If you are intellectually curious – and if you go to college, that ought to be prerequisite! – it’s natural to gravitate towards studying things that interest you. Goodness knows that’s what I did part of the time in college. I took courses in German, Latin, Entomology, and Paleontology. I minored in History; treating my Communications major as a place-holder. Other courses I took included Music Appreciation and Economics. In other words, I was your quintessential liberal arts student, with an intellectual curiosity that brought much pleasure to many of my professors. I thus graduated from college feeling very enriched intellectually, and for someone intellectually curious, that is intrinsically important.
But it did nothing for me in terms of building skills employers need. I was thus left for years struggling in grunt jobs at the most menial level, knocking around. As intellectually and mentally engaging and fulfilling as learning about all those cool things were, I realized rather quickly that it would be far more fulfilling to have skills to land a job where I wouldn’t have to struggle to pay rent (or a mortgage), utilities, groceries, car payments, not to mention student loans.
The smart thing for those of us “on the spectrum”, and even for those not on it, is to concentrate on something practical and marketable for our post-secondary education. In case you were never informed, “post-secondary” means any education beyond high school. As we have noted already, and shall do time and again, it’s the practical, marketable subjects (e.g., engineering, computer science, accounting, etc.) that shall help lead you to career success.
The paradox for us with a zest for knowledge is that we want to learn about lots of things. Thankfully, today’s technology offers the intellectually curious opportunities even I never had in college. To borrow an old saying, we can have our cake and eat it, too.
These days, some schools offer online courses in subjects that might fascinate you on an intellectual level even though they’re useless when it comes to your job.
The best examples I can point out are the online courses offered by Hillsdale College. They are absolutely free, and each course offers a whole series of lectures by Hillsdale’s finest professors, often times with introductory presentations by Hillsdale’s own president, Dr. Larry Arnn. Ever wanted to learn more about the U.S. Constitution? There’s a course for that (actually, two). Want to learn more about our American heritage, and why it’s worth preserving? There’s a course for that? Want to learn about the specifics of Western Civilization, and why it’s the best culture in the world? There’s a course for that, too. There’s a course on Ancient Greek civilization, with half the lectures given by visiting scholar Victor Davis Hanson. Dr. Arnn teaches an entire course on Winston Churchill. Another course covers great books of Western literature. Naturally, there’s also a course on economics, which is so important for all of us to learn. I honestly learned more from some of these courses than I did on the bulk of my undergraduate studies.
Again, it’s all online, and it’s all free.
Another wonderful example, this one for us life-long Paleontology enthusiasts, is a YouTube channel called PBS Eons. It expounds on different periods of the fossil-geological record, offering the latest in scholarship on the species of prehistoric times in a very concise manner.
So if you do pursue a degree after high school, focus on something marketable. If your intellectual curiosity makes you want to learn about history or American government, or natural history, something else strictly academic, there are plenty of outside, online sources to cater to your every whim while you focus your scholastic time and tuition dollars on marketable skills for your career. Enjoy, and let us all learn and grow together!