Transferable Skills from School to University

For the past few weeks, university students in Perth have been on their semester break and my tutoring efforts have focussed more on high school students. This has provoked me to think more about the similarities, differences, and transferable skills between high school and university. We tend to use the term ‘transferable skills’ when discussing career changes, but the transition between school and university is similar in many ways.

Content Overlap

Although it is fine for school students not to have everything worked out yet, it is definitely helpful for ATAR students to choose subjects that are relevant to the university course they wish to apply for. For my final years of high school, I studied biology, human biology, and psychology as ATAR subjects, which was a great help when beginning an undergraduate psychology course. It already felt remedial when we had to undertake Scientific Method 101 style units - The ones that teach students the differences between quantitative and qualitative research, the benefits of a randomised controlled trial (RCT), and why your uncle’s Facebook post about microchips in vaccines is dubious.

One of the reasons why a content overlap is likely to occur between your high school subjects and university course is that there is a massive overlap between adjacent fields. In my case, the overlap between various health and social sciences has been of great help. Since completing my psychology course, I have tutored students from various health and social sciences and there is always a great feeling of familiarity. It’s incredible how many different courses address aspects of game theory or the differences between medical, social, and biopsychosocial models of health. The same is true of the relevance of mathematics and statistics to all sciences.

Academic Writing

Using professional language in your writing will begin to feel more natural the longer you have been in academia. Although there can be disciplines specific jargon, academia as a whole can feel as though it comes with its own language. Towards the later parts of high school and into your undergraduate course, you will learn to hypothesise, to derive, to employ a methodology, and to use ‘therefore’ and ‘furthermore’ with alarming frequency. Research has found that students who already have a more advanced vocabulary when undertaking an undergraduate course tend to achieve higher grades and learn further vocabulary more efficiently (Irvin & Blankenship, 2022). This is not surprising when you consider that even writing a formal email can feel awkward to someone not used to doing so.

As well as learning the words you need, your overall writing style and flow will develop throughout high school and continue to improve into university study. I have written before about how writing is an implicit skill and that there is no substitute for practice.

Personal Qualities

Finally, putting your best effort into school, and having your efforts pay off, helps you to develop study skills and a motivation to learn. You may already know that you can achieve better grades by studying harder/smarter, but this knowledge becomes way more powerful once it is backed up by past experience.

References

Irvin, S., & Blankenship, K. G. (2022). Vocabulary & academic success in university undergraduate students. Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences & Disorders, 6(2), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.30707/TLCSD6.2.1660595992.600476