Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Truth About Life Experience

We all have our schools. Then we move on to colleges. Here we make a choice; go for degree colleges or diploma colleges? If we choose a vocation where special training is required, we choose the former, whereas if the only thing required is a qualification, we choose diploma colleges. There is, however, a third school.

Life experience degrees are all about practicality. It is all about *experience* gained in *life* and hence, life experience degrees. They reward the hands-on experience gained by an individual in his life and vocation. Come to think about it, for a given job, say, computer programmer, two kinds of people may apply – one, absolute fresher who just got out of college with nothing to show but a piece of paper called degree, and the other is someone who is coding for years, a self-taught professional. Who would you trust more? Both know the languages of coding, and the self-taught professional gains in terms of having hands-on experience at coding, which the novice obviously does not. You would probably still go with the novice, just because he is *qualified*. I would say, it is not that he is *qualified*, it is just that he is *certified* qualified. This is where a life experience degree helps.

Life experience colleges award degrees to such candidates who do not possess a traditional degree but are equally, and in most cases, more competent than their degree-d counterparts. These degrees attempt to bridge the divide a mere piece of paper creates, by handing out the same paper to the one who was denied of it otherwise but deserved it more than anyone.

By: Shubhanyu Jain

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