The university campus is occupied by diverse kinds of students who are defined by their programmes of study. Many chose their programmes of study to make their dreams come alive, others had theirs chosen by their parents because they have peculiar dreams for their children. The most unfortunate ones were rather chosen by the programmes…programmes they never requested for.
One obvious question fellow students ask after your name is…what course? Students offering social sciences at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science (KNUST) are often tagged the ever famous but somewhat ridiculing name, “SocioSo students”. Among the many funny responses to this particular tag are “y33 daa awu” (we will sleep till death), “de3 wo hia ne pillow” (all you need is a pillow),” or the contemporary one,”y’ada!!”(we are asleep!!!).
The supposed sharks, reading the courses tagged to have many prospects see liberal arts unworthy and time wasting to study in the university. They are perfectionists at making a social science student feel worthless with even a stare.
One thing the “real” science students don’t ever want to gulp down their digestive factory of understanding is the “science” in social sciences. You dare not argue with them…though whatever you apply a scientific method to becomes a science. This euphoria of the “real” scientists stampeding the egos of the supposed social scientists hilariously ends when they exit the four walls of the formal incubator of slavery, the university.
The global economy has changed. The days when the richest and most influential in the society were the university produced doctors, engineers, business administrators, and social scientists are long gone with history. Today, the world is ruled by people like Bill Gates, who did not have a study plan while in Harvard and eventually dropped out from school. The extremely influential are people like Mark Zugerberg who left Harvard, a school many Ghanaians will sell their family wealth just to attend.
I need not bore you with names of school drop outs who are richer than the worth of all the universities in the world combined. The undisputed fact is that, the university teaches you what dead creators like Thomas Edison invented, what Karl Marx wrote. You memorise these things and never create new ideas (you become a slaw to people’s ideas).
The university puts you inside the box of someone’s inventions and makes you myopic. All I want to tell the university student reading this is, if you study the inventions of an inventor all your life, you can never be greater than the inventor. Dare to step out of the foolishness of branding and priding yourself with a BSc, BA or whatever, because you are nothing more than a parrot.
Always remember, the richest people don’t work for people’s creations; they work for their own creations. The world is not wowed because you are graduating with a first class honours in Engineering, Law, Medicine or African Studies. You’re more likely to add up to the unemployed populace or join the unsatisfied workers who are always going on strike for a meagre increase in salary.
The world will be wowed when you graduate with unique hammers, saws, and chisels of ideas to create your own business and wealth and employ the other graduates to work for you.
