“But I Don’t Know the First Thing About…”
Learning in kollel does not generally prepare you for any particular career path, unlike a lawyer, doctor, or engineer. The lack of college degree presents two problems:
- A lack of credentials for prospective employers, and
- A lack of the practical knowledge needed to perform the job at hand.
Most people, when faced with the first problem, give up right away. They say things like, “I will never get a job without a degree so why bother?” But those who instead choose to deal with the second problem first have an entirely different experience.
College degrees are really only certificates attesting to the person’s proficiency in a particular subject. Always, that same information is readily available for anyone who wishes, either in a book, DVDs, or online. For free. In a fraction of the time it takes to get a college degree, one can study a subject and become sufficiently proficient to have the skills needed to perform the duties of any job. Obviously, one cannot become a lawyer, accountant, or a doctor without going to college. But there are many careers and businesses which one may think they need a college degree, when all they really need is someone proficient enough in the skills needed to perform the job. (Computer programming, networking, web design, construction, nutrition, & special ed are all great examples of this.)
Oh, and what about that you don’t know the first thing about programming, construction and anything else? Think back to when you started learning a totally unfamiliar sugya for the first time. Did you know anything about kodshim before you went to Brisk? How about Yoreh De’ah? But after a few weeks, you were sufficiently familiar with the subject you were learning.
Dive right in and you’ll become an expert in no time. That is, if you don’t give up hope before you even start.
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Filed Under: Career Advice
Speaking as someone who is a programmer and has been for many years, I would not say that a degree has no value. Yes you can learn to program from books and such but there is a LOT you won’t learn that way. There is a lot more to being a programmer than knowing some java or C# (Or pick your favorite language). Understanding how to work as part of a team, what tools to use to do that are very important. As are some ideas from computer science.
For example this one comes up in my life all the time:
The program works fine on test data but fails on the real data. Why? In general it has to do with how things scale with size. There is a lot of understanding that goes into understanding this problem. Yes you can learn it from a book, but you probably won’t without a degree. Why? Because you would have no idea that you should even have read that book or why.
So yes you can work without a degree but it will hurt you.
There is much to be gained by learning yourself, but there is much lost out without having a more involved/immersive learning process.
In attaining a dgree you don’t just read the books, you have to prepare assignments, projects, and presentations. You have to learn various software packages to do that (word, excel, powerpoint, databases etc.) you need spend time trying to writing your paper/assignment well (with much effort in editing till you’ve put together a polished product). You need to collaborate with others on team assignments. You have experts (professors) to ask questions to, and listen to the questions of other students.
You can learn gemoro on your own but does that mean you don’t benefit from having a maggid shiur? (lehavdil).
Equally important, that you retain the information much better and learn the application when you put the learning into practise via projects/tests, rather than reading it today and forgetting most of it by next week.
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