08/09/2026
If you are still in university, my advice is to waste some time intelligently.
I mean it.
Take a course that has nothing to do with your degree. Join a student organisation. Try journalism and see if it’s something you’d like to do. Learn to code and discover you hate it. Volunteer somewhere. Start a small business that fails. Help organise an event. Contest an election if that is your thing. Sit in a lecture in another department. Make friends with people studying things you know nothing about.
University is one of the few periods in life when you can try many things badly without the consequences being too expensive. Once rent, family, career and other responsibilities arrive, experimentation becomes more costly.
So experiment now.
But don’t spend four years only experimenting. At some point, start paying attention to the clues.
What do people repeatedly come to you for?
What do you seem to understand faster than others?
What kind of work can hold your attention for hours?
What have you done that made you think, I could actually become very good at this?
Follow those clues and start building some depth.
And before you graduate, have something outside your transcript that you can point to.
Not 27 certificates from webinars. Something you actually did.
Maybe you wrote five really good articles. Built a small app. Ran a business. Analysed a dataset. Led a student organisation well. Produced a podcast. Worked on a research project. Managed a campaign. Built a community. Interned somewhere and left evidence that you were useful.
Just don’t arrive at graduation with a CV whose entire argument is: “I went to university.”
And while doing all of this, learn to respect process.
Don’t be in too much of a hurry to skip the boring parts. Write the bad first draft. Sit through the long meeting. Prepare the spreadsheet. Organise the logistics. Get corrected and do the work again.
You learn things in the process that the final outcome never shows you. You discover how things actually work, where you are weak, what you are unusually good at, and why some things that look easy from the outside are not.
We sometimes want the outcome without the process that produces it.
It is in doing the work that we mine gold.
Also, meet people.
Not the forced “networking” where everyone is trying to collect important people’s phone numbers. Build actual friendships. Your classmates will scatter into different industries, countries and institutions. Ten years from now, the person sitting beside you in an economics class may know something or someone you need, and vice versa.
Read too. Please read.
You have access to a university library and more intellectual freedom than you may have again for a while. Don’t spend all of it on TikTok and lecture notes.
And don’t panic because somebody in 300 level already has a startup, 14 certificates and “Founder & CEO” in their bio.
You are allowed not to have your life figured out at 21.
The goal is not to graduate with a perfectly designed career. It is to leave university more curious, more capable, with some evidence of what you can do and a slightly better idea of where your abilities might take you.
And please enjoy university too.
Life will become serious soon enough.
Akintunde Babatunde
