The dive: more important than the swim?

“Getting a job is a dive. You can have a magnificent one. But you are in a swimming competition, not a diving competition.”

I heard this somewhere a long time ago and it has become one of the many one-liners which I keep mentioning in my ‘deep-shit’ talks. But as I navigate my way through the peaks and troughs of engineering life, I realise more and more what our “education factories” have turned us into. Churned out in batches of thousands, we are expected to have the same knowledge, same skills, and the same strengths. At this juncture, it is rather easy and common to blame the institutes, the professors, and most importantly the ‘system’.

But if you think about it, why wouldn’t they turn into factories? After all, they are delivering what is expected from them. After investing lakhs of Rupees and four years of one’s life, what is the minimum output every student expects? A job! That is what our education institutes seem to have reduced to, mere recruitment agencies, dancing to recruiters' tunes, supplying them students of required specifications, configurations and features. Even though I am a novice who hasn’t even started his career and has no knowledge on this matter, I find it absurd.

Building a career can be one’s aim of education, but getting a job can’t (Or at least it shouldn’t)! Even though in most cases, the two are not in direct conflict with each other, the priorities seem to be offset. It’s rather sad to see that most of us came to the institute to get a job and not to build a career (myself included). And even though I am sounding like one of our professors, who most find repugnant (all my classmates know whom I’m talking about :P), I do believe that getting a good job should be a byproduct of our work and not the main objective!

Another thing that is a consequence of prioritising the dive over the swim, which I find weird and unnecessary, is “placement preparation”. I don’t mean to be didactic, but isn’t the whole placement procedure supposed to check who you are and not who you want to be? How is a week of practising aptitude questions and revising all important topics going to affect a person’s utility as an employee anyway?! Wearing an elephant costume and claiming to be as strong as an elephant is not going to yield anything either to the employee or the employer. Why can’t we just be ourselves in the interview? If we are capable enough to work there, we will be selected. And if we are not, we won’t be. Instead of trying to fake our way through the interviews, let’s accept who we are and how competent we are. If we work at a place which suits our capabilities, it would be much better for us in the coming forty years than sitting in an office in which we objectively feel as the dumbest in the room. Instead of trying to show that we are competent, let’s work hard and become competent.

This issue is rather deeply rooted in our society. Whenever we talk about people who inspire us, we remember them by the posts they’ve held, not by what they did when they were holding those posts! Everyone knows who Ratan Tata is, who Bill Gates is, but very few of us know the situations they faced or the decisions they took. If we spend more time reading about the careers of our stars rather than their designations, we may begin to understand what education should truly be.

Don’t get me wrong. I do agree that getting a job is very much essential at the end of our college life. And it does matter which job one gets and how much his/her package is. But what I want to say is that the knowledge, the experiences and the insights we get in college are not given the importance they deserve. The subjects we study, the formulae and definitions we mug up would all be forgotten in no time once the exams and placements end. What would remain with us for decades are the concepts. So let’s stop merely studying and start learning.

Ritvik Joshi.