Yeah, the school you go to matters a lot, not because of the academic knowledge that you’ll get there, because that is the easiest thing to acquire in school. The electrical engineering that you study in one university will be the same as that which you study in another. No difference. Unless one university has terrible lecturers and an outdated scheme of work, but other than that, it should be quite easy to do the same thing across several universities and colleges.
This is why a certified engineer is not asked what school he went to, because as long as he has the certificate to prove it, it doesn’t matter if he learned it in Maiduguri or Lagos, the outcome is the same. Students in both states learned the same thing, and any differences observed would solely be on the students themselves or on the lecturers. But not the system.
But sadly, this is where the similarities stop. Because every other thing you learn or acquire in the university depends largely on the school you attend, it can determine the environment you’ll be exposed to. It also determines the people you get to meet and how these connections will shape your future. It’s safe to say that if you didn’t go to the school that you did, you would never have met the people you actually met there, and every decision you’ve ever made based on those connections will be gone as well. Replaced my different people and different choices.
Take me, for instance, I was still a student when I was introduced to Hive. If I hadn’t gone to Nekede, I would never have met the guy who introduced me. But then, since I’m a writer, and I’ve always wanted to earn from writing, I may have found out about it eventually. But this friend cut through all that red tape, and I had smooth sailing during my early days on this platform. If I hadn’t come to Nekede, I probably wouldn’t be a moderator today.
So, I don’t really know for sure. Life in a different school would have been crazy because I would have had different coursemates and different lecturers who would have given me a totally different picture of what life was. It could have been better than what Nekede showed me, or it could have been worse. I guess I can’t know for sure.
So, what am I trying to say? The school you go to matters because it grows you in a way that others won’t. It has something unique to add to your growth, and a different school or even a different department in the same school would expose you to a new path that you’ve never tested, and you’ll be up for a whole new set of discoveries.
In a nutshell, for academic brilliance, all schools are basically the same. But for street smarts, emotional intelligence, financial literacy, and all that, the school itself determines it, and also the people you surround yourself with. So much goes into determining what a good school is, and academic excellence is only a fraction of it.
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