A high school grad may walk into the University of Texas, but they will most likely leave with a degree that prepares them to do a very good job in a very small section of the total job market. Colleges are in the business of specializing students, but is that a good thing? Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz about a flaw in this model. In 15 years, work will no longer be through a silo. As machines do society’s mundane, repetitive tasks, humans are freed up to be creative and solve problems using soft-skills and holistic solutions.

Enter art, literature, design students. When they enter the workforce today, companies are noticing that their solutions offer interdisciplinary solutions. Creativity is driving innovation and giving companies a competitive edge. As HBR notes: “Companies with easy-to-use interfaces and intuitive functionality will win every time over companies that create any roadblock to using a product”. Designers would tell you that they’ve been saying that for years, decades, and they have. It’s only recently that we see a shifting in weight in big companies that reflect new emphasis on creative talent.  Like IBM, who recently announced an effort to take its designer-to-engineer ratio from 1:20 to 1:15.

Steve Jobs in his 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Clearly, the importance of new, challenging educational experiences cannot be overstated.

As a business student, I don’t like to think that studying business is setting me up for failure in the business world, but I don’t think that any of us have to worry. It’s a small adjustment, but companies want to include creativity in their business, and students of business should look to their studies and find ways to incorporate more than one discipline into their scope of study. For me, I find that talking to students from the School of Humanities to be a treat; for me talking about music or literature is almost a break from the hard facts of Accounting 2302.

Recently, I’ve partnered with a graphic design student that wants to launch a product which formed from her senior design major assignment. I think that her sense of creativity and my business training are nice complements. Even if we don’t win, the knowledge that I create from our partnership will hopefully shape my approach to business problems for the rest of my career.

St. Edward’s University has a partner school in Beppu, Japan, Asia Pacific University (APU), which hosts students from all over the world.

Travel Time from Beppu, Japan

This past summer break, Dr. Catherine MacDermott had the chance to take her expertise abroad and teach a class at APU as part of a 2 month program. When she came back, I was eager to speak with her and pick her brain about the cultural nuances of the Japanese and the experiences that she had with that society.

I first met Dr. MacDermott in my Japanese I class freshman year. Like the rest of us, what she lacked in talent and experience, she made up for in enthusiasm and hard work. When I found out that she was going abroad, I decided it would be cool to live vicariously through her experience.

Dr. MacDermott, for me, provided some real insight the meaning of respect.

Same As My Neighbor

Japan’s history of isolationism is well known in history. The Japanese have managed to keep their population almost exclusively Japanese, even with the pervasive influence of the global economy taking place. According to Dr. MacDermott, this homogeneity is one of the chief reasons its culture can remain so uninfluenced by outside culture.

The Japanese have a separate alphabet for foreign-borrowed words, which helps the society from integrating outside cultures into its own.

MacDermott said that the first thing that she noticed was the airport. One of the largest in the world, Tokyo’s International Airport was packed with people. But to her surprise, there was no shouting, no stressed out attendants screaming at people to get in line. There was a sense of harmony that diffused to her attitude, and the process of going through customs became that much easier. It was, as she said, a soft landing.

We discussed the benefits of a homogeneous society: manners and customs across the entire  country are carried on. In contrast, in the United States, at any given moment, 100 people in a room have 100 different upbringings from 40 different countries and they wouldn’t necessarily have a easy time finding common ground.

Respect

When manners were introduced into the discussion, MacDermott commented that the Japanese showed amazing hospitality to her and that she received numerous offers from strangers for dinner and a place to rest. Our conversation moved to the education systems in Japan, from elementary to higher education. She describe the students as respectful always, saying they were a model for good-behavior and preparedness.

Dr. MacDermott mentioned her adoration of the children’s school uniforms, especially the hats.

I was surprised and intrigued to hear that Japanese elementary schools do not hire a janitorial staff because the children clean the school. Just as well, the kitchen duties are manned by the children on a rotating schedule. Through these exercises, th

e students learn at an early age to be interdependent and team-focused, which is a very different reality for students in Western countries such as the United States.

I asked Dr. MacDermott: In a society where harmony, respect for others, and cohesion are valued, what is the role of innovation and competition in business?

The Japanese are one of the premiere manufacturing and technological centers of the world, she replied. The emphasis on quality and service was something that other parts of the world could learn from. The fierce competitiveness of the Western cultures is flashy and exciting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are better. That point was something I hadn’t considered. Being humble and giving credit to your teammates wasn’t exactly emphasized to me growing up the USA. Nowadays I think that I myself could learn some valuable lessons from the teamwork model.

As our time together came to an end, we discussed the effects of the trip on Dr. MacDermott as an educator. She confessed that they were profound. Her expectations for the students had been raised and her tolerance for lack of effort (which for 20 or so years had been significant) started to dwindle. While listening to her explain the change (she doesn’t all of the sudden hate kids, she just wants them to do their homework), I felt admiration and guilt for not giving my education enough of a chance.

Sure, I do my homework. But am I always engaged? Am I making the most of my professor’s time? My peer’s time? My parent’s hard earned money? I realized that my obligation to make good grades isn’t about how smart I am, but how dedicated and respectful I am to the people in my life that lift me up.

And while Dr. MacDermott may have higher expectations of students, I think that students should have higher expectations of themselves. I don’t think grades are everything but nobody failed a class after doing every assignment the best they could and coming to every class ready to ask questions and participate. I think we could all learn something form Dr. MacDermott’s experience.

Last year, as part of an extra credit opportunity for Women’s Studies, I attended WEcon 2015 (Women’s Empowerment conference). It is run by the Women’s Community Center for Central Texas.

It was an awesome experience, and it kind of led me to start exploring ways to give back to the community and especially underprivileged minorities.

Women CTX

What They Do

They hold workshops for bringing women together to discuss social problems in Austin and learn skills for everyday life improvement. I like the approach to the local level because State and National legislation rarely does enough to tackle serious but specific issues such as gentrification and cost of living.
The point of getting these women together is to build each other up. Women are social creatures, and collaboration and group projects are a strength that help develop all the women involved.

My Role

I joined the Logistics and Fundraising planning subcommittees. Hopefully I can lend my skills to them to solve problems for the money side of the event. I know that I wouldn’t be very effective helping with the content because I tend to have very limited scope of understanding to all of the issues that they are interested in covering.

My goal is to get the school involved. Maybe I’ll ask Jo’s Coffee to give some sponsorship. Also, there are a lot of places downtown that would be interested in advertising and helping our cause. More updates to come!