Is degree important for success? | Mehak from IIM Shillong 

While pondering over the relevance of thought that if 'degree is important for a successful life', I always end up concluding that - It's the will, not the skill!

We spend half of our lives preparing to live the life of our dreams. Many of us perish in the process itself, taking it too seriously, so much so that by the time we reach our destination, it loses its worth, for it had been a scourge from the time of its inception.

The whole pressure of performance, which gets inflicted by the mandatory lines of demarcated systems and procedures, is so consuming that the complete enthusiasm and charisma around the "idea" kind of gets lost. It becomes something where we have to be, rather than where we want to be, which was the calling and the axis of decisiveness for embarking on the journey.

Equipping ourselves with a degree is one of those mandatory requirements. At times the process gets so monotonous that when we get to do the job, we have already lost the liking for it. There are times when our degree and our interests are so unaligned that we just rush in to complete our degrees without actually learning through the process. We are in a time when even our marriage invitations have our qualifications written in bold letters, which eventually become our identification. This has all come from how we define our jobs. We usually have the prerequisites as degrees rather than skills. We are neglecting a big talent pool when we do that. 

Experience is the best teacher

There are numerous people who, through the medium of self-learning or learning by experiencing, tend to achieve what getting a degree would never render us capable of.

Experience is the best teacher - we often come across this phrase by various successful people of the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They all are dropouts who believed in their synthesis of experiential learning than what a college degree could provide. 

Their will had them start their journey, which they could continue and sustain by acquiring skills throughout, by committing mistakes and thus learning life lessons as they confronted situations, people, and problems that sculpted them into the personalities they are today.

Thus, the vexing question, i.e., 'Do degrees define what our lives would shape like?' answers itself. They might not be the determining factor of what we turn out to become, but they definitely help us sail through our respective journeys towards our destinations. 

Align the wheels of interest and career

One thing that we need to understand is that there has been only one Steve Jobs or only one Ellen DeGeneres. Everyone does not encounter the same instances while in their journey, which would eventually lead them to success as extraordinary as theirs. We will have our problems, our failures, and our high points, which would be poles apart from them. We might not end up the same way they did. It does not imply that we should not try. We should equip ourselves before entering a particular field, and such kind of preparation is henceforth provided by a degree.

Today is the time of competition, creativity, and innovation, of imagination, learning, and independent thinking. Getting a degree would help stimulate these variables into practical and applicable ideas with feasible implementation. It provides a platform for making mistakes before we enter into an arena where even minor errors would cost us thousands of crores. It lets us learn from other people's experiences and mistakes.

But this all would materialize only if we pick a degree that aligns with our interests and is something that we want to build a career around. Thus matching your interests and area of study is imperative. Although it won't be right to say that our degrees define us, they definitely frame the way we approach the Gordian knots that life tries us to bind with. The time that we invest in a degree makes up a very significant portion of our lives. What all skills we acquire during that period ultimately is the make or break factor. We get to explore various areas of interest and hence pursue whatever lends meaning to our lives. 

After all, only relationships do not have compatibility issues. We often face them with our respective degrees and at times with our careers. To balance the front wheels of our interests and career, we mustn't overburden any of them, stabilizing and maintaining accord.

Thus, finally, being #degreed doesn’t tag us with anything unless we prove it actually to be. We are our personalities, not our degrees.

This article was submitted as an entry to Become an Author 2.0 with Dare2Compete.