Writing Feedback / GRE Essay Specialisits Vs Generalists [5]

Good day everyone,

I'd really appreciate your feedback/suggestions for improvement on the following GRE general essay. 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, 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 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 by having approximately one year of 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 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 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 covering everything a project needs, the quality of a multi-disciplined project would be significantly higher than generalists 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. As a result, specializing even further by pursuing a master 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.