineering students) that started out with the professor saying that we would all learn soon enough how to write technical papers in our own fields. Electrical Engineers used different formats and techniques than Civil Engineers and those are both different from Chemical Engineering scholarly papers. The point of this class was to learn how to write about technical subjects for non-technical people. The reasoning went something along these lines: It does not matter whether you end up in acedaemia or in industry, you'll need to be able to explain to people what it is you have or want to do.

If you need to convince the VP over your organization to drop $250K on hardware to solve a specific problem, you can bet you will need to be able to explain why. If you want a research grant from just about anybody, you can be sure that you are much more of an expert in your field than the people reading the grant. If you can't explain your technical information to non technical people you will never get anywhere. At the very least you have to be able to explain to a non-technical manager what you've been doing and why you should still have a job tomorrow. You need to be able to write plans for work, documentation for your software or hardware, release notes, source code comments, etc. So, learn how to write - practice, write a blog for instance...



Next up - #2 "you will make big mistakes, but you can learn from it and move on"