THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
The Study of ‘Business’ and What You Need to Know About Career Planning
By Robert A.G. LeVine
Let’s start with a simple truth: We’re all in business (at least those of us who work for a living). It’s called “capitalism.”
What we do, how we do it, where we do it … these variables define our daily routines.
But before we go too far, please accept my personal biases. First, I worry that specialized business programs are too limited. Second, I wish for all of our students to learn at least the minimum necessary to be successful in business.
Why are deep, intensive business curricula too limiting? Because in my opinion, a career involves three factors: your knowledge and skills; your personal nature; and the industry in which you work.
Business programs provide knowledge and skills but do not focus upon your personal abilities and limitations, nor do they help you identify the best industries in which you apply yourself. For these reasons, I strongly recommend that students look beyond business coursework to identify learning opportunities that identify and amplify the other two career attributes.
As example, my first industry was law, my second was marketing, and now I work in the education field. Those are very different areas of commerce.
And what about your nature? Are you a natural CEO, or are you better as a COO, a CFO, a mid-level manager or perhaps a worker who is not weighed down by the needs of the many? You will perform better when you’re in a position that matches your innate abilities and preferences. Remember the Peter Principle: people rise to their level of incompetence, after which they rise no further. Not every job is for every person.
That being said, how do we best understand “business” as a working concept? To the uninitiated, there are a lot of areas one can study, and it can be dizzying. Bryant University, for example, offers a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (with 11 separate concentrations), a Bachelor of Science in Data Science, a BS in Entrepreneurship, and a BS in International Business. And that’s just in their College of Business. There are more business majors (like Applied Economics) in Bryant’s College of Arts and Sciences.
I like to simplify everything into what I call “The 3 M’s” – Money, Management, and Marketing.
“Money” relates to currency. Things like accounting, bookkeeping, and finance (with a small “f”) involve money, are often historical, but are used to make strategic decisions. To my eye, introverts do better in this area, although there are exceptions to every rule.
“Management” involves the internal workings of the organization. By analogy, it’s the motor of the vehicle and all of its working parts, but not necessarily where the vehicle is going. Simply, management involves the always-challenging balance of two things: human resources and material resources.
“Marketing” is my term, not the commonly accepted concept that lies somewhere between branding and sales. To me, marketing involves everything that relates to the interaction of the business with the outside world (the “market,” if you will). Under this umbrella, you will find sales, advertising, traditional marketing, customer service, the Cult of Apple, even product design. Embrace the phrase “the customer is always right” (within reasonable limitations). Steve Jobs forgot that truism, and after designing two of the world’s greatest computers, he was fired from his own company because the public did not want to purchase those brilliant machines. Oops!
To all of our students, and for everyone out there, please learn at least the basics of these three M’s. Otherwise, someone else will determine your career (and economic) future. If you wish, take the courses pass/fail, online at your own pace, or learn the stuff through self-study. Just understand the rules of the game.
And for those intent on obtaining a degree in business, consider programs in the liberal arts and sciences as viable options. Business programs tend to teach, well, business and only business. They have more requirements, less flexibility, and their depth can be limiting. Remember, you’ll learn more in the first few months of a job than from all the preparation for the job because on the job, you’ll be immersed. From a school of Arts & Sciences, you can take classes in business school, but you are more likely to gain broader skills that, magically, tend to become very important as you progress in your career. Regardless, before committing (or even applying) to a program, look carefully at the classes you must take (they differ from college to college)Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.