How To Keep Learning After College

Education is an important facet of human life, but we don’t always appreciate the process of being taught until later in life. Experts recommend delaying higher education for this very reason. However, many people do come to not only appreciate learning, but also learn even more. College is a logical endpoint to formal education, because it prepares a person for working life, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the road in terms of learning. If you’re interested in pursuing education beyond college, here are some ways you can accomplish this goal.

Develop a New Skill

Though you may have arrived at a job specialization via education, there’s no reason not to have other passions. In fact, most people have hobbies, and many people pursue them, even if it doesn’t benefit them financially. Developing the skills involved in your hobby are a great way to learn new things, because you’re ostensibly learning on two levels. Procedural memory is simply the knowledge of how to do things, which is a kind of passive memory that pertains directly to learning and retaining skills. Semantic and episodic memory, on the other hand, correspond to knowledge of facts and events, respectively. Learning a new skill will typically exercise a mixture of these different types of memory. For example, if you attend a truck driving school, you will learn the information involved in operating a truck, but you will also develop the reflexive ability to operate a truck.

Seek Reference Material

“Reference material” is a phrase that refers, typically, only to books and other sources for academic information required throughout their academic career. However, there are plenty of reference materials that don’t fit into your school curriculum covering every imaginable topic, and even a variety of media. A trip to your local library will expose you to countless learning opportunities in the form of myriad scholarly articles, for example. With the advent of the internet, information is more widely available than ever before. Many of the documents you can find in a library can also be found online, and even YouTube is now a source of educational content, at least in some corners of the platform. Always be wary when using the internet for extracurricular learning, as some of the information you come across may be incorrect or misleading, whether that be because of a lack of knowledge or willful misrepresentation. You will want to weigh your findings against multiple sources for the best possible results.

Pursue Higher Degrees

While a college degree marks the end point for most, there are still formal education opportunities available to you after earning your undergraduate degree, hence the name. There is, for starters, a hierarchy of degrees marking a linear progression to the master’s degree, which means attending more advanced universities for several more years. Each step up in this hierarchy also translates to more job opportunities that also tend to pay more. There are also medical schools that exist not to expand one’s general knowledge, but, rather, to train them to be a medical doctor. This path is not contained within the traditional hierarchy of higher education, but it is adjacent to it.

Become a Professor

There is a metric for how well you understand something that hinges on whether or not you can convey it to someone else. By that logic, a professor must have at least a cursory knowledge of everything they teach. Becoming a professor would be, perhaps, the ultimate learning opportunity, as it requires a degree to even be eligible for the position, and it also requires you to know a great deal of information that will almost certainly expose you to new information over time. This is probably why people become professors in the first place: because they love knowledge genuinely and completely.

Education is a precious resource that can radically transform someone’s life, whether that be because of increased job prospects or because it enriches their personal lives. However, college can feel like the end of the road, and that holds true for the average person. As shown above, education can continue indefinitely after university, as long as you stay curious.