I recently saw a headline on LinkedIn where someone was talking about how much of an impact edX had on their work life.  This got me reflecting on my college education and a few of the classes that had a huge impact on my life.  For most of us, our education represents our foundation in the work world.  And it is important to reflect on that foundation.  What others areas do we need to add?  What advice would we give to those younger than us that ask what helped us the most?

For this list I’m going to go in chronological order.  There were a large number of courses between the various colleges I’ve attended, my certificates, Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.  These are the three that came to mind first as having a huge influence on my career and view of the world.

The first is the Speech 1A course that came early in college.  I was very quiet and introverted in high school, so this course pushed me to be more comfortable communicating with others.  (And cold calling will really accelerate that, which is topic for another article.)  There were two experiences that happened shortly after the class that really cemented the value of communication and knowing how to do it properly.  The first was within a month of finishing the class.  I was Treasurer of a local car club.  Easy to do at the time since I had a laptop, knew how to use spreadsheets and it didn’t involve much talking.

I showed up for one meeting, and neither the VP nor the President showed up.  And for some reason there were 15 new people in the room who wanted to learn about the club.  Normally there were 8 to 10 members per meeting, and nobody new, so this was a big deal to me back then.  As introverted as I had been, I was able to run the meeting, keep it interesting and exciting.  The best part?  Most of the visitors joined.

The second was when I attended an open house for a sales position.  The owner of the company lead the talk about his firm, the benefits of working there and his take on the type of sales we would be doing.  Initially I was really taken in by his excitement and enthusiasm.  But this quickly dissipated when he was wrapping things up.  His last statement before taking questions was to apologize for being so nervous – that these talks were normally done by his office manager.

In my Speech class, the instructor had talked about how similar the symptoms of nervousness and excitement were.  In both you tend to get excited, speak faster, have more energy and different voice inflection.  Her recommendation was to turn the nervous feelings into an appearance of being excited about your topic.  The owner was not attempting to do that, but it was inadvertently what had happened.  If he had kept his feelings secret I would have thought he was excited and charged up about his firm. Instead I saw that his confidence was lower than I initially realized.  No, I didn’t apply to work there.  But I did spend 5 years where 100% of my income was commission based.

I’ll be updating this article to include details on my Economics course and a Linux course.  I’ll also be including my advice for others.

What courses have you taken that have had the biggest impact on your life?