Want a Job after Graduation? 5 College Courses You Shouldn’t Miss

Cindy Bates

Despite the fact that we all have our particular degree requirements during our respective times at college, it is always helpful to be anticipating skills that are marketable in the workforce. Aside from offering the chance to take sunrise yoga as an activity course, this stipulation in the design of college degree programs exists to also allow students to vary their interests and their skill set in order to be more desirable as a new piece of meat in the job market. Yet, there are those college courses that everyone should take—not only to make oneself more attractive to a possible employer, but also to gain life skills that are essential to functioning in life:

1. Psychology – Psychology, being the study of the mind and mental processes, is not the soft science that many allege it to be. Backed by empirical research that is often also biologically measured, psychology includes examining how we think, feel, and take and use information. Furthermore, all of us can use some experience with social psychology throughout life. Studying how one thinks in relation to one’s social environment can be especially useful when figuring out the best way to approach new friends, new coworkers, and new dates.
2. Critical Theory – Because so much of creative work today, from engineering to poetry writing, is based on the theoretical yields of research, an appreciation of theory and its criticism is essential to being an inquisitive, well-informed, and productive person in various different fields. While linguistic theory and design theory differ dramatically in their respective content, each one is overall important to understanding each field and furthering the confines of each area of scholarship and research. It also helps an individual in practicing abstract thinking, which only becomes possible in later stages of brain development that actually occur in early adulthood.
3. Ethics – Ethics is a two-sided coin. Part of the subject extends into being a good person, and the other part extends more into the legal side of one’s behavior. Understanding ethics and what it means to behave ethically or unethically is something we all have to confront in the way in which we comport ourselves. While some situations are easily boxed in one category or another in terms of being ethical or not, real-life instances are not typically so easy to distinguish from one another. Tough decisions are a part of everyday living, and being skilled in making good ones is always going to be necessary, even more so as our world becomes more advanced and complex, in terms of both technology and globalization.
4. Business –Business courses are not only for those of us who plan on entering positions in management and entrepreneurship or finance and economics. General business courses teach many of the specialized skills that allow one to be, not only an informed consumer, but also an informed producer in what today is becoming an increasingly service-based economy. Consumerism aside, business courses teach one how to market not only a product, but also oneself, which is particularly necessary when explaining to an employer why he or she should hire you instead of someone else. While all of us are different and can bring diverse benefits to our workplaces, if you can put your best foot forward and sell yourself well, it is not going to matter—hence, why everyone should take at least one business course in college.
5. Statistics– Of course, an art history major is not necessarily going to care much about bell curves, values of bar-x, and standard deviations, but nevertheless, everyone should take statistics. For students of sciences and mathematics, statistics is essential to even conduct formal research—for the rest of us, we need to understand the work of others and how it impacts our lives. Specifically, those of us in business must use statistics to sell products, but all of us have to make informed decisions about cause and effect and the probability of certain ones being more apt to occur than others. You might not know off the top of your head the formula for a regression analysis or a correlation coefficient, but we all employ what each means on a daily basis in how we make informed decisions about what information to which we have access.

Even though some courses might not seem particularly relevant to everyone’s major, general education courses exist for a reason, and these options help students utilize the skills obtained in them to become reliable, knowledgeable professionals after completing their postsecondary studies. Obviously a collegiate education gives us more than just the skills to get a job, but even then, a college education provides what can be difficult to obtain otherwise—better ways in how to think and understand the world and the plethora of things in it. No man is an island, and by taking away these skills, one finds that one does not necessarily need to be.

About the author:

Cindy Bates is an experienced writer and educator at Bestessaytips. She has written for different online publications, where she shares her experience and knowledge. Her main focus is covering a variety of topics in education niche.