It Takes More Than That (an ivy-league school degree)

I was reading the article of "Any College Will do" by Carol Hymowitz from WSJ this morning. This article was on the Free Features two days ago, you probably need to have a WSJ subscription to read it now. Anyway, to sum it up, the writer suggested that it is not necessary to have an ivy league degree in order to be a CEO of a company.

Based on the article, there are several key characteristics the CEOs considered as more important than the ivy league degree:

1. Your drive to success---"What counts most--is a person's capacity to seize opportunities". Like I said before, you use the college degree in order to get your feet into the door of the company you want to work for. After that, it's really up to you/me to deliver the result and stay competent.

2. Be a true "underdog"--"You can go to a top-end school and end up dramatically unerperforming, or you can go to a place that cares and blow away what everyone thinks." said Bill Green, CEO of Accenture.

From my experience, I can assure you where you go to school does make a HUGE difference on how your perform academically. I was being placed to study at a "top 5" Junior College in Singapore by the Singapore government for two years, the dynamics was so streesful and competitive there and I ended up being the bottom of the class.

Yet, when I came to US to study actuarial science, I became the top 7% of the class. The reason I mentioned this is not because I want to brag. The reason is that when you are studying in a school where the professors and staff give me more attention and care about your study, you feel important and you start to believe in yourself, and hence you do better in school!

3. Work ethics---According to Richard Tedlow, a business historian at Harvard Business School, he said, "a lot of people who earn degress from tier-one universities and business schools aren't willing to start at the bottom of a huge company."

Perhaps some people may think that if you have the right connections, know the right people, being in the right place at the right time, all the problems will be solved and you don't have to put in efforts. However, sometimes we do need to get our hands dirty and work hard so that we can get ahead by generating results and offering values.

Interestingly, though some CEOs did not go to a pretigious university, they went to some top-tier schools for graduate degrees (eg MBA and Law). Definitely a degree from an ivy league schools opens up a lot of doors and maybe those CEOs realised that later on.

It's good that if you have a glamorous degree, the bottom line is this--"it's what you achieved that counts, not what you were at 21."