CHEERS TO THE ones who made it this year! The academic journey is over, at least officially, and the adult life begins. And as the seniors are rearing for life outside the red halls, this means that everything you’ve learned over the past four years, give or take, will finally be put into paid use.
Work is nothing if not another thing necessary for continued survival. The experience, the career, and the money. All for the good of our future. As someone who has worked—campus presswork but work nonetheless—from first year to fourth year, let me offer some unwanted advice. Take whatever opportunity you can get but know your limits as well.
“Attitude means everything.”
Duty and responsibilities are used interchangeably. You could have a professional duty but a personal responsibility to the workplace. On another note, you could also resonate more personally with your duty to uphold expectations and be detached from responsibilities jobwise.
Attitude means everything. No matter how talented one person is, if the rest of your peers don’t like you, then that says a lot about your personality wise. Cooperation and collaboration are inevitable no matter what kind of work you have. Your attitude will be the baseline for how people are drawn to you.
Work ethic and attitude are something that is forged over experience. Some are good, others are bad, and the rest in between. I’m no expert, but the advantage of keeping yourself busy on top of studying is that you learn to deal with certain things much earlier. There is always a hierarchy to follow, rules to obey, and ethics to adhere to. There is a difference between confidence and arrogance and a limit to how well people can perceive it.
Confidence is not a problem per se; how well you deliver that confidence is. When dealing with people at an organizational level, the thing most people latch onto is your position. Regardless of such, a well-adjusted student would know not to utilize a power move on another. Conflict can either be functional or dysfunctional, depending on how it is dealt with.
Arrogance is detrimental in the long run. It feels good, probably, but it won’t really help anyone. Being self-important never ends well when dealing with other people. If your self-interest gets in the way of work-related activities, then you could hardly be considered professional.
Confident and arrogant attitudes usually describe work ethic, and that in itself determines whether you make it or break it. It’s one thing to juggle extracurricular work with studies, and it’s another to work full-time and experience the world outside of an academic perspective.
Someone once told me that once you leave college, you would be surprised by how much personality and attitude could affect your career. The difference between personality and attitude is that your personality defines who you are, while your attitude describes you to everyone else.
In any case, college is the institution that lets you live up to your career while providing opportunities to learn more. As you move on from this environment, always remember that success is not a race. We all have our own time and our own development. Focus on factors that will determine whether you make it or break it.
In college, all we had to maintain were our grades. After that? We have to maintain everything else.
