<p>“blossom, I am glad you check transcripts and SAT scores of new graduates. That is reassuring.:”</p>
<p>collegehelp, surely you understand that there’s a level at which it doesn’t really matter - that the 2300 isn’t “appreciately brighter” or better qualified than the 2250, or the 3.8 versus the 3.75? Or are you kind of blunt and robotic and linear about these types of things?</p>
<p>It isn’t just sales people who need interpersonal skills. If you are the CFO of a public company and you lack interpersonal skills, the first time a Division President has to tell you that they suspect they are losing market share even though revenues are robust may be the last time you get bad news. And then two years later you are ousted by the Board for not being proactive enough about soft revenue results (which could have been predicted if your divisional leaders knew you had enough emotional intelligence to take bad news). The head of engineering at an aircraft engine company isn’t the smartest aerospace engineer (typically). But he or she will out-earn the smartest engineer by a factor of 10 because he or she knows how to work with marketing, can deal with the investor relations team, can communicate technical specifications in layperson’s terms when giving an interview to the media, etc.</p>
<p>Bill Gates made waves back in the 90’s for aggressively recruiting sociologists and anthropologists in order to take the computer (a big box, used by experts, requiring an extensive education and training) and make it a “must have” for every household to have on a kitchen counter or shelf in the living room requiring no more training than just flipping through the manual. The explosion of the desktop computer and the ease of use wasn’t just a technological breakthrough, but one requiring a huge mindshift on the part of families, small businesses, women, and lots of other “groups” who had never ever thought of themselves as “computer users” let alone owners.</p>
<p>Trust me- this wasn’t “book learnin’” alone. The people who powered the digital revolution needed deep strengths in the graphic and visual arts, observing how people interact and talk to each other, figuring out power structures in families and offices, etc.</p>
<p>You are cheating your children if you expect them to become successful adults by hiding in their dorm room during college. Name a blockbuster drug or invention… and there will be people (scientists or other) behind its discovery or introduction who used observations from art or music or culture or social relationships or politics to fuel its launch and success.</p>
<p>And jobs that require somebody to sit in a room and do repetitive work–even if it’s highly trained technical work–can be done in India for less money.</p>
<p>^^^Not true. Even resource in India want to feel like they are part of the team. They want to help with the design and implementation, and they want to have career growth. 
The days you could out source the most mundane tasks to India is kind of going away.</p>
<p>Guess no matter how you slice it, you have to interact with people! Don’t worry, collegehelp - I’m an introvert, I’m happy to be left on my own – but you have to be able to carry on conversations and lead / influence people, and you don’t get that from textbooks.</p>
<p>You might like this article from Harvard Business Review that suggests data and equations do a better job of hiring than intuition and instinct.</p>
<p><a href=“In Hiring, Algorithms Beat Instinct”>http://hbr.org/2014/05/in-hiring-algorithms-beat-instinct/ar/1</a></p>
<p>Are there any college teachers out there who have broad experience with college students? I think they would support my point that many students have time management problems. However, even they might not have complete insight into the reasons for poor academic performance. Every time a student drops out of college it is a choice…or many little choices…and I think about half of college students drop out. They mostly leave because they didn’t focus.</p>
<p>But you’re really, really black and white in your thinking, which is why I asked the question I did.</p>
<p>The choices aren’t “spend every waking moment studying or going to classes and don’t waste a single evening going on a date or to a sporting event, lecture or movie when you could redirect those hours to studying” versus “party til dawn, skip class to party some more, and wind up dropping out.” There’s a lot of gray in between. Just like you (presumably) manage to hold down a job and still find time for the theater performances that interest you, most students manage to handle their studies and also find time to date, play sports, go to movies, and so forth.</p>
<p>And your last statement is a prime example of being out of touch with the real world. The primary reason college students drop out is because of financial reasons, not because they’ve partied their way to an F. Many, many college students have to take off a semester or a year to work and regroup financially and then come back. The four-year-sleep-away</p>
<p>You seem to have a lot of resentment of students who are able to balance studying / academics with reasonable social pursuits (sports, lectures, etc.) - such that you need to unfairly portray them as dilettantes wasting their time away. Why is that? Did you ever look up from your studying and think that it might be fun to go to a movie or a lecture or hang out with friends? </p>
<p>Top 10 Reasons For Dropping Out</p>
<p><a href=“http://cbaweb.sdsu.edu/assets/files/bac/guides/Top10-Reasons-College-Students-Leave.pdf”>http://cbaweb.sdsu.edu/assets/files/bac/guides/Top10-Reasons-College-Students-Leave.pdf</a></p>
<p>Reason # 1 is “Too much fun at the expense of classes and grades.”</p>
<p>I am not really black and white. What I am saying is that, among the general population of college students, poor time management (failure to focus on studies) is the primary reason for academic difficulties and failure to take full advantage of college opportunities.</p>
<p>Personally, I have no friends. I’m ok with that. Neither do I have any interpersonal conflicts with anybody. But, I am very close to my wife and family. I love humankind. I just don’t want to spend much time with them.</p>
<p>Here is another link to a Harvard Business Review article “The Daily Habits of Geniuses”. The last item is “limited social lives”.</p>
<p><a href=“The Daily Routines of Geniuses”>http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/the-daily-routines-of-geniuses/</a></p>
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<p>Heh. There’s the old law school truism about the A students becoming professors, the B students becoming judges, and the C students making the money. 
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<p>^ Like.</p>
<p>Here is a management tip from the Harvard Business Review:</p>
<p>When Hiring, Tryouts Trump Interviews</p>
<p>During an interview, it’s easy to be influenced by traits like eloquence or charm that have no real bearing on work performance. And it’s frustrating when those hires ultimately don’t work out. One way to avoid this is by augmenting your hiring process with auditions. After résumé screening and initial interviews, invite final candidates to work with you for a few weeks (with pay) and perform real tasks alongside potential future colleagues. This allows you to evaluate them and provide feedback, while giving candidates the chance to size up your company. The tryout process might seem over-the-top, but it excels as a filter to identify the people who will truly succeed at your company. If weeks-long auditions aren’t right for your workplace, you still may be able to enhance your interview process with other assessments, like a short-term trial, a presentation, or an assignment.</p>
<p>Glad you like it…but none of that is illegal. Now, if your definition of success from law school is to be a professor or judge, then great. But if your definition of success is making a pile of $$$, then there’s no justice there (so to speak hee hee). </p>
<p>The “tryout” process is going to screen for competence AND also for charm, meaning how someone gets along with others. It’s not concerned with GPA, or with who blew off studying in order to [fill in the non-academic activity of your choice]. </p>
<p>
This is very sad to me. I don’t have a lot of friends, but I know I can count on my friends when chips are down. I have trusted friends at work and outside of work. I don’t know what I would do without them.</p>
<p>Working hard & playing hard</p>
<p>It’s sad that you have no friends, college help. Seriously. That’s nothing to emulate, and I would be very, very saddened if my kids were to report they didn’t have friends at college. It would break my heart. </p>
<p>I love hearing that my kids are going out and doing things with friends. I couldn’t care less what those things are - movies, music, picnics, or even just studying together at the library. </p>
<p>I assume you didn’t feel that the time you spent going on dates with your future wife was “wasted time” because you could have deployed it elsewhere. </p>
<p>No need to feel sad. I socialized a little in college with roommates but have not kept in touch. No bonding there. Maybe its a “guy thing”. Enjoyed dating my future wife. My family provides all the social life I can handle. My wife does maintain contact with her friends from college and they meet up a couple weekends each year in one city or another.</p>
<p>My favorite line from the “tryout” tip in Harvard Business Review is:
“During an interview, it’s easy to be influenced by traits like eloquence or charm that have no real bearing on work performance. And it’s frustrating when those hires ultimately don’t work out.”</p>
<p>deleting a draft response</p>
<p>Personally, I’ve found that charm goes a long way in many jobs, including essentially.all of the jobs in the field I work in.</p>
<p>Eloquence has all the impact in the world. My business partner was a speech, comm, rhetoric, persuasion major. She can convince anybody of anything. She can take a situation in which someone doesn’t feel heard and make them feel very heard. Of course eloquence is important. We lead workshops for 30 or more marketing, research and R&D professionals on a routine basis. Often globally, with different levels of English understanding among attendees. We have to juggle multiple competing agendas, communicate complex ideas, facilitate consensus. How we say things is VERY important.</p>
<p>You seem to have a very “produce a widget” view of the work world. </p>
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<p>The SAT is meant to measure college readiness. Using it as an aptitude test is inappropriate. The score from a test taken when a child was 17 has no bearing on the ability of that now 22 or 23 year old adult to perform a job they hadn’t been trained for when they sat for that exam.</p>
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<p>While I agree with you on the lack of appropriateness on using the SAT for employment, note that the A in SAT used to mean “aptitude”, meaning that the SAT used to be marketed as an aptitude test. Of course, the S used to mean “scholastic”, so the aptitude it was marketed as measuring was supposed to be school-specific. The A eventually was changed to “assessment”, presumably because aptitude could not be measured completely separately from environmental effects (quality of schools attended, etc.).</p>