A reflection on the value of formal education and lived experience

Amidst the continuing grim picture painted of 2020 from the news and social media, there was a tiny little story about an abandoned school bus being air lifted out of the Alaskan wilderness. Not to belittle the significance of the pandemic, the protests, the ‘pink recession’, among many others, but this bit of news allowed for a reflection on my student experience so far.

The abandoned school bus had become a popular adventurer’s destination following the film adaptation of the book Into the Wild, the real story about Christopher McCandless. 'In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.' —Jon Krakauer

It’s been one of my favourite books and movies of all time, with the 2007 film adaptation being directed by Sean Penn and starred Emile Hirsch, Jena Malone, and William Hurt. I was really drawn to the story and was looking forward to an adventure of my own when I first saw it in 2008 and then read the book, a travel essay beautifully written by Jon Krakauer. I had never lived anywhere else apart from my parents’ house in the northern hemisphere, my home since I was born. There I was, a 24-year-old bound for South Australia after having accepted a master’s scholarship to study overseas and about to live on my own in a foreign country for two whole years. I was super excited! The adventure I had, it was exceptional, and it was life-changing.

Fast forward ten years later, successfully completing my degree and then experiencing jobs and opportunities that have taken me all around Australia, back home, then to Italy, Mexico, the US, and then back to Adelaide. I’ve been through job promotions, but also countless job application rejections, career changes, and relocations. I’ve worked for private companies, state governments, schools, universities, and not-for-profit organisations. Next it was to pursue the PhD dream and I was grateful to be offered a place. Now I’m back at university as a student, and although still employed part-time while studying, I join my cohort in feeling nervous about job prospects during this pandemic.

While my lived experience, my education in the ‘real world’, was very valuable and the wealth of transferable skills I accrued over the years is undeniably significant in getting a job, I recognize the important part that formal education played in preparing me for the many roles I’ve taken on in building my career. The lessons from my lived experience gave me the ability to be adaptable and resilient. It allowed me to really hone skills like customer service, communication, teamwork, project management, networking, and so on. These are skills valued in various industries and careers. Still, formal education and the university life made it possible for me to distill all my ‘real-world’ education, understand it, and draw from it. Knowledge and application go hand in hand. There’s not much use in me knowing a lot of things and then not being able to apply it, and the converse I feel, is true. How can I substantially apply myself to anything without having some knowledge or experience on the task? I could research just purely for the sake of contributing to knowledge. Personally, I would like what I learn to be shared and to be useful. I think both knowledge (my degrees, qualifications) and experience (skills) are both more powerful when shared.

I admired Christopher McCandless for his desire to live purely, solitarily, wildly. He finished his degree and then, ‘at long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence’. You probably know how the story ends, but I will leave it out of here in case you don’t, but here is the thesis and distillation of his journey into the wild, in his own words: ‘And so it turned out… that an unshared happiness is not happiness… and this was most vexing of all, happiness [is] only real when shared’.