No Sweat Kosinski
I was changing planes at O’Hare Airport recently and crossed paths with a friend from high school named No Sweat Kosinski. No Sweat’s real name is Aloysius; he’s a nice Polish boy who grew up in St. Michael’s Parish on the southeast side of Chicago, less than a mile from Lake Michigan and the steel mills.
A classmate of ours gave him the nickname “No Sweat” during final exams freshman year. While everyone else was sweating out finals, No Sweat was cool. Nothing seemed to perturb him; he was always unflappable. He traveled to the beat of his own drummer, indifferent to the peer pressure that so influenced me and most of our classmates. No Sweat was the perfect nickname for him and nobody ever called him Aloysius.
Turns out No Sweat was pretty smart. He earned bachelors and masters degrees back to back, and when his kids were in high school, he went back to college and earned a degree in creative writing. He’s mostly retired now, living in North Carolina like a lot of other Chicagoans who got tired of the cold and snow.
Though I hadn’t seen him in more than 30 years, we clicked right away and we’ve carried on a steady stream of conversation via email since that chance meeting in Concourse C at O’Hare. No Sweat doesn’t blog, you won’t find him on Facebook and he doesn’t have a LinkedIn account. But he’s had some thought-provoking things to say in his emails and he’s given me permission to share some of them.
Yesterday, I got an email from No Sweat in which he mused about the value of a college degree and the high unemployment rate among recent college grads. Here’s some of what he had to say; he poses an interesting question at the end of his musing.
“In the last month, I’ve read three op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal about the declining value of the degrees recent college grads are earning. The articles claim colleges are turning out graduates without the skills to compete for jobs, that the courses students are taking aren’t rigorous and too many of today’s graduates are earning degrees in fields that leave them unemployable. I think these editorials are overlooking an important point. College shouldn’t be a trade school; it should be a place where you learn to reason, to form a point-of-view and be articulate enough to defend that point-of-view orally and in writing.
No doubt, you’ve heard the expression ‘companies hire for skills and fire for fit.’ If that’s the case, interpersonal skills and empathy are critically important competencies to succeed in the real world. I’m not aware of any courses or degree programs that teach these competencies.
Take an inventory of the 40 courses you took to earn your undergraduate degree and ask yourself, which of those courses really taught you to think? Which ones truly prepared you for the world of work? I’ve done this exercise and concluded that just twelve of my forty classes, fewer than one in three, really made me exercise my brain. It’s not the classes you take or the degree you pursue, it’s the quality of the teaching and the rigor of the classes that counts.”
I took No Sweat up on his challenge and determined that just ten of my classes made the cut. None were in my major and only my statistics and accounting classes were business school classes. What were some of the others? Economics (micro and macro), two writing classes, speech, math, philosophy and, believe it or not, the art history class I took because I thought it would be an easy ‘A’ (what an eye opener that one was).