Mueller Time

Learn your efficiencies.

Degrees do not necessarily make your child successful; learning from mistakes early on does. College in general can be as relatively useful or as useless as you make it. I’m going to discuss a series of personal events and then work backwards to show how my experiences were altered based on what I learned from each mistake I made.

Today, Senior Year of College: Currently a senior in business management, drafting a blog post to give quantios (the company I’m fortune enough to be a co-founder of) visibility on the blogosphere, by offering a personal experience into the vague regions of high school and higher education.

Junior Year of College: It took me three years to realize that the computer and electrical engineering degrees I worked so hard at were not my area of expertise (It makes much more sense to understand that if someone is willing to work cheaper and more efficiently than yourself to switch gears and find your efficiencies).

I would have never co-founded a company if I had not spent three years in engineering. Doing so I met Max Hodak, founder and CEO of quantios. I also would have not held internships with Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and Red Hat, both of which have taught me a great deal. I would not have met individuals such as Per Hyttfors who helped foster innovative thinking and motivating me to work outside of work.

Sophomore Year of College: Stressed out both semesters over engineering problem sets, often found myself finding clever ways to manage a study group of students that inevitably and collectively got A’s on all the homework, however come test time I would consistently shoot B’s, and rarely higher.

The mistake I made here was that all along I should have realized that I wasn’t necessarily a rock star in engineering, however I was able to manage my surroundings to produce the desired effect. Sophomore year is one of the most intense years of college. The majority of my classes were classified as “weed-out-courses” which is a basic function to test who will cut it in the desired major. Ironically enough engineering was one of the only majors associated with such courses. Here is a quick and dirty reality I wish I would have known before coming to college: Here is the breakdown of the perception of majors (experience comes from a 30k student body size at a state-school, so take it with a grain of salt).

1. Engineering / Chemistry / Biology / Bio-Medical are often seen as the “difficult” majors that are associated with high pay checks. (Always has been extremely competitive).
2. Business comes second, and is often associated with students who are often intelligent, but don’t know what they want to do with their life so their parents pushed them in a direction that can still prove fruitful and keep opportunities open. (Has begun to increase in competition)
3. Specialty degrees (Agriculture / Psychology / Accounting / Math) these degrees have extreme value with someone who’s motivated in the field, and generally are composed of students who have a good idea of what they want to do coming into college.
4. Communications, “the new business degree”, often is associated with students who fail out of the aforementioned areas and just want to graduate with a degree. Also associated with students who don’t hold relative work experience during college and often take random jobs after school. (This in my opinion puts the students at the greatest disadvantage because it’s going to take them the longest to first make a real-world mistake, and then learn from it).
5. History / Philosophy are often reserved for those who want to teach.

Freshman Year of College: Was under the realization that now I had made it, all that was left was to graduate with my intended engineering degrees with hopes of one day getting my MBA. I spent most of freshman year meeting new people, playing intramural sports and trying to do well in school. I received a 3.95 GPA freshman year and had nothing to show for it, other than a fun trip to Cancun with my suite mates and a few random girlfriends.

The aforementioned insight to my education has taught me the following takeaways:

1. Being a college student grants you access to opportunities most of the world cannot. For example, I was able to use my student-status to my advantage which landed me opportunities to meet big wig’s such as former Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, current Red Hat CFO Charlie Peters, as well as many other leaders in technology.
2. Take advantage of internships and COOP opportunities, which on top of paying $20 an hour give you actual experience to what you want to do. My advice to parents is to let your child work at one terrible minimum wage job that teaches them the value of a dollar (I held several, one including a movie theater ticket checker). This will hopefully scare your child, giving them a taste of the real world and what happens when you don’t follow through on your actions.
3. Come into college having an understanding that the reason you are here is to learn your efficiencies, learn how to learn, and most importantly build a network of connections as quickly as possible, while still not failing out. (Parents: Don’t be alarmed if your child is bringing back a steady stream of C’s on their report cards, as long as the reason for the average performance is because they are pursuing something equally as challenging at the same time. If you work hard, and understand your passions frontwards and back, at the end of the day it’s who you know that will land you a job in your idolized career path).
4. Bite off more than you can chew at least once (I was working on my own start-up while working for two others while taking classes). This allowed me to learn the value of priorities, as well as a great insight on team dynamics and being able to contribute from multiple concurrent experiences. This also allows you to realize exactly how inexperienced you really are, and forces you to focus on what you’re truly good at.
5. Realize the power of the internet; if you don’t like technology you are going to be in for a rude awakening.The smartest people I know are not necessarily innately smart, but know how to use the internet effectively. I’m comfortable knowing that no matter how hard the problem, my co-founder Max Hodak can scourage the internet for an hour and learn enough to solve it. Today’s students are smart because they know how to not re-invent the wheel instantly, not because they can read a 900 page textbook over the course of 4-months and give you an answer at the end of their journey.

The point of college has different meanings to everyone, however don’t let past guidelines influence current realities.