4 Ways College Life Helps to Develop Your Personal Growth

College — it’s not just a place for conceptual education but to build your skills and character as well as to prepare you to face the workforce when you’re out there.

It’s an undeniable truth that nowadays employers aren’t merely looking for excellent transcripts or A’s on your paper. Rather, they’re now looking for candidates who can adapt to the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world.

College plays an important role in building the character of the students through a variety of assessments and activities on campus. They not only prepare students to be intellectually ready to face the working force but also help in developing the necessary skills, behaviours, and qualities of a student that can adapt to the demands of the VUCA world.

Joining clubs and societies

Throughout your college days, you’ll be involved and engaged with various clubs and societies where you’ll be asked to manage your club members and conduct events, with the given limited resources. Through organising projects, you’ll be able to brainstorm and think out of the box for brilliant ideas along with your team members!

This ultimately fosters interpersonal relationships among your peers, widens your network as well as helps you to be more sociable. Even if you’re an introvert, you’ll have to communicate with your team members in order to get things done. Personally, as a member of a few clubs in Taylor’s, I enjoy working together with my teammates to solve problems creatively and find ways to make our club stand out from others. As I look for solutions, I learn to stretch my imagination and think of ways to tackle each obstacle effectively.

Doing presentations

Needless to say, communication skill is essential for everyone to acquire, especially when it comes to teamwork. Having impeccable communication skills works as a bridge to engage better with people. To present yourself to someone, you must be able to communicate effectively which you’ll pick up in college.

This is why doing presentations is crucial. It’s part and parcel of nearly, if not all, programmes in college.

As I conducted more and more presentations in college, I realised not only does it enhance my speaking skills, my self-confidence and self-esteem have also improved tremendously. I also learned that presentation isn’t about putting up the perfect slides but about connecting with the audience to get your message across effectively. This is definitely a vital skill that employers look for as many jobs require excellent customer engagement.

Completing assignments

In college, you can’t run away from doing assignments — especially group assignments. It’s a significant learning curve as you’ll learn to deliberate multiple ideas and bring them together in the most effective manner.

In order to complete the assignments, you may have to go through countless all-nighters which ultimately test your dedication and endurance in accomplishing a task.

As you work along with your team members, you’ll learn how to delegate tasks, cooperate, and make decisions together, which is a crucial trait to being a good leader.

Learning new knowledge

Besides learning the different subjects taught, being a college student means you’ll also learn the ropes of what it takes to survive. To succeed, you not only need to be book smart but being street smart will help you get through most of your obstacles.

Street smart students are those who are good at their non-cognitive skills and are more practical, not just theoretical.

You need to be situationally aware all the time and be able to make good choices and decisions in life to reach greater heights in your education and life in general. The many challenges posed in college will teach you resilience and perseverance which helps to make you street smart once you successfully tackled them. Hence, being street smart is necessary to help you get through the many endeavours in life.

So, these are some points that I wanted to share on how college life can help you in your personal development. However, there are many more ways in which college can enrich your life as it’ll be filled with endless opportunities. You’ll definitely learn something new each and every day spent in college which would gradually impact your life in the most unexpected ways.

I wish you all the best and may you successfully manoeuvre and develop yourself as you tread through college one step at a time!

A Taylor’s Sports scholar, Shahmala is a passionate karate athlete and a math whiz with big dreams to inspire everyone. She’s currently pursuing her Bachelor in Actuarial Studies at Taylor’s University.

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