My Education: 3 Principles
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
As the recipient of an amazing education and now on the giving side as a parent of three children, I’d like to double down on the statement “education is the most important investment one can make.” For me, it’s the most important investment a parent can make in their children, the most important investment society can make in current and future generations; and, once you are old enough to understand, the most important investment you can make in yourself.
I want to examine the parts of my education that were the most valuable, but somewhat uncommon, to kick off some discussion on how education should be evolving as our society and economy continue to transform.
First, a few disclaimers before I dive into things:
I came from a financially stable family and was afforded many opportunities that were unfortunately out of reach for many.
The uniqueness of my education is by no means anything super special and I know many more like me, or folks with even more unique educations. Despite this, my education is still on the rare side of the spectrum.
I see three broad themes that have the potential to be broadly acknowledged as principles for parents, educators and children/young adults. They are all universal and we should strive to make them available to all. The first one is more relevant for the earlier years of your education, while the second is mostly applicable for post-secondary, but they are both worth taking to heart at all times. The third applies to all ages. I will share my personal experiences to highlight the importance of these three principles, which are:
Go wide, then deep and then wide again. Not many children are automatically gifted and able to perform strongly across a majority of disciplines. In many cases it’s a confidence issue, or something as simple as not understanding that hard work pays off. What they often need is some kind of catalyzing spark where they can prove their worth by proficiency in some subject or task. This then leads to confidence, which then spills over into other subjects and results in broad growth.
Students should incorporate meaningful forays into the real world (i.e. work) concurrently throughout their 4+ years of post-secondary coursework as a means to build strong agency for their career. After having been in the classroom for 12+ years already this should be a no-brainer, but it is still the exception rather than the norm.
Small and intimate classes focussed on meaningful discussions and debates are not only the most memorable, but the most impactful way to not only learn, but also build social skills to prepare you for the real world. With e-learning becoming a likely reality in too many situations and mass lecture-style classes remaining stubbornly prevalent, it’s important to hammer home how valuable an intimate learning environment is.
My Education and how these principles played out
Let me run you through my education and why I see these three principles being the key reasons for my education being, subjectively and objectively, a great success. How do I measure this success? Like most of us probably do - by looking at where it has led.
I will say just this: my education had me running into a rewarding career even before I graduated, which enabled me to undertake some remarkable positions in Government and now a global tech company, leading a team of remarkable and ambitious people much smarter than me. It’s also given me the foundation to be a loving and providing husband and father of a wonderful family. My experiences have been sought out on multiple career and expert panels and my education was featured on the national news. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Principle #1 - let students go wide and narrow to find their catalytic spark. For me this was Japan.
Even though I knew I was smart, curious and wanted to learn, I was never more than an average student throughout elementary school and the start of junior high. I lacked the confidence to believe in myself as capable of excelling. I was also missing the fundamental cause-effect understanding that hard work pays off.
Finding a passion for Japan, and specifically learning Japanese, changed everything for me. My school had a sister-school relationship with a Tokyo school and we would visit each other during our respective school breaks. In Grade 8 I ventured on a two week tour of Japan, which totally blew my mind away and ignited in me a passion to learn more about it and master it’s language. Grade 9 saw me go on exchange to Tokyo for three months. I spent hours every day studying Japanese and by the end of my three months I was able to hold fairly decent conversations.
Beyond learning Japanese (which in itself has shaped my life in so many ways), the three month exchange was a watershed moment for me. It was the catalytic spark that ignited confidence in myself and my abilities as well as entrenched a newfound cause-effect understanding that hard work actually pays off.
Returning to Grade 10, all of a sudden I found myself excelling in all courses, despite having missed the last term of Grade 9. I made the Honour Roll for the first time. I felt good and confident about myself in a way I had never before.
The Japan exchange was such a formative time for me that I begged to be let to do it again. I succeeded and found myself heading back to Japan again for the last term of Grade 10. This time I had much stronger confidence and conviction in the “hard work-pays-off model.” I knew I had three months to blow it out of the park, and I lived and breathed Japanese, learning over 600 kanji (Chinese characters) and becoming able to converse and write about almost any topic.
Guess what happened when I returned in Grade 11? Honours with Distinction and ongoing strong performance across all my subjects. I really came into my own and had the confidence my parents had always wanted me to have. I continued to excel and got accepted into all of Canada’s top Universities as well as being offered a full scholarship to a new up-and-coming Japanese University.
Takeaway: it doesn’t matter what it is, but we need to help kids find their spark.
So, what’s the take away here? I would argue that most students need that catalytic spark to help them realize their full potential. Finding such a spark is easier for some, but many of us don’t even know where to start. Once it’s found however, it can propel a student to excel in so many other areas. Helping them find it is the job of parents and educators; hence my 1st principle of going wide, then deep and finally wide again.
As we often don’t know what this will be, we need to find ways to expose kids to many different subjects, tasks, projects; and once we find one starting to gel, we should support it with all we got so they can develop strong competencies in it. From there they will have more confidence and upon being nudged back to a broader set of activities, will most likely find themselves performing much better across the board. For me this spark happened to be learning another language in a foreign country, but I think it can really be anything. Bottom line, we need the flexibility to help kids experiment with many things and once they gravitate towards one, be accommodating to empower them to go deep on it.
Principle #2 - During University it was more what I did outside of the classroom that set me on my path to success.
My university days, like for many, were some of the most formative years of my life. Spending my first year in Japan and the remainder back in Canada, I made some great lifelong friends, learned lots, and lived on my own for the first time. Most important however, was how I was able to use my time to start etching out a career for myself through various part-time jobs, co-op internships and contract work. By my last year in University, I was holding down three meaningful “mini-careers,” pulling in $40K in annual income and getting the best grades I had ever received. I had the agency to push myself into my element and build out some of the most rewarding learnings a student could hope for, both in the classroom and in the real world.
My first part-time job was quite conventional, a gig doing fence construction during summer break. What I was able to take away from it however, was invaluable and is still helping me. Firstly, I learned how empowering the sense of satisfaction is when completing a project from start-to-finish, especially one that brings utility to others. It made me want to do the best I could, even if it was hard and painful. This newfound work ethic carried over into the classroom and future jobs. Secondly, building fences with many different types of people also taught me important team work and interpersonal skills. Some may argue that you could get this from a classroom environment as well, but when you and your teammates are responsible for each other’s lives, it’s a whole different ball game. My parents will probably cringe to know that I was in situations working directly under a forklift holding up a 1 ton hopper of wet concrete to pour moulds. But it’s environments like these that bring building trust and getting along to a whole different level.
This strengthened work ethic and ability to build strong relationships with others spilled over into the classroom and I found it easier to apply myself and quickly build trusting connections with my classmates. It also set me up nicely for my next job, one that I wasn’t actively seeking but something I literally walked into one day. Going for lunch at my favourite local Japanese grill, the owner, who I had only spoken to twice before, asked me if I was looking for a job. “Not really, but do you need some help?” was my response. She had just lost her main grill chef, and despite thinking that I needed to keep ample time to study; I thought why not. The next day I was on the grill, burning the hell out of the food and wondering what had I got myself into.
All to say, I ended up working at that restaurant for the next three years and it led to many great things. One, I learned to cook, which is a skill everyone should have. Secondly, due to the nature of my job, being the head griller in an open kitchen, I was required me to become multitasker extraordinaire - at busy times cooking ten different dishes at once, taking orders and conversing with customers sitting at the counter while communicating between the servers and the kitchen. In addition to learning multitasking, my ability to tolerate stressful situations while keeping my cool, and having fun at the same time, was the real gift of this job. Thirdly, some customers seeing me in action ended up scouting me for my first “office job,” which we will get to in a moment. And finally, it was at this restaurant that I connected with the woman that would end up being my wife. All to say, this gig gave me great experience and so much to be proud of. And despite working a good 20+ hours a week, I continued to excel with my studies.
The next gig I undertook, concurrently with my restaurant job, was my first foray into the office. A customer of the restaurant ran an architecture and product design firm, which was awarded a contract to design a cultural hub as part of an urban revitalization project in northern Japan. They spoke no Japanese and their client and partners in Japan had a very limited command of English. Having just let go of their interpreter, they needed someone to bridge the language and culture barriers. I was invited over for an interview and the project sounded super exciting. But I was worried that I was going to be taking on too much and unable to juggle my studies and work at the restaurant. My solution: bring on extra help from my network to split the workload and charge almost four times what they were originally offering (an intern wage of $12/h). I felt bad asking for $40/h, but knew I was worth it and had to compensate for the fact that I would probably be losing some sleep and most of my leisure time for this. We ended up settling on $35/h, which is still amazing for a humble university student. The lesson I learned here was: don’t undersell yourself and be confident in your worth to others.
Originally hired as a translator/interpreter, the work soon evolved into me becoming a defacto project manager and proved to be a fascinating 18 months of learning about the world of architecture, cross border deals, working with Government and managing strong personalities across two dramatically different cultures. Now working about 40 hours a week between this and my restaurant jobs, I still managed to keep good grades and be an active participant in class. I was a busy man, but I had the agency in me to stay on top of stuff and be smart about getting all my things done.
The most influential set of jobs throughout my university years came from my participation in the Co-op program. For those unfamiliar, Cooperative Education is an optional program at many universities which blends classroom work with real-world work experience, usually in the form of semester-long paid internships. My university's program had you do four work placements and provided training on resume crafting, interviewing and once you had landed a placement, coaching and site visits. I could write a book on the value of this program, but to sum it up here: it’s truly a win-win-win system:
For students, it allows them to dabble in a number of different careers in a low-risk environment, gain crucial work experience and often land job offers even before graduating. It also often helps students understand what type of jobs they aren’t cut out for.
For employers, it brings them closer to the future work force and provides a commitment-free means to evaluate potential permanent hires over a multi-month period.
For Education Institutions, it allows you to prepare your students for the real world and dramatically increase their chances of success in finding meaningful work soon after graduation.
I am still puzzled as to why Co-op programs are not more broadly available/mandated. If I was a university administrator, I would be jumping on anything that has proven ability to drastically improve my students chances of finding gainful employment before/after graduation. Maybe they want them to be unprepared for work so they sign up for a graduate degree instead!?
For me, my co-op placements were life changing and directly led to the career I have now. My first two were at a Japanese Hotel on a semi-rural island. I learned many things there, most importantly Japanese business etiquette and colloquialisms, how to motivate people (or not) and that I was not cut out for the service industry.
My third co-op placement was with Canada’s foreign affairs and trade promotion department and this was a big eye opener. In four months I had to learn the ropes of Government in general, the in-and-outs of the Department and deliver a few fairly large programs to promote Canada’s resource and clean tech industries. One of my projects included putting together a 120-page publication promoting Canada’s mining service industry. I was given $5K in seed money and had to “fundraise” the remaining $30K from other Government departments and industry associations. Pretty big task for anyone to pull off in four months, let alone a humble intern. This required me to believe in myself in a way I hadn’t before, as well as the whole office believing in me. My boss gave me a pack of business cards the first day with the job title of Assistant Trade Commissioner and said “you should never introduce yourself as “the intern,” nor should see yourself as one; you're a member of the team like the rest of us.” That was perhaps one of the most empowering things ever said to me and sums up what more work experiences for students should be like.
I enjoyed that internship so much that I did another one with the same department, this time at HQ in Ottawa. I will spare you the details, but it was an equally rewarding experience that allowed me to further build out my network and prove my worth to the Department. So much that, during my final semester at university, the Department was in need of extra help and brought me on as a temporary full-time employee.
By the time I graduated I was already in the process of converting to a permanent employee with the Canadian Government and running full speed into what has become a dynamic and rewarding career. This would not have been possible without my Co-op experiences, and those would have been as rewarding if not for the other part-time gigs I was managing throughout my university career. To repeat, I managed to do this all while keeping up my grades and getting lots out of my courses (especially the more intimate ones, which I will cover in my final point below).
Takeaway: your post secondary education should be a time to build agency in yourself by excelling both in the classroom and the real world through meaningful part time work and internships to kickstart your career before you even graduate.
Since graduating, I have been sought out on numerous career panels, presented to high schools and have been featured in the national news as a success story for liberal arts education. It was certainly very flattering and a boost to my ego, but as I don’t see myself being that exceptional of a person, I humbly, yet boldly state: why was I the exception rather than the norm? You would think that it would be a priority of the post-secondary system to set students up to hit the ground running upon graduation. Certainly thatis a priorityof students and their parents. Why not of the system itself?
Alas, from what I can observe, things haven’t really changed much at the systemic level in the 13 years since I graduated. But this is to be expected. The inertia and resistance to change by any organization is an unfortunate reality. Compound that with the Ivory Tower mentality prevalent at most Universities and it could still be decades until meaningful change makes an education I experienced be the norm. This is sad for society and our economy, but it shouldn’t discourage the individual. The good news is that everyone has the right to build out their own agency and there are plenty of interesting things you can do to carve out your own niche, even before you start post-secondary (if you even choose to do so, which is a topic for another Note). Saying all that, it would be great if policy makers, educators and employers would become better aligned on the importance of enabling students to better build out their careers while they are still in school.
Principle #3 - You learn and remember the most from small and intimate classes that had a strong emphasis on debate and discussion
The above two principles were more focused on the extra-curricular elements of my education, but no education is a real education without some serious good old studying and learning. My final point applies to all grades and disciplines.
I'll spare you too many anecdotes here, but let me throw out a personal statistic: of the 40 courses I took in University, only nine of them really stick with me till this day. All of them were smaller in class size (although some had 80+ students) and had a very strong portion of learning achieved via class discussions, debates and presentations. Did I learn nothing in the larger 200+ student large classes, and have they had no cumulative effect in building up my knowledge, intelligence and capabilities? Of course not; but I only dream about how richer my education would have been if even half of my courses were as rewarding as the 9 intimate ones I took, which all emphasized discussion and debate.
Apologists will cite limited funding and not enough Professors as the main reason why my ideal class style is not achievable at scale. I say it’s just a question of prioritization and misaligned values.
Of my nine memorable classes (which by the way is where I honed my written and verbal communication skills and critical thinking the most), four of them were taught by part-time instructors or graduate students, which surely are much more affordable than tenured professors. Also, and while not always the case, a large portion of professors are more incentivized and preoccupied with research over teaching.
My 1st year philosophy class (which I credit for instilling in me a strong base of logic and reasoning) had a non-tenured lecturer for half of the class and the other half consisted of small breakout groups led by graduate students. It was here where we really dove into the logic behind various philosophical arguments, wrote short pieces on them and then had to defend them in front of our peers. Again, something that is affordable and scalable if you have the right priorities.
Perhaps my most memorable class was by an Asian Studies professor that dove into the topic of Western perceptions of Asian religions. The topic could have been anything, but that Prof’s approach was very simple, yet super empowering. He would lecture for the Tuesday class and the Thursday class would be a student led discussion and debate. I made some lifelong friendships in this class, something that I found very challenging to do in the larger and less interactive classes. I was forced to process heavy topics and then synthesize them into simple arguments to be shared with the class; skills that I employ all the time at work now. I didn’t take this class until my third year, but it epitomized what I always thought and hoped university to be like. Why was this the exception rather than the norm? Why don’t administrators, students and parents alike demand this for all of their studies?
I’ve spoken about university so far, and I will touch on grade school only with the fact that I remember almost all my courses from then, probably because they were naturally much more intimate in size and prioritized discussion and debate. With e-learning on the rise, which will never allow for a truly intimate environment that is conducive to discussion, all I will say is that this great aspect of grade school should be protected and enhanced.
Takeaway: small and intimate classes have a much higher ROI than the large scale instructor-to-many lectures. Making more courses follow a small and intimate, discussion-based model is easily achievable if prioritized. Universities should be held accountable for not making this the norm.
Summary - we should all demand a top notch education and it shouldn’t be out of reach for anyone
My education was top notch and set me up for success in the real world, but it was by no means an elite education. The three principles are universally applicable and, if priorities are right, could be accessible to all. Even for folks wanting to get into very defined professions like medicine or law, having a catalytic spark early on in your education, blending your education with substantial real-world work or volunteer experiences and prioritizing classes that are intimate and have discussion at their heart is a powerful combination to set you up for success.
I would love to hear other examples, as the more patterns we can show the easier it will be to drive discussion on this at a higher level.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
