Expectation management

The application processes for Finnish schools has swung into gear recently, as evident from the number of advertisements pasted in buses, trams and metros. This got me thinking about the expectation management aspect, which links directly to the dissatisfaction of e.g. the Occupy movements. Most of the advertisements suggest that the degrees offer a very good first step in a career and go around spurting words like finance and business. Yet, if I do a bit of reflection on the courses I've studied at TKK around business and management, to be honest I've been left a bit wanting. Of course they're fun and fairly light in weight, but I'm not entirely certain that they've significantly contributed to my knowledge or ability to succeed in my career.

The problem, how I see it, in these cases revolves around the fact that only once you've actually started doing real work do you gain enough insights about the real life to be able to ask the right questions and understand the substance of the courses. It's of course fun to talk about innovation management and do case analyses where you get to write general comments on how to tackle a 400 million per year budget of technology development, but let's face it, citing some academics and writing very shallow and general suggestions won't get you too far. Of course they teach you something, but to be honest, if that is the level of post-grad courses in universities, I'm somewhat worried about what they are teaching in vocational institutes or the ammattikorkeakoulu.

I may be repeating myself but I think that prior to having any real experience, the most useful things that students can learn are practical tools that they can apply in different situations. And I'm not talking about innovation funnels and frameworks, but simple things like mathematics, languages, programming, and so on. A certain amount of common sense wouldn't also hurt. Looking back at my degree so far the most useful things I've learned, in no specific order, include:

• The attitude of not getting frightened when encountering a problem. Many of the exercises done during advanced mathematics courses looked very scary, but instead of freezing, just start taking tools and hitting the problem with it.
• The ability to search for tools and concepts to hit problems with, linked with the reading skills to be able to go through even large bodies of literature and try to organize and make sense of the publications to get a grasp of a field.
• Understanding that in many cases when trying to figure out things and solve problems, exact solutions may be irrelevant and more often than not figuring out magnitudes is more than enough. And if more is wanted, you can always dig deeper and narrow down your approximation.
• Programming skill are always beneficial. They teach you a certain type of thinking and approach to problem solving as well as offer you very concrete tools with which to attack larger masses of data, perform simulations, etc. Everyone should know at least a bit of programming, in my opinion.

There are certainly many other things as well, but those were the first to come to mind. Having also worked during most of my degree, school may not have in fact taught me all of those things, but a combination of working and studying has been a very helpful combination. But interestingly enough most of the things I've listed above have not been learned as a result of any specific course. And it is entirely possible to go through a degree program without worrying too much about learning any of the above skills, but this will undoubtedly lead to a situation where the expectations that were created with the degree marketing aren't really met and reality hits in at some point, causing huge dissatisfaction in the people who neither automatically got the career they thought was promised to them nor did they end up learning any of the core skills to increase their competitiveness in the job market.

But naturally school want to market their offerings and attempt to attract as many students to maximize quantity and quality because the incentives for the schools have been set to encourage pushing as many students through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Is this the most optimal situation in the long run for the economy, the students themselves, or the schools? Hardly, but short-term optimization of hastily created and incorrect metrics is often a lot easier than trying to figure out what the optimum situation would be in the long run and how that could be achieved... So, expect more disgruntled students when the batch of this year's accepted students graduate in the next 4-6 years.