College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
Above ↑ Katie Selin (right) worked with fellow UW-Madison student Katy Bresette to design student housing and community space for the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College.
Preparing for a Lifetime of Change
If you are an undergraduate in the 21st century, you’d better be nimble. And alert. The knowledge you’re trying to acquire is a fast-moving target. So is the job market you’ll enter when you graduate.
That’s the challenge facing the 2,200-plus undergrads currently enrolled in the College.
In their world, there are few constants. The technology that is cutting-edge when they are freshmen may be out of date by the time they graduate. The science they’re studying is developing so rapidly that textbooks can’t keep up. They’re preparing for highly specialized careers that may not yet exist. When they graduate, they’ll dive into a job market that is highly competitive and global in scale.
Rest assured — when these students graduate, they’ll be ready.
They’re preparing for careers in a global, multi-cultural marketplace by getting as much global and multicultural exposure as possible. They’re preparing for an increasingly competitive job market by arming themselves with unique and useful combinations of skills that cut across multiple disciplines. Most important, they’re developing personal skills that will help them and their future employers deal with change — skills related to critical thinking, leadership, team-building and communication and life-long learning.
Some of these skills are learned in the classroom. Others are learned by experience, gained through internships and summer jobs, study-abroad and
community service, independent research projects,
student organizations and intercollegiate professional competitions.
All of this adds up to an independent, entrepreneurial approach to education that teaches students to educate themselves. These lifelong learning skills will never become obsolete.