College students should be encouraged to pursue subjects that interest them rather than the courses that seem most likely to lead to jobs Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain y

When I was a middle school student, I never really thought why I should attend college and what I was to study in college. I was just tunneled into a college-oriented curriculum track with other well-performing students. As a result, I didn’t really start to figure out my study plan until I got into a college, and I did so amid a variety of voices of whether I should focus my study on the subjects that really interested me or I should focus on the so-called “useful” subjects that has a prospect to lead me to a stable career. Looking backward, I would argue that it is surely important for every student to think through what field they are going to dedicate themselves to make a living; however, the priority is to find the very field that would give a student the kind of passion to do so, not to find a field that would be lucrative enough to induce students to jump in even though they have no passion for it at all.

First and foremost, student should pursue the subjects that could really kindle their passion not because of “interest for interest’s sake,” but because one’s interest actually indicates one’s calling. The main purpose of college education is not for the gaining of each student’s personal income, but for the public good of society as a whole. Whenever one student finds their calling during the learning process of a certain subject, this is the very precious moment that set student free on the track of devoting themselves to the public good. College education should empower students to pursue their passion as well as encourage them to utilize what they have learned to benefit the world. By so doing, each and every year, the college would be able to send into society an army of talented and passionate specialists from various backgrounds, and together these future leaders would be enthusiastic to come together to solve all kinds of unresolved issues in the world.

Moreover, when students are allowed to concentrate on what truly interests them, this makes it possible for them to combine learnings from different disciplines into an unexpected and yet innovative way. One of the most successful case is Steve Jobs’ experience of learning calligraphy in his drop-out years in college. Steve Jobs dropped out from the college basically to free himself from studying the mandatory courses that were designed by the university authority that they thought would enable students to find a stable job with. However, Steve Jobs did now view these courses at the ones that either interested him or was useful for him. Instead, He dropped out in order to focus on what really kindled his mind, and calligraphy is one of such courses. Eventually, the knowledge from this course rewarded him in a way that he did not expect in those years. Thanks to the calligraphy course, all personal computers we are using now are equipped with multiple sorts of artistic fonts. When students are allowed to follow their hearts, they are allowed to connect the dots through some ingenious routes that are unimaginable for those who are conventional in viewing what subjects are useful for the later career in life and what are not.

In conclusion, I believe that the college education should be reformed in a way to allow students to explore and to pursue their interests instead of following some stifled job-oriented courses which are reckoned as profitable from an uncreative, conventional perspective. By so doing, the society as a whole would see itself be equipped with much more passionate professionals instead of some cold, boring, profit-focusing individualistic individuals. Thanks to many of my professors in my college years, I had the opportunity to focus my study on complicated political issues that really intrigued me, which did not seem (and does not seem even now) profitable at all. Yet through these years of study, I have gradually developed a great deal of rigorous passion in this field, and am determined to equip myself even better on these topics through higher learning in order to dedicated myself to reform the socio-political environment of my own country with others of the same mind. I insist that students should focus on their interests so as to benefit their society in the most profound way, and this is the very way of living I have practiced daily since my college years.