A College Degree Does Not Equal Success

As a child I was told that if you want to be successful in America you need a college education. This seemed to be the case when I was seven or eight, but as I got older I noticed that most successful people making it, did not have to go through college. What do Bill Gates, Sean John Combs, Steve Wozniak and Russell Simmons all have in common? They didn’t need college. In my mind, I didn’t need College to have a career, I felt experience could teach me much more than college could. Not everybody is built the same; some do need college to guide them through their choice in a career. I happen to know what I had wanted to do early in my teen years.

      By the time I made it to high school my mind was set that I didn’t want to go to college. The courses I wanted to study weren’t even on the list at most colleges, so I had to learn on my own. Lucky for me, I don’t have to have a bachelors in audio engineering to be successful at it. The end of high school I did find a vocational school that taught courses in my field of interest and I decided to at least give that a chance. It was the first time I saw something that interested me that had to do with school. It wasn’t the traditional learning process, I was going to school for the skill I wanted to learn. I didn’t have to take a number of courses I didn’t need in order to have a degree. I was only getting a certificate so school was more like job training. I had already been doing audio engineering a few years before school so I didn’t learn much at first but there were many things I didn’t know and made me a better engineer in the process.

      Combining school with experience worked out for me better than I could have expected. As if I was walking around with bad vision and school was like glasses that allowed me to see things much clearer than before. It reminded me of Malcolm X prison stories, where he taught himself to read the dictionary to understand more complex words. With self-motivation he pushed himself harder than any school with in means could push him. It’s not the college degree that is going to make you successful, it’s the work you put in after that degree that will set you apart. School gave me a better technical understanding in my field, which made me better in my career. After school I continued in audio engineering and one of my dreams was to build my own studio. I thought once I’ve built my dream studio that I was going to be satisfied but that wasn’t the case. You can’t stop dreaming just because you fulfilled a dream, you must continue to dream and dream big.