As cliche as the phrase sounds, I want to take a moment to explain what I mean…
As someone working in the energy industry and someone who’s working towards the energy transition, I was listening to one of the panels from Duke University’s energy conference as I was walking on the treadmill in the basement of my girlfriend’s parent’s house. The energy transition is a complex challenge that excites me, and I am looking to pursue a graduate business education to conceive new business models. Because of my academic training thus far, solutions for these interesting challenges, in my mind, have always been only conceptual in nature. But the closer I listened to the panelists’ discussion, I realized something. Something that prompted me to pause and reflect on what this means.
In college, I was surrounded by this system. This system had an order. There was Blackboard for classes; there were lab classes; there were office hours; there were discussion sections. We learned the theory, we designed things, and we built things. But we were always given a problem statement. And we were given a rubric, a timeline, and a support system to fall back on whilst solving this problem. We started to depend so much on this system: someone giving us a problem statement, pointing us to the relevant resources, and ensuring that there is a support system to fall back on. It even went so far as to continue beyond college campus into the working world. It is good to have a system, but when this system hinders us from seeing the opportunities for improvement that are out there in the world and from creating our own problem statements, then the system we were trained in and are consciously or subconsciously following becomes a problem.
Some problems are so trivial, and the solution potentially so simple, that it is hard for someone like me with an engineering degree from a top-tier research institution to acknowledge the problem and monetize the value you could deliver by implementing the simple solution. For me to even acknowledge a problem, the problem needs to be something super complex, and the solution to the problem needs to be equally as complex. But not all problems are like that in the real world. Universities are so far removed from the real world that students, even after graduation, often fail to see market opportunities in the real world when they appear. This needs to change. College curricula should encourage and integrate entrepreneurial elements in almost every class and show students how to seize opportunities, big or small, simple or complex, when they arise. This is immensely important for the energy transition that the world is going through right now.
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“Universities are so far removed from the real world that students, even after graduation, often fail to see market opportunities in the real world when they appear.”