Part 1 - Helping People - Part 2 - What College Has Taught Me - Part 3 - Money
2) BTG as compliment to my education.
I love my university. I love my studies, I love my books, I love the people and the environment.
But at the end of the day, every single person sitting in the room with you will know exactly what you know, which is exactly what every other student in every other school will know: everyone is learning the exact same thing.
Students are, in this sense, no different from one another, and thus unable to compete with one another. And I knew that though my grades were high, there would always be someone whose grades were HIGHER, and that that simple fact would be enough to keep me, perpetually, in second place.
Finance is a competitive field, and there is no second place for top spots. I decided I needed a competitive advantage, and that competitive advantage would be knowledge. I would simply have to know more.
So I began reading, and watching, and listening to everything I could find. I started at my school’s library, and by snooping around for talks and presentations and extra certifications my school made available to its students. My personal and professional growth has been explosive: in the four and a half months since I started BTG, I have learned more about certain areas of my field than I had in a year of formal schooling. Much, much more.
My advice to new college students is this: study hard, you need to know your core material. You must know what everyone else knows, or else you might as well not even be in the race. But college/university is what you make of it, the core curriculum is only there to make sure you get the needed basic information to function in your role. To be exemplary, personally and academically, you have to seek out the opportunities that the university can offer. If these are unsatisfactory or insufficient, create your own opportunities. For me, this also lead to the creation of BTG.
3) BTG As Proof Of My Competencies
I’d like this part to serve as a warning and a hope to new college/university students: grades are important, but so is your integrity. You’ll see why in a minute. Upon realizing that I and my fellow students were all learning the same thing, and therefore were unable to compete against one another, I realized that the school would have to have some way of distinguishing our individual competencies.
Enter the GPA.
And the cheating.
I genuinely believe that my university is doing their best to prevent cheating, and to catch and discipline those who do.
I’m not naïve enough to think nobody cheats (though naïve enough not to be aware of the creativity in such endeavours), but I was still shocked one day when, in a study group, someone asked how they were supposed to learn this stupid formula by tomorrow, it was like, soooo long.
I told her to write it out 100 times. Someone else said she should write it on the back of the bathroom door.
I was appalled.
Though I consider cheating when you have a fair chance of “winning” a cowardly, lazy act, what abhorred me was actually the selfishness inherent to the act. I hope the selfishness on the part of the cheaters is simply because of their ignorance of how their cheating affectes their fellow students, rather than their apathy.
It has to do with the bell curve.
It’s a way of evening out the grade distribution. Basically it means that I can have my actual deserved grade raised or lowered based upon the strength and number of the group. Most teachers use this grading scheme, great teachers do not.
This is because great teachers know that, in addition to actually giving students the marks they deserve, for some students it can mean the difference between one grade or another, and to me it may have been the difference between a 3.43 GPA and a needed 3.5. I still feel to this day that I was rejected from an incredibly elite portfolio management opportunityd ue to my inability to obtain a that extra 0.07th of a point (because there is SUCH a distinction between a 3.43 and a 3.5). I don’t blame the system for this rejection: for this I stick the blame squarely on myself: too much video gaming and not enough studying.
But when I began to think about it, how much of that 0.07th of a point that I was missing could be attributed to someone who snuck the answers in under their t-shirt?
For me it just meant I no longer had access to an extra (though lucrative) opportunity, but for some it can mean the difference between passing or failing (and having to pay again to take a course), between academic glory or probation, between keeping and losing a scholarship.
All this because some knuckle dragger couldn’t be bothered to spend ten minutes memorizing a formula, and because we have a system that seeks to smooth out a distribution. 
It’s a quietly disastrous combination.
I now reject the GPA as a means of determining competence. I spent some time being disillusioned, and then took action.
Employers and prospective clients would need some way of objectively determining my competence in my field, something that as more objective and more informative than the easily influenced GPA. Why not then simply show them the scope of my knowledge, with BTG acting as a virtual CV and database of my competence?
Of course, the reason I want employers and clients to know my competencies is because I want them to have confidence when they hire me; I want them to know in advance exactly what they will get. This is, of course, because I want them to hire me, which brings us to the fourth reason why I started BTG, MONEY. Let’s find out more in Part 3!
Part 1 - Helping People - Part 2 - What College Has Taught Me - Part 3 - Money
Yesterday while perusing Facebook, I found that one of my friends was particularly anguished.
