Reflection on the article:
Dear Class of 2016: Get Moving on Your Future

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443855804577601250967842174

Business is the driver behind getting anything done in this world. By learning business you learn fundamental principles and techniques that can be applied to any industry and across fields.

For example, in newspaper publishing, you have the editorial and you have sales. Editorial creates content and sales sells advertising which makes money. The two are interconnected, but the sales side is predominantly the business side. You can be a great editor, but without a publisher you don't have a newspaper to sell or a job.

And though the specifics of accounting may vary from business to business and industry to industry, accounting provides a framework for being able to compare the financial aspects of any business.

As I start working towards my Accounting AS degree, the WSJ article helped me think about the future and what I should be doing now to position myself best when I graduate.

The article emphasizes working on making yourself marketable, which I read as working on soft skills and social polish. In particular, communication -in both written and spoken form- and building a strong network of relationships with professors and alumni. Both things that can be facilitated with class work, but largely need to be worked on gradually and continuously in life outside the class.

This makes sense and is great advice, because the hard skills learned through class work need to be marketed properly to get a job. And this marketing is something that might be taken for granted and is impossible to do at the last minute.

This is not my first time in college and the advice really resonated with me, because I approached college the first time in a less focused and less purposeful way than advised in the article.

One simple but profound piece of advice from the Business and Technology e-book relates to the idea of building a strong network: "PS, know your professors’ names." While, yes I know my professors names, am I making efforts that will help me remember my professors name in two years from now? There were many influential professors I've had in college and whose names I remember, but I don't think I've ever actively tried to include them in my network. And there are many great teachers whose names I don't know anymore, whose only memory in my life is a course title in my transcripts. 

On a more serious and severe note, I found an interesting comment on the article:

The real message to the class of 2016, and every class thereafter, is that the pie that is the US economy is shrinking. The fight to keep one's own slice of the pie from shrinking faster than the overall pie will be more fierce and ruthless with each an every passing year. That is what living in a nation in secular decline means. Those without the correct appearance, native-level language skills, and personal contacts to pursue opportunity in those economies that will fill the vacuum created by the decline of the US need to be prepared a career in an environment of few opportunities and shrinking possibilities, regardless of the campaign rhetoric about the US that one will continue to hear from those across the political spectrum for decades to come -- regardless of how much more visibly untrue that rhetoric continues to become.

And perhaps that is another good reason to study business. Because it is an increasingly competitive world and in particular, country we live in.