Summer School: Old Lessons for New Dogs
☀️ It's summer. You should be at the beach. But instead, you're taking “Strategic Service Management” on Zoom with a professor who still thinks the cloud is a weather phenomenon. And you’re wondering: Why are we learning frameworks that were invented before we were born… on PowerPoint slides that haven’t been updated since 2004?
Let’s talk.
🐶 New Dogs, Old Tricks?
If you’re a college student today, you’ve grown up in a world of swipe-left simplicity, infinite personalization, and AI that finishes your sentences (and your assignments, if you’re clever enough).
So it makes sense that when someone says “service management,” your brain quietly mutters: Is that like Uber, or what IT does when my Wi-Fi dies?
The truth is: most service management frameworks taught today were designed for a world of fax machines and floppy disks. They’re loaded with acronyms. They assume you work in a giant beige building where “collaboration” means sending a strongly worded email and hoping it gets lost in someone’s inbox.
🎓 Why You Should Still Care
Here’s the deal: whether you become a founder, a product manager, or a freelance llama groomer with a TikTok side hustle, you’re going to be managing services.
Helping people get what they need
Delivering outcomes, not just outputs
Solving problems, creating experiences, staying in business
And the better you understand the invisible plumbing behind how services work — the roles, the processes, the value loops — the more control you’ll have over your future.
🚀 Enter: The USM Method
Now for the cool part.
There’s a modern way to learn all this without drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and soul-crushing flowcharts.
It’s called Unified Service Management (USM) — and it’s not just for IT. It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for managing any service, from campus food trucks to AI startups.
USM teaches you:
How to design a service from the outside in
How to run a simple, scalable system that works at every level
How to spot broken logic (and fix it before the robots learn it)
It’s the system behind the system. And it’s so universal, even your student org can use it to stop arguing about who forgot to book the meeting room.
🧠 Want to Learn It? It's Free.
The best part? There’s a free Online Learning Environment built just for students and educators, courtesy of a non-profit foundation. It’s got:
Flash lectures (shorter than your Reels)
Exercises and templates (drag, drop, dominate)
Tools and videos to help you make sense of it all
You can learn it in a weekend. Use it for a class project. Put it on your resume. Or just flex it next time someone complains about “how nothing works around here.”
👉 Learn more: https://usm-portal.com/project-leermiddelen-servicemanagementmethode/
🌊 Final Thought: Don’t Just Learn Tools. Learn Systems.
You already know how to use apps. You grew up with them.
But apps change. Fads fade. Acronyms die horrible, acronym-y deaths.
What stays? Systems. Roles. Structure. Flow.
Understand the system, and you can master the service. Even if your professor still thinks TikTok is a kind of peppermint.
🧃Enjoy your summer. Stay curious. Learn like a rebel. And remember: the best trick a new dog can learn… is how to teach the old ones something new.
#SummerSchool #USM #StudentLife #ServiceManagement #SystemsThinking #CollegeHumor #FutureReady