myUface Blog

Here at myUface, we continually recommend to international students that they give serious, prolonged thought to their future careers before they apply to U.S. universities.  Doing so will focus your thoughts during the application and essay-writing process, and lead to a better, sharper application – one with a much greater chance of being accepted?

We hear from students quite often, however, that thinking about what they plan to do so early on in their lives is a difficult challenge.  Before introducing today’s blog post, let me first of all say, that’s OK, you can always CHANGE your career plans – but it’s still a good idea to have some!

Beyond that, though, I thought it might be useful to give all of the readers of the blog an insight into where the global economy is headed, as a tool for you to use in thinking about your own careers.

The following is excerpted from Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, a national bestseller here in the United States that introduces us all to “globalization.”  I would recommend that anyone interested in understanding the global economy today, and the direction in which it’s headed, should buy this book.  For now, I wanted to focus on two sections:  one (today) about the skills that workers of tomorrow are going to need in order to be successful; and the second (tomorrow) on the ability ot the U.S. educational system to impart those skills.

What Skills Do You Need To Survive In A Globalized World?

The way to succeed [in a globalized world is] . . . by upgrading your skills and making the investment in those practices that will enable you . . . to claim your slice of the bigger but more complex pie.

You have to constantly upgrade your skills.  There will be plenty of jobs  . . . for people with the knowledge and the ideas to seize them.

You actually want to become really adaptable.  You want to constantly acquire new skills, knowledge and expertise that enable you constantly to be able to create value . . . . Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to “learn hot to learn,” will become one of the most important assets any worker can have . . . because innovation will happen faster.

Atul Vashistha, CEO of NeoIT, a California consulting firm . . . has a good feel for this:  “What you can do and how you can adapt and how you can leverage all the experience and knowledge you have . . . that is the basic component for survival.  When you are changing jobs a lot, and when your environment is changing a lot, being adaptable is the number one thing.  The people who are losing out are those with solid technical skills who have not grown those skills.”

In short, it’s not enough to simply know information or possess skills.  You have to know how to be able to use those skills and apply them to new situations.  You also have to know how to learn new information quickly and efficiently.  The watchwords of the age are:  innovation and adaptability.

And as we’ll see tomorrow, these are precisely the attributes that U.S. universities specialize in cultivating in students.