From Classrooms to Newsrooms

If you are a college student and you don't have a clear picture of how you should spend your time at college for a compelling future, this write-up is for you. You have subjects and exams which are good to give you knowledge and check your knowledge but alongwith you, your batchmates are also gaining similar knowledge, and will passout college at same time with you and will be available in the market at same time with you. So how you will be different from them?
Couple of questions you should ask to yourself - How I am different from others in learning and skillset? Which skills I should have which are valuable in the market. What is valuable in the market?
In simple terms a thing is valuable for which there is a demand or you can anticipate a demand. For example if we look at Swiggy - A food ordering app, there was already a demand for restaurants food and people use to eat from restaurant either by dining there or through take away from restaurant by traveling to the restaurant. Due to traffic and restaurant/s being far away, Swiggy's founders anticipated that they could provide an offering where people don't have to take pain of travelling to restaurants to get food, they can order at the comfort of being in their homes by ordering and paying from home. Thus they developed a mobile app and asked restaurants and customers to register on app and give order, track order on Swiggy's order booking application. Of course a lot of things go behind the scenes but starting point is same - determining a valuable vision, plan and execute steps to bring a valuable vision to reality.
So being in college you can analyze your environment and either directly see where the demand is (transactions are happening) or anticipate a demand which is not directly met.(Story of Swiggy as as we have seen above). Start acquiring skills and resources which are required to fulfill your vision. Create a plan now. Start small from today. Keep learning, acquiring skills which are relevant to the vision and build things of value. Eg Acquiring resources, learning mobile and web application development, learning company finance etc. Once you have build for yourself or at a micro scale, trial and test it. After having an MVP (a minimum viable product), deliver those values to end users. Get feedback from them and improve. If your efforts don't give results, don't give up. If one way doesn't work explore on other better ways to do. Analyse and implement on them and learn from experience and move forward. You will find solution. I have also faced hurdles and road blocks, but I explored other ways, studied them, understood them and implemented them. After some trials and errors I got success. Same will be with you.
If you are a finance student study investment banking, buy and sell shares of small amount for yourself, learn the system how it works. Get the required licenses and once you see positive results for yourself you can do for others. Similarly you can do for mutual funds, taxation, ITR filings etc. Follow all legal requirements and you can start as an independent finance consultant helping other people to manage their finance and grow its value.
Learn how to market yourself - One of the definition of marketing is that it is an effort to communicate to others that you/your product or service has a potential value to them, useful to them.
Start analysing your environment, see if there is any need or a problem which people are facing and you can solve for them. Start building your solution and serve those people well with your offering and heart.
All the best!