WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE, FRESHMEN

23 Aug, 2015 - 00:08 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

Blessing James

University of Zimbabwe

Knowledge is of no use if it is about gaining certificates and accolades acquired only to lie idle on our walls and offer nothing for the enhancement and perpetuation of life for the body, heart and soul

MEDIA houses across Zimbabwe have for the past four weeks been awash with headlines pertaining to the historic Supreme Court ruling in a case involving a local petroleum company and two of its former employees that reportedly triggered the sacking of hundreds of employees in the country. The court’s interpretation of the law and consequent judgement came at a time when most people including myself had all along thought that the labour laws in the country were crafted in favour of employees as the perceived weaker party which could have made some sense especially to a student aspiring to be employed at some Mr A’s firm sooner or later. The justification of the ruling has and is still a subject of intense debate at least not for now. That’s 2015!

Change, like time, is uncontrollable but fortunately manageable. For as long as time ticks, change picks up pace because the two are engineered to occur in tandem. We find in the widely read and bestselling book of all times that the human race is highly favoured in that, in us lies the ability to quickly adapt to varying circumstances and in some cases alter them to suit our desires. This means that although change might be an inevitable force of nature itself, we do still have the willpower to deny our victimisation by it. What am l trying to put together here?

One of my favourite columnists in The Sunday Mail for years has been Milton Kamwendo in his inspiring and highly motivating column “Hunt for Greatness”. A few weeks ago the column carried a piece titled “Surviving Life’s roller coaster” in which the writer emphasised that life is a victim of change. In his opening remark Milton asserts that not everything that worked in the past will work in the future. The tone of the aforementioned will drive any sensible and right thinking individual to the conclusion that it is the ever-ticking time that initiates the inevitable process of change thereby disabling old tactics from bringing victory today. The writer goes further to say that we are living at a time when everything we knew about work and labour relations is about to change, perhaps forever. He goes further to implore today’s generation to see itself differently in acknowledging that gone are the days when a professional qualification was a ticket to success.

On the 24th of August 2015, the University of Zimbabwe once again opens its doors to thousands of its students who will be coming in to commence the 2015-16 academic year. Senior students, mainly those in their final years will be battling with pressures that come with it, dissertations, projects, exams etcetera. Others who still have a year or two pending on their transcripts will not be spared; they will be gearing themselves up for another season of sometimes tedious and rigorous lectures, mindboggling in-class exams, quizzes and assignments. Incoming freshmen will, for the first time, taste the real varsity life. Although they will be highly expectant and so much eager to start a new phase in their academic lives, the ups and downs that come with life at the university are hardly known to them. Enough of the varsity myths! Life at college is actually easy, you just need to be focussed and level headed and success will be an obvious eventuality for you.

My call rings on to the minds of my fellow students currently enrolled at various higher and tertiary institutions across the world, calling for a change in our mind-sets from the traditional, old fashioned mantra that after college comes job search. Gone are the seemingly good old days when after graduating with this BSc or that MSc degree employment was a certainty and financial security an obvious guarantee. Times have progressed and as such change has taken its toll and hijacked our joy for the better or for the worst. For aspiring graduates, there is no better time than now for us to come to understand that the system has changed and these diplomas and degrees are not any longer being conferred to us so that we can then move from firm A to firm B begging for job placement that are not there. Time is now ripe for us to appreciate that we need to cultivate within our minds the idea that company A and company B are products of a Mr A or Ms B who just like us graduated from college and right away opted to press the green button that leads to the employer and shunned the employee mode.

In computer science we have what we call programming languages, which are the mediums through which we convey sets of instructions to the machines to enable them to perform certain tasks for us. Literally, the more the languages one is acquainted to the greater his/her relevance in the programming arena. l have it on good record that more and even more of these languages are being developed each day. This then demands for one to be tolerant and develop a persistent learner’s attitude if ever one is to get that degree to work. And this is not only for us the computer-guys, but for every other programme across the academic divide.

We are all fighting a battle for recognition, recognition which is a product of relevance. You can only be employed by that successful and well-paying organisation that you dream of, if and only if your service to them is of any relevance. By relevance l mean, that input of yours that is generating towards the objective of the organisation (profit in most cases). For the past decades our world has been inflated by economic recession every now and then and to cope with this, the corporate world has responded by scaling down its labour force and keeping only those whose service is directly linked to productivity. The consequences of the later has been the churning of thousands of graduates by universities straight into the streets at a time when the employers have virtually very little or absolutely no prospects to offer at all. You can imagine how uneasy life after graduation would be given the nature of the challenges posed by any attempt to try and fit into the current system.

In my freshman year at college l was delighted to be introduced to a course in entrepreneurship which opened my mind and tremendously brought a new wave of enlightenment to my academic life. Our class was introduced to the strange subject of technoprenuership (a combination of technology and entrepreneurship, so they said). Technology here is used to refer to the practical application of knowledge to the industry as a framework to create the tools, to develop expertise and materials to solve existing problems in our world today. The course basically sought to educate our class that we could all at any time become entrepreneurs regardless of the old norm that science people do not make good business people. During the course we had the privilege to be joined by various successful young businesspeople from across the globe and locally who boasted of owning million dollar portfolios. They made presentations to us on how they started and the like. l was challenged by one local guy who owns a software development company and various computer and computer accessories retailing outlets across the country when he narrated how during his second year of study at the University of Zimbabwe he had to run the risk of selling his personal laptop to finance a money generating project he had just started. A project that was a while later going to make him a millionaire. Examples abound from the likes of Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.), Larry Page (Google) and many others who did not wait to be employed so that they could start to deploy the knowledge they had acquired from college.

I realised then that the idea of learning was to impart knowledge to the mind so that at the end of day it brings life to the body, heart and soul. Knowledge is of no use if it is about gaining certificates and accolades acquired only to lie idle on our walls and offer nothing for the enhancement and perpetuation of life for the body, heart and soul. Sooner or later we are to graduate lawyers, pharmacists, journalists, accountants and host of others, but this will only matter if our professional qualifications can release a better lease of life for us. Let’s embrace and work towards the entrepreneurship model. Not to say that we should never aspire to get employed someday. You can still go ahead and launch a Google search on the job market but given the current structure of the market, it would be wiser to merge our studies with ideas of how we can go out there and start our own sets of ventures after or even before completion of our studies. There are plenty of lucrative unexplored opportunities just across the horizon, unfortunately only for out of the box thinkers but thank God you are one of them.

Some youthful and world renowned entrepreneur once said that the Facebook generation has never been easier to start a run a successful business than any other before (in apparent reference to the generation born in the early 1980’s and years ahead, that witnessed and graced the advent of Facebook). The dominance of the Internet and the social networks that came with it have harmonised a world which was once clustered into a global village. Our generation is blessed guys, we just need to pull our heads above the waters and take advantage of this information age.

Like Mr Kamwendo said, “you are the executive chairman and the chief executive of your own personal services company called, Me (Pvt) Ltd ‘’. As we commence another academic year, let’s reinvent ourselves along these lines and evade the roaring and unfavourable dynamics of this world that threaten to devour our educated selves. Ahoy UBA Ahoy!

The writer is a BSc Computer Science student at the University of Zimbabwe and the Founder and Chairman of Rockfields Investments Group. [email protected], YOU CAN SEND YOUR ARTICLES THROUGH E-MAIL, FACEBOOK, WHATSAPP or TEXT Just app Charles Mushinga on 0772936678 or send your articles, pictures, poetry, art . . . to Charles Mushinga at [email protected] or [email protected] or follow Charles Mushinga on Facebook or @charlesmushinga on Twitter. You can also post articles to The Sunday Mail Bridge, PO Box 396, Harare or call 0772936678.

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