By Edward DuCoin, Co-Founder of Orpical Technology Solutions & Professor at Montclair State University.
At the end of last semester, a student of mine wrote a sentence I have not stopped thinking about.
“Because of this class, I am no longer waiting for permission to be a professional.”
It was not dramatic. It was diagnostic. After four months of an undergraduate marketing course, what this student walked out with was not a framework or a model. It was a realization: he had been waiting for a degree, a title, a hiring manager, some invisible authority, to declare him ready, and the waiting was only himself.
I teach undergraduate business classes at Montclair State University. Every semester, I assign a final reflection that asks students what they actually learned, what surprised them, and what they intend to do differently. Reading those reflections is the most useful pedagogical exercise I do. The students share with me what landed and what did not, and often they tell me that what landed was not what I had planned to teach.
This year, a single theme threaded through nearly all of the assessments. The word my students used was permission. More precisely, they wrote about the cost of waiting for it.
The students arrived in January believing, without ever quite saying so, that there was a sequence to becoming a professional. First the degree, then the title, then the credibility, then the right to act like one.
The degree was a kind of license that would be issued in some future ceremony, after which they would finally be allowed to act. Speak with authority. Pitch an idea. Call themselves something other than “a student.”
I do not think they were wrong to think this. We, and by we I mean colleges, employers, and the credentialing apparatus generally, have trained them to think it. We have built an elaborate sequence of permissions: prerequisites, GPAs, declared majors, eligibility for upper-division courses, eligibility for internships, eligibility for the senior thesis, eligibility for graduation, and eligibility to put initials after one’s name. By the time a student is twenty, the rhythm of earning the credential, then acting, has been so thoroughly internalized that the alternative, acting first, feels almost transgressive.
What I noticed this semester, more clearly than in past years, is how much actual instruction goes into dismantling that posture.
One student wrote that the most useful thing he learned was that “it was never about me; it was always about them.” He had been writing his resume as a story in which he was the protagonist; his accomplishments, his interests, his ambitions, and had only realized, partway through the semester, that the document was supposed to be about the employer’s problem and how he might help solve it. He rewrote it, sent it out, and had an internship within a few weeks. The mechanics of resume-writing are not the lesson. The shift in posture is. He stopped presenting himself as a candidate awaiting evaluation and started presenting himself as someone with something to offer. He did not need anyone’s permission to make that shift. He had only to notice he was making the wrong move.
A second pattern in the reflections, which surprised me less but moved me more, was about being willing to be wrong out loud. Several students wrote about how hard it had been to speak up in class when they were uncertain, and about discovering, over the course of the semester, that the speaking was the point.
The uncertainty was the point. The students who grew most were the ones who said something half-formed, watched it not go well, and said the next thing anyway.
What strikes me is that these students could see the connection between that small classroom act and a much larger professional one. Speaking up before you are sure is the same as sending the pitch before you are ready, applying for the job before you tick every box, or publishing the essay before you have it perfect, because you realize the 19th draft won’t be better than the 18th. Perfection, they began to see, is a hiding place. It is the most respectable form of inaction available to a young adult. It looks like patience and high standards; it functions as a form of deferral.
Somewhere in the middle of the term, I ask every class some version of the same question: Why not start now? Why not write the article, build the portfolio, pitch the internship, send the message, do the thing you are imagining you will get to after graduation? Several students cited that question as the most useful single thing they got out of the semester, which is humbling, because it is neither original nor sophisticated. It is a small intervention against the assumption that the work begins on a future date.
Their assumption is, on its face, irrational. Nothing structural in their lives prevents them from starting. They have laptops, internet connections, free time, an entire campus full of practice audiences, and a professor actively asking them to start. And yet most of them have not started. They are waiting.
What We Have Taught Them to Wait For
What I have come to believe, after enough semesters of reading these reflections, is that the waiting is the central thing an undergraduate education must dissolve, and that we, faculty and institutions, are uneven at best in our willingness to dissolve it.
The credentialing structure of college teaches students to wait. That is, in fact, a substantial portion of what it teaches them. Sit through the prerequisites. Hit the GPA threshold. Earn the recommendation. Complete the application. Wait to be selected. There are defensible reasons for much of this structure.
Still, the cumulative effect is to convince students, by graduation, that any future they might want has a gatekeeper attached to it, and that their job is to keep performing eligibility until a gate opens.
The students who realize otherwise are not realizing something I taught them in the business curriculum. They are realizing something the structure of college has actively obscured, and something one course was enough to crack open. This transformation must occur in some form throughout every undergraduate’s experience. Whether it does is a function of which professor the student happens to draw, in which course, in which semester. That seems too contingent for something this important.
I would like to take credit for my student’s sentence, but I think he was already done waiting when he wrote it. The class only gave him language for something he had been quietly approaching all semester. That is, I suspect, true of most genuine learning. The student is already moving toward the recognition; what an instructor offers, on a good day, is a vocabulary to name what is happening.
If there is a lesson in this for those of us who teach, it is to ask more often what posture our students are arriving in and whether anything in the course will dislodge it. The content matters. The posture matters more. A student who leaves my class still waiting will have learned the business educational material, possibly very well, and will not use it for years. A student who leaves no longer waiting will be five to ten years ahead of their peers.
The waiting is the assignment. Naming it is the lesson.
Edward DuCoin teaches business at Montclair State University and is co-founder of Orpical Technology Solutions. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
