Bitten by the Senior-itis Bug
Yes, I am graduating next year.
For many of my batch, it will come sooner than that, aka end of this year.
Which leaves me thinking hard about where I want to go after this.
It has been an interesting situation, to have been working when my peers were studying, and now studying when my peers are out working.
I’ve been the youngest in my class, close to the oldest in my class, which has resulted being stuck in some kind of a time vacuum or limbo, in some sense. It has been interesting, if only because it has contributed to a certain fluidity in which I ease into any position. I place markers at personal goals, and not by age. Many seniors feel compelled to do certain things by a certain time. I want to be a millionaire and retire (before 30). I want to get a job (before I graduate). There is nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that is what you want, and not something you feel compelled to do, because everybody is doing it. That’s a lame excuse, and makes you seem like sheep.
Having graduated before, the second time round should not seem as scary as the first. But come to think of it, I knew no fear when I first graduated into the working world. It was a come what may, do your best kind of attitude. And look at where it’s taken me.
System hopping
I’ve been in almost every single educational system you can think of, from the strictest, most traditional and academic kind of environment… to the fluid, relaxed and creative sanctuary and of course, institutions that fall somewhere in between. I’ve enjoyed them all to varying degrees.
I suppose the main driver that caused a super introvert like me to throw myself into a system that espoused verbal participation, was the mentality that I wanted to try out something new and break out of my comfort zone. On an aside, I believe that just like learning a foreign language, there is nothing quite as effective as throwing yourself into another country that speaks mainly that language. Only then are you forced to learn, or basically, have to deal with your handicap in various ways. Or sink.
So yes, jumping from system to system was challenging in itself. It would be the same thing each time. Coming in, having to adjust all over again, and then after a while, getting comfortable. I don’t just get comfortable, I get really comfortable. It is always fun to meet people from all walks of life and listen to them, and share with them. And then, inevitably, it is always time to leave.
Let’s get comfortable. (Just not too much)
So N was talking about being very comfortable over lunch a week ago, and I immediately disagreed verbally. Another asked why? I said anyone who is feeling comfortable is never going to move forward. You tend to get so comfortable that you see no need to move from your current position and that is dangerous. I happen to think you should allow yourself to enjoy some comfort, before telling yourself its time to go again.
That is the only way that I can be truly “comfortable” because I’ve accepted change as part of what I crave in the long run.
I guess I would just like to share this sentiment, in which the author states that,
“If the importance of your credential and the prominence with which you advertise it does not decrease with age, you are not achieving or succeeding that much in the real world. Would a successful lawyer begin a letter to a prospective client, “Dear Joe, I graduated from Columbia Law School in 1990″? Of course not. He’d hang his hat on real experiences. Al Gore’s bio on this page doesn’t even mention Vanderbilt or Harvard, two brand names most people would be eager to display. He doesn’t need to. His work speaks for itself.”
How true.
Oh, what’s in a name?
I suppose no one really wants to face the fact that unless you are from an Ivy League school, effectively, the degree that you obtain in Singapore is not that significant when viewed from a global perspective. All that trivial quibbling between the three(or four) universities locally is actually redundant. This post, “Danger in Our Education System, houses several opinions about the state of education locally.
You know, instead of forcing requiring students to go and terrorize help out at the local charitable organizations, it might just be better to have them take modules where everyone gets a chance to travel to a neighbouring country, or some variation of taking them out of their daily lives and opening their eyes. Just to put things in perspective.
If you think about it, corporations could afford to spend less on advertising that just gets lost in the clutter out there or less on their swanky designer furniture, and just pool together their insane amount of resources to help those without the means to just be able to take this trip somewhere. It is just going to translate to better(and hopefully smarter) employees in the long run.
I suppose it is not really in our culture to take a gap year of sorts, to travel the world, to see things and to experience life. This is ironic, when you think about the fact that with Globalization and all that jazz, the world is our oyster like never before. But most people will not have the luxury, but mostly not the intent to “waste” any time on this. It used to be that graduates aspired to get a job after graduation, then it became getting a job before graduation. Now, we’re working even before we graduate.
I don’t know how else to say that rushing to graduate is a worrying trend. Fast trekking to anything is a worrying trend. You can’t get much out of speeding through the learning process, because it still takes ten years to acquire expertise in any field.
Uncertainty and Ambiguity, more Friends than foes
I would also share this mock commencement speech by Mary Schmich, published by the Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1997, possibly forwarded to death, but still encapsulates so much, and of course, sells hope, something of which seniors (or most people for that matter) seem to be in short supply.
“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.”
It seems to me, that the people who know exactly what they want to do with their life, don’t really have much of one, because, they’ve mentally limited themselves to the one thing that they (think that they) want to do. I am not advocating a lifestyle in which you just sit around the fire and roast marshmellows. I am advocating the fact that we need to have some openness in deciding what we want to do with ourselves. Given the current times, maybe you might find yourself in a job that did not exist a mere two years, one month ago. These things slip by easily, when you’re happily doing the one thing that you knew you’ve always wanted to do, and not concurrently looking out at what is happening around you. The sooner you realize that the social landscape is now changing faster than you will ever be comfortable with, the happier you will be. The sooner you understand that people (basically, ourselves) are in general really bad predictors of what and why they are feeling, the better off you will be.
But here I am, living in the future again. Guilty as charged. I end with another quote that I distinctly remember from an IDN conference I attended more than half a decade ago, surely. Joshua Davis. He had a really awesome website that I used to frequent. It was called once-upon-a-forest and was a highly experiemental flash based experience, in the age when Flash was still considered a novelty. The only thing I remembered from the entire IDN conference was that he used to put food colouring in his eye (yes, really!), and his phrase,
“If you have one foot in the past and one in the future, then you’re pissing on the present.”
I wish I had the guts to truly live.
Some of you may be shaking your head at this “display” of idealism. Seemingly. If you must have reasons, blame it on the time of the day, on the lack of sleep.
Still, pure idealism, I don’t believe in. But the kind mixed with rationality, the force that everyone purports to align themselves with, just so they can justify their actions.
Now that, is another creature altogether.
Tags: life, graduation, senior, school, academia, university, future, institutions, joshua davis, travel, experience, commencement, job, career,
i would agree, smu is now more like sheep management university. go to uni, get a job. wow. how exciting – should life only be about a job? having been away for the first half of the year (as you have, too), it is rather disturbing to find that our final year in smu will probably be filled with people chasing jobs rather than what they wish to do. perhaps i am being unfair, and that the jobs are just the means to another end, but seeing how people mutate simply at the fear of not being able to get a job is very tiring, and makes me unhappy. i am not in a position to comment, but the way things have changed.. i always wonder why my friends at nus seem happier.
hmm.. as for cip, think about it – for the comm service report, we are asked to write about whether the experience has made us more receptive to a career in social service, but it blatantly ignores the fact that the same office of career services behooves us to get a job all the time.
i wonder why i choose smu. hmm..
@Harvey: Let me rephrase your question about whether life should only be about a job. I think a job should only be part of life. Unfortunately, maybe Singaporeans in general don’t really have much to fall back on apart from their careers, which inevitably forms a large part of their master identities, who they are. They’d be lost without their job labels simply because they are nothing BUT their jobs.
I am actually rather envious of the “student life” in NTU, or even NUS but I’m sure we have our own merits… like being located right next to the industry for one. Our environment shapes much of how we function, and our city address is pretty much unparalleled… as opposed to being located at the outskirts of town. I’ve heard sentiments expressing doubts about the location of the new uni near the expo for the very same reasons – what can that industrial environment offer (that is different from the others)?
Regarding institutional choice, I don’t regret coming to SMU. While not an entirely clear cut choice in the past, I don’t think I could have grown so much in any other local institution, nor been given the same opportunities that I have been blessed with!
i suppose that is a better way of putting it – and then when you consider that that is exactly what our wonderful uni is actually emphasising, it kind of just gets on my nerves! how different are we, really? perhaps smu is different from nus/ntu, but i believe that we end up being more ‘singaporean’ here than there..
as for the located right next to industry argument, i find that to be a rather weak argument, considering the size of singapore, and the wide range of counter-examples. wharton is a top business school, but it is 2 hours away from wall street, for example. similarly, uva’s business school has been rated as the 2nd best undergrad business school, and it is probably even further away from a lot of ‘industry’.. (of course, it is close to the washington lobbying machine, heh.) if being located in an obscure place is a problem, there would be many other excellent universities and liberal arts colleges that would be doomed to fail, would there not..
perhaps i am over-reacting to an unwelcome change, but who doesn’t? perhaps smu has been good to some people by giving them a sense of direction (ie, a job, although i think this is a flawed compass), but sooner or later, the wheels will fall off.
@Harvey: It disturbs me actually, since there is the public sentiment out there than we are increasingly becoming more like NUS/NTU as time goes by. Some myopic people just bank on the fact that they are graduating, and hence feel it does not concern them. I think they’ve forgotten that whatever their juniors do out there is going to reflect on them, so I don’t really want a bunch of bad apples personifying what an SMU student really is like.
As for being “singaporean”, there are different aspects of being Singaporean I guess! What’s not to say that I am more “singaporean” overseas just because there is a starker contrast between me, and a non Singaporean for example. I guess you are referring to how “KS” students here can be?
I suppose on the grander scale of things, like I mentioned in the post.. out of Singapore, is there really a significant difference as to whether one is from ntu/nus/smu? No. So as mentioned in the post, credentialism will only get you so far… after that, what you accomplish (ideally) takes over.
I have to say that it is different overseas though. First year college students are given far more liberty to mix and match modules, and are accustomed to actually doing some THINKING. Whereas we, on the other hand, have been spoon fed and followed a guided academic path for the most of our lives, contributing to this “anxiety” when we finally graduate… and then the options that we have are seemingly mind boggling. That is why I don’t discredit the industry argument for the specific case in Singapore, because how else are we going to get that experience, or environment to facilitate any kind of thought? Quite different from overseas, is it not? Not just in terms of environment, but also in terms of student composition. UVA had a far more diverse mix of students than we can boast of here, and that in itself also creates a different learning environment that students interact in, not just banking on obscure physical locations itself.
I would just say that at the end of the day, the onus is on yourself to find your own path. Sure, the school can point you in a certain direction, but if you know that it is not for you, nothing but yourself can stop you from pursuing what you want. Maybe most students just feel helpless in this sense, because of that ‘herd mentality’.
We just need to take more responsibility for our own actions. If the wheels fall off, then who was the one who followed a direction as dictated by another? If we don’t follow what was dictated to us, then we are taking control of what we want to do, and any consequences, again our responsibility.
It’s tough being marginalized all the time, but such is life…
hmm. we not really becoming more like nus/ntu – we just simply stopped being smu. smu, when it started, was supposed to be different in terms of intake, in terms of curriculum, and other things. fast forward to now, we have incoming classes full of people with 4As – the achievers that smu once thought would just go on to nus/ntu rather than smu. good for us? i don’t agree.
and based on what i have heard from some professors, their attempts to make the system less singaporean (ie. less tests, more project based learning) failed because the students wanted more exams (more singaporean ma..) and when the students feedback forms make up such a big part of their performance appraisal, the professors find that they have little choice but to comply. in other words, singaporean-ness has entered the system and turned it upside down. i don’t think we can say that we are different any more. the grade chasing, in fact, is not as bad in nus from what i hear. that is the singaporean aspect i speak of – the grade chase, the paper chase. yes, it could be considered the ks thing.. (the here or there in my previous post was here: smu, there: nus/ntu – apologies for being unclear..)
no, i hope that there is no significant difference. however, in the context of our nation, past affiliations count. it happens all the way from secondary school, to junior college, that i think people get used to using schools as a way of pigeonholing people. a previous employer i had preferred to hire full time employees with overseas degrees – and while there is some merit in that.. oh well.
haha. i agree with you. here, we have specific courses and requirements to fill, and even those there is a veneer of being flexible, the courses choices are so limited.. as for spoon fed, hey, look at all the letters every year about junior college students not being able to get a place in university – we have gotten so used to meritocracy that it has been turned in on its head. people think that if they do a, then they are entitled to b, rather than thinking that if they do a to a certain standard, then they are entitled to b. where did those other words go?
you might say that the industry argument fits for singapore because of the difference in academic independence, but do you really feel that smu has benefitted any from just being closer to the ‘industry’? perhaps for corp comms, but to me, all it has done is exacerbated the ‘mustgetajobatallcosts’ mentality.
i think the herd mentality is that even though people know or feel or at least have an inkling that such a life is not for them, they follow because everyone else is doing the same thing – and the irony is, everyone else is possibly doing the same thing because they do the same thing: classic prisoners’ dilemma.. and then, i am not sure if the school is even pointing the students in an appropriate direction.
(the thing is, i fear that many smu people may very well turn around in their lives later on, and think what if, instead of doing what our school seemed to promote, they should have done what they enjoyed. and by then, it will probably be too late.)
thankfully, i know what i want to do. phew.
@Harvey: I guess the most important part for me in your latest reply is the last paragraph.
As long as you know, then nothing else matters, really.
And there is no such thing as too late. Things -might- get harder to do after a certain phase of life, or time, but it’s never too late (pardon me for being cryptic… and excuse the pun) until we are 6 feet under.
@dorothy: oops. it just occurred to me that i should be doing this @ thing. i don’t know if i can say that nothing else matters, because there are so many other things that can affect my happiness – but at least, i am true to myself. hopefully, that will be sufficient. it is never too late, but always too difficult later on. there will always another option, but that option is usually also going to be too distasteful to be considered..
either way, cheers. let’s hope we all have a good life out of this one.
@Harvey: haha. Don’t worry about it. Just one of those things we humans create to ‘regulate’ our lives. Like how some people stop at the red man at traffic lights… even when there is no traffic around.
To the good life.
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