Warren buffet says the best investment that you can make is to invest in yourself. That can be done through reading books, through school, and getting a degree. But learning from online courses is the easiest and most convenient way of learning available to most people. That’s why in this article I want to put forward the five free courses that you must take in 2021. If you are in college it does not matter, if you are in computer science, electrical, mechanical, chemical whatever degree you have you must take these five courses. These courses will provide you with real-life practical knowledge that would be essential to your growth once you get out of college and get into the work environment. So these five amazing courses are listed below in random order.
1. Learning how to learn:
The best course to start with would be Learning How To Learn. This course is available on Coursera. It was started by Barbara Oakley, she teaches at the University of San Diego California, and she does a fantastic job of breaking down what learning really means. How does learning really happen? How does it start? How does the brain really work? In India, we only focus on the concept of memorization as much as possible, but there are other efficient ways to learn something. And she talks about all of these things. I think it’s really insightful for us people to learn about, because this will help you in your academics if you are in college, and it would just be a great experience for you learning about how the brain works? How to retain whatever you’ve learned for a long period of time? She has fantastic conversations with people and professors who are doing amazing research in the field of the brain and just learning about the dynamic of learning. So this is an amazing course you should definitely take a look at that is available on Coursera and yes you can avail Coursera courses for free. There can be three scenarios, chances are the course you want to avail is already free which means you can avail the courses, but you won’t get the certificate, and the second way is you have to apply for financial aid for the particular course and the third way is you can use your college’s custom Coursera platform (you might need to ask you college for this).
2. The Science of Well Being:
The second course is going to be the Science Of Well-Being by Dr. Laurie Santos. She works at Yale University and this is a course that has been provided from Yale to us on Coursera for free. In this course she goes into depth and talks about what happiness is, and what do you think makes you happy, is it money, is it relationships, is it your life partner, what is the one thing that will truly make you happy. She conducts some workshops, surveys and speaks with the students at Yale. Here you would find answers to issues like let’s say your happiness level was x when you were making one lakh rupees per month and how your happiness level would be affected when you make two lakhs per month, would it be 2x would it be 1.5 x would it be 3x. So she has done some amazing conversations, you would find more of a conversation that you’re having with some elderly person. This is one course that will teach you a lot about what happiness is and how you can find true happiness and what you should be looking out for in your life if you want to be happy.
3. CS50 by Harvard’s Professor David J Malan:
The third course is called CS50. CS50 is a course that is taught by Harvard’s professor David J. Malan on the YouTube channel of CS50 itself. Everyone should take a look at this course because first this course is taught in a way that anyone can understand the concepts. You do not have to be a computer science student to understand it. You would find many people around you who have already listened and I made notes of this course. It has been short like a movie. David J. Malan has some fantastic speaking skills, he keeps you captivated and focused on what he’s talking about in the complete session, which is around two hours per class and they have 13 classes going. Here he talks about what is computer science, what is python, what is backend development, what is front end development, what is web development, what is android development, what are algorithms, how can you create algorithms. The basics of everything have been covered. This course is for all, even if you are not planning on being a software developer you must have basic computer science knowledge and this course will help you out with that.
4. Finance for Everyone Specialization:
The fourth course is called Finance For Everyone. Finance For Everyone is a specialization on Coursera which you can take a look at to understand personal finance that this will teaches, how to find value in something, what is debt, what is good debt, what is bad debt, how should you understand the interest rate, what are banks, how banks function, what are economies, how do they work. In addition to that you will also get to learn about markets, the stock markets and how you can assess the value of a stock, the flow of assets through businesses, governments, and other institutions; and the commodity, bond, and equity market dynamics that create and destroy financial value. When you finish the Specialization, you’ll be able to better understand both global financial news and your financial arrangements.
5. Successful Negotiation:
The sixth course that you should take a look at and is going to be Successful Negotiation. This course is available on Coursera and this course has an astonishing way to explain to you how you can negotiate with some business in a business deal and how you can even negotiate for a higher pay whenever you’re in an interview and understanding how negotiation really happens. This is something really important. Our parents are great at negotiation, but we are not so good at negotiating so I think this course is crucial for us to learn how we can extract more worth from things. It is an amazing course that all of us should take a look at and in fact there’s a book also on that that is titled Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss.
Here, the idea was to get some practical advice. Most of us go into colleges, and you get enrolled in a bunch of courses and the problem with those courses is that they will teach us technical subjects but that alone is not going to get you ready for life itself. So these courses would be really amazing for students to learn about practical life skills. I really enjoy what Warren Buffet says, and he says that the best investment that you can make is an investment in yourself.
Just to give you a better understanding here is a story. I had a friend of mine who got 1000 rupees as pocket money from their parents, and then he thought he can actually buy a pizza from this and he can eat that pizza. But I intervened and said that okay like you can definitely do that the pizza would be amazing but consider this maybe you take 500 rupees, and you buy yourself a digital marketing course or any other course you would like from Udemy or other websites, and you can learn our new skill. And then once you have a skill you can monetize that skill by getting yourself an internship, he did that he got his digital marketing internship, and he started with 5000 rupees immediately a 10x return right 500 rupees invested in addition to some efforts and time. This is what I wanted to convey, invest as much as you can into learning skills at this point in time. This is the best thing that you can do with the little money that we students are making.
