One of the most important decisions I had to make while at college was how to spend my time. There were so many competing priorities—from making friends to landing internships, from pursuing my passions to taking enough breaks to stay sane—that I, along with many of my friends, struggled to find balance.
I quickly realized that there was a significant difference between being in college vs. being at college. Being in college was everything that carried over from high school: classes, homework, grades, clubs, and fun social life. Being at college meant all the other opportunities that suddenly opened up when you lived away from home: things like independent research, work, and travel. More of the stuff that made up “real” life.
Then there was the age-old dilemma of breadth vs. depth. Should I throw myself head-first into my intended major (physics at the time), or branch out into other topics? Should I dedicate myself fully to my dance team, or try to dip my metaphorical toes into as many clubs and societies as I could?
Now that I’ve had the chance to speak to hundreds of college students and look back with perspective on my own experience, I realize that these are struggles that all students face. Though I had no way of knowing at the time if my choices would lead to success or destitution, I ended up with some validation: I was the only undergraduate in my freshman class to land a software engineering internship at Google.
I ended up turning down the offer (gasp!)—ultimately deciding that studying abroad in Italy would be more fulfilling and fun than spending the summer in Pittsburgh (no offense Steelers Country)—but I continued to double down on my habits from my first year.
By the end of my sophomore summer, I had completed my Google internship at their Mountain View headquarters, traveled to Tokyo to help a friend launch a school for Japanese high schoolers, and been elected the director of one of the largest tech organizations on campus.
Most importantly, I had discovered that my passion lay at the intersection of technology and education, and could focus the last two years of college developing my career prospects in that space.
While I am 100% confident that luck and good timing had a lot to do with my success, I also feel that I navigated the college dilemma differently than my peers. Looking back, I can distill my philosophy into two principles:
- Spend 50% of my free time on my primary focus.
- Approach my primary focus from as many angles as possible.
Career Semester and iXperience are programs designed to help you navigate university by these principles, and help you set yourself up for a successful career in the industry. Stick with me and let me go into each one a bit deeper.
50% of free time on the primary focus
Rather than prioritizing things sequentially (grades are most important, then friends, then my dance team…), I would put things into two buckets: my primary focus, and everything else. My primary focus was whatever happened to be engaging me most fully that semester. Often it was coding, but sometimes it was dance, and sometimes it was a side project, like the school in Japan. A primary focus only had to meet two criteria: it brought me intrinsic joy, and it didn’t cause long-term harm (i.e. partying can’t be a primary focus; video games would be a stretch since I had no intention of being a game designer). Other than that, I let my interests guide me, mostly because it was hard to spend 4-5 hours a day doing something I thought I “should” do, rather than something I could barely stop myself from doing.
This helped me navigate the breadth vs. depth tension by fearlessly prioritizing depth, and letting breadth sort itself out. Whatever time wasn’t spent on my primary focus, I could allocate to other things. But there was only one main focus at any given time, and I made time for it.
Approach my primary focus from multiple angles
The concept of focus won’t be new to many people: in fact, many of my peers had the opposite problem. They had a singular drive for a particular result: a perfect GPA, becoming president of this or that club, landing an internship at a prestigious company. The issue I saw with that approach was that they put their focus on a result rather than on a topic.
If my focus, for example, was on landing a Google internship (a result), there were only a few strategies that I could pursue: do well in class and study for the interview. But if my focus was rather on programming in general, then trying to land a good internship was only one of a few strategies I could try. I could build my own website. I could try to build websites for local businesses or side projects. I could volunteer to teach coding to other students. I could try to start a tech company. Maybe Google and other companies would care about those things, maybe not. But that didn’t matter so much because I was engaged with my primary focus.
In fact, I found that approaching my primary focus from multiple angles was the only way to tell for myself whether I cared about the result or the topic. Did I truly want to work at a tech company, or did I only want the prestige of Google? In my case, it turned out to be the latter. After my internship, I realized that I was far more passionate about teaching people technology than coding all day. That gave me the courage to make the (scary) post-graduate decision to move overseas and start an education company, rather than taking a lucrative job in Big Tech.
And this was the biggest difference between thinking like I was in college with a predefined formula for success, and thinking that I was only at college—but really had the freedom to direct my own time.
The foundation for our programs
This type of thinking laid the foundation for programs like the ones iXperience and Career Semester host. By integrating classroom learning and a real-world internship, the programs force you to approach a particular topic from multiple angles. The programs challenge you to direct your focus on a few topics, so you can make rapid progress there—rather than stretching yourself too thin between competing priorities. The company you intern with is ultimately less important than how you approach the problems you face in your internship, and what that teaches you about yourself.
