School Daze…

If you’re a young professional, you’ve likely finished school and easily remember everyone pestering you to “get involved, do an internship, anything!”  Did you do it?  I did and I can say that a lot of that involvement was only valuable for meeting people and nothing more.

It’s interesting, however, because just the act of being engaged, of trying to do something beyond what was required probably did two things: 1) reflected my own eagerness and 2) gave me something to talk about when I was getting started.

If you’re new and just starting out, my number one piece of advice is to do SOMETHING.  Anything related to what you’re trying to do with your professional life.  Get an internship.  Join a club.  Volunteer your time.

I’m not alone here in saying that this helps breed later success.  According to two professional researchers (Huang and Chang here):

The results show that the correlation between academic and cocurricular involvement is positive and linear. Also, to maximize cognitive and affective growth, students should be involved in both academic and cocurricular activities as much as possible.

That’s kind of a fancy way of saying, to be as intelligent and grow as much as you can, you’ve got to do more than just pass.  And that’s something that we should ALL remember for every day of our professional lives, too!  (PRSA, various press guilds, there are lots of options; I’m just sayin’!)