#CareerAdvice : #CollegeStudent – Essential Advice For Building Your Dream Career In The Digital Economy. Got Kids? Great One Min Read!

Lauren Maffeo has her finger on the pulse of tech, education, and especially, how to educate people successfully in order to succeed in a tech oriented job market. But she certainly didn’t start out that way.

In fact, in college, computer science was her least favorite course. Yet, today, Lauren is an award-winning technology expert, covering the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small and mid-sized business owners. I caught up with Lauren on our From the Dorm Room to the Board Room podcast to discuss her interesting career journey and advice she has for young people interested in the digital economy. The following excerpt from this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Andy Molinsky: Is there anything in particular you’d suggest about preparing yourself in college for a future career in tech?

Lauren Maffeo: If you’re still in a position to be picking classes, pick as diverse a range of classes as you possibly can. I don’t regret being a Media Studies major, but I do wish that I had taken more business courses, especially marketing and product management.

Molinsky: How about just majoring in Computer Science?

Maffeo: And if you’re a Computer Science major, I think it’s really essential to be taking courses on Ethics, and Philosophy, and Rhetoric to understand the bigger picture of what you’re building, and understanding the impact of your products on end users, which is something that tends to really get lost on technical teams if they’re too far away from their customers.

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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Molinsky: You majored in Media Studies. Was there anything particularly useful in retrospect about that major?

Maffeo: For sure. I couldn’t foresee at the time how valuable my Media Studies education would be, both in my career and also in this weird cultural moment we’re in. I could not have imagined how media literacy, at large, would evolve the way it has into what it is today where we have this real explosion of literal fake news where even someone who is highly literate can’t necessarily tell the factual accuracy of what they’re reading. We’re in this very unique moment where the value of being able to dissect arguments and rhetoric for what they are and critique things at face value is a more essential skill than ever.

Molinsky: If you had the power to dictate how college was run, is there anything you’d change?

Maffeo: I would require interdisciplinary education, which a lot of universities already do. If engineers are building products for end users not thinking about the myriad of ways they could be used for both good and bad, that’s very problematic. So Computer Science students, for example, need to take coding courses alongside Philosophy. The other thing is that I would emphasize the benefits of project-based work, especially if someone is taking more technical subjects. You’re always going to get more exposure and more knowledge from doing something hands-on versus just memorizing information.