HOW RELEVANT IS UNDERGRADUATE COURSE OF STUDY?

I first wrote this article for 10 Minutes With, a global education and career platform with Headquarters in the United Kingdom

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As an African blogger with focus on education and career mentoring, one common question I get from student readers from time to time is, “How marketable is my course of study?” This is surprising given the fact that a student is expected to know the marketability of his course of study before opting for it in the first place. But anyone that is familiar with the educational system of African countries, especially Nigeria, will know that many students are more bothered about getting admission into University than the relevance of the course of study that they are pursuing.

It is common in Nigeria for a student to apply for a certain course, say Economics, but due to the inability to meet the cut-off score for admission into the chosen department, he is offered admission to study a less competitive course, say Sociology. The implication of this is that someone that has primary interest in one course will find himself being forced, so to speak, to study another course because that was the course “given” to him by the University he applied to.

Although a few undergraduates will stand their ground and do not mind spending another year at home to retake the entrance examinations, many students take the offered courses because they are not confident that they will get admitted into their desired department even after retaking the entrance examination. The latter set of students are the ones that come to the internet to ask for the marketability of the courses of study offered to them.

But does course of study at undergraduate level really matter? The truth is, except for highly specialised professions like Medicine, Engineering et cetera, you can become almost anything without having your first degree in that line. Even for Engineering, many postgraduate schools allow you to do your Masters in engineering courses with a related Science first degree.

In some cases, you don’t even need a second degree in a specific career line before you become a professional in that industry, all you need to do is to gather practical experience or run some courses in the desired field.

The current president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is my favorite example. The Korean-American studied Medicine at Harvard Medical School for his first degree. He now heads a Financial Institution.  There are many top investment bankers that studied courses that are far off from Finance or Banking. Even Christine Lagarde, the current Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), another financial and economic institution, studied, not economics, not Finance, but Law, for her first degree. She is now a Finance guru.

A good number of the best accountants around the world studied Economics. In fact, I don’t usually advise my mentees to study Accounting. All you need to do to become an Accountant is to write relevant accounting professional examinations like that of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW) or other recognised accounting professional exams of the local country. I have friends who studied courses as far off as Agriculture but are now working as Accountants because they wrote and passed the qualifying exams of a relevant accounting body.

First degree, most times, is just to broaden the student’s horizon, to improve his cognitive processes. It hardly determines what one goes on to be in life. This is why I normally advise young students to make the best of whatever courses they are studying and not to be demotivated by their inability to get the course of their desired study.

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