Could you please check my essay? I'd appreciate any comments and suggestions. Thanks
* The essay is a response to the following statement "In our time, specialists of all kinds are highly overrated. We need more generalists—people who can provide broad perspectives." Thank you very much for your help.
At this age of human development
(This is called "fluff". It doesn't add anything except extra words to the essay.), many people wonder whether humans have improved to such an extent that being a specialist is no longer sufficient. Some people claim that society should change educational systems
(Maybe change the educational systems - this means to alter the system. You are saying that we should get another system.) in order to produce generalists rather than specialists. However, the current state of training in industry and academia is trending towards producing more and more specialists which indicates that specialists are more valuable than generalists.
In
the industry, most employees start their carrier
s by
having doing approximately one year of
an internship (training). Usually, an employee is rotated in his company's divisions to gain experience and to be exposed to as many available jobs related to the employee
's discipline as possible. This helps the employee to decide what job he would like to advance in and ultimately specialize in. Therefore, although giving a general idea about available jobs is necessary for an employee to make up his mind about the job he loves, he has to specialize and continue with a single job in the end. This demonstrates that
the industry usually encourage
s specializing in one discipline over having general knowledge about all disciplines. Had generalists been more beneficial to industry than specialists, it would have been the opposite way around.
Provided with
an adequate management, specializing does not have to lead into narrowness and isolation. For example, looking at the big picture, if you have enough specialized
indivisuals individuals covering everything a project needs, the quality of a multi-disciplined project would be significantly higher than
if generalists
were working on the same project.
Another example that shows that specialists are more important than generalists is the system of academic institutions. Based on the work demands and needs of different countries, academic institutions are structured such that each student should decide what major, aka speciality, he is going to study. Some exceptional individuals may study more than one major, but those majors are often directly related to each other. Nevertheless, there is no student in the world who can possibly digest and assimilate all of the knowledge in any given discipline
(Be careful here. There might be one person in the high Andes who could do this.). As a result, specializing even further by pursuing a master
s and/or PHD degrees is an appealing option for most students.
To conclude, while the prospect of viewing the world through a broad perspective may seem more beneficial and attractive for some people, both
the industry and academic institutions adopted specialization and proved that it is a better solution for up to date problems and challenges. Specialists have driven technology forward and taken a step ahead every year while generalists are still hard to find
(Let me see - The founder of Apple Computer was not a computer specialist as there were few computers around when he started the company. The founder of Microsoft quit college to make money - he did just that. Henry Ford developed the Ford automobile yet he lacked formal education in automotive design. The point is that generalists make things happen, they create new things and then specialists come in to modify these new inventions.