Where do we go from here

When my classmates and I started talking about our goals and concerns, at first it seemed that there was a wide disparity in our worries, but the more we talk, the more I see a common thread. While one classmate worries that she can't keep up with our classmates in the technical arena, another worries about how to pull her broad range of interests together without gaps into one employable package, and I worry that I will dutifully complete assignments through a master's degree program and walk away with a degree but without the skills to do the kind of work I want to do. The common thread in our concerns is that we know we need real-world job skills. It is foolish to set aside those concerns. It is foolish to unquestioningly complete assignments which will teach us a dying art that has no current applications, and it is foolish to spend all our time dreaming about future opportunities that advancing technology might bring in some future decade. For a well-rounded education we need to consider the earlier roots of our field, of course, as well as anticipating where things might be going in the future. But those are extraneous issues, not worthy of consuming our entire educational experience. What we need most is the ability to do productive work in the world of today, with a broad enough knowledge base to adapt to what's coming in the next few years. We need real skills in what's happening now, not in what's going away, and not in some dream that may never come to fruition.

We don't want to be working drones, we want to be leaders and innovators. But innovation does not come from a romanticized clinging to the past while scorning the present, or from anticipating the future through a fantasy which has no relationship to reality.

And none of us wants a worthless degree that will scare employers away.