Never Discount a Learning Opportunity

Seeing as we are currently in the middle of the semester, one learning experience that I have had at work is especially relevant. I was recently given a task in which my boss requested that I put together a memorandum by the end of the week that analyzed the suitability of a foreign country for investment. I found that writing the memo itself was quite difficult as almost too much information exists on the country, but nevertheless I pushed forward and slowly throughout the week I began to shape what looked like a half-decent memo. Around 3:00 Friday I finally finished the memo to the best of my ability and turned it into my boss for any revisions or corrections. After around 30 minutes I received the revisions, and I was pleased to see that my boss was very happy with the overall memo, and did not have much to criticize. However, he did ask for a very specific graph to be created and inserted into the report. While gathering requested information and creating corresponding graph would normally be a fairly simple task, the format in which the graph was requested meant that it would not be as simple putting together a simple line graph in excel. I did not want to ask my boss or any full time employees because I felt that this was my task and I wanted to be solely responsible for its completion. I struggled as I tried to figure out exactly how to make this graph work in excel, and as time went by I started to feel the pressure as the end of the day got closer and closer. However, just as I was about to give up, it hit me - I remembered that we had learned how to build this exact graph in our excel class last semester. When I was in that class, I remember thinking to myself how useless it was learning how to build this graph because I believed no one actually used it in the “real world”. Needless to say, I was able to put the graph together, effectively finishing the memo.

However, even though I successfully finished the memo, I couldn’t help but being impacted by the thought that I had discounted a learning opportunity just because I didn’t feel that it was useful at the time. I began to wonder what other possibly valuable learning opportunities that I had ignored or chalked up as purely academic. I think it is apparent that sometimes I overestimate my own ability to the extent that I end up trying to decide what is important enough to learn and what isn’t.  However, what I have learned from this is that you never know what you will end up using someday, so you should try to learn everything you can. At the very least, you may never use something but you will become a more well-rounded person, and at the most you can use a skill to directly help your work efforts.

Overall, as a result of this experience I will definitely not take the learning opportunities I have at TCU for granted. Instead, I will try to “soak up” everything to the best of my ability because I have learned that you never know what you will and won’t use, so you should try to take advantage of every learning opportunity.