Have I been living under a rock all this time? I have been too engrossed in living my life here in KL that 2 years and 8 months have passed since I last went back to Singapore. Where did all that time go to? All this while I thought that ‘how time flies’ was just a figure of speech!
I also just found out today from the ICA website that I have not kept my end of the bargain in the 1 year minimum requirement for me to stay in the island state. With 4 months more to go before my permanent residence in Singapore expires, I am not so sure whether or not the Singapore government will consider renewing my PRship.
On the other hand, my life hasn’t been all that smooth sailing in the past 2 years and 8 months as well. The only thing that went well for me was my MBA which up to today, I have managed to finish 8 out of 9 subjects and now left with 1 more subject to go and a thesis before I can finally add that 3 alphabets after my name and start chasing bigger dreams, dreams I had wanted to chase in Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom or even in the United States.
I was there over the weekend, accompanying a friend to a job interview he setup with a new company based out of Singapore. After the Star Cruises experience last year, I had came to realize the importance of going with conventional wisdom and mainstream choices when it comes to choosing which field you want to be in when you were in Uni or in school.
When I was in Uni in Australia in the 90s, all I thought of was taking the easy courses so that I could do my best not to drop out and graduating as soon as possible so that I could go home to see my family a few thousand miles away. Since we were studying the easy courses (business!), we used to have a good laugh at friends who were struggling in their engineering or architecture or even accounting courses, burning the midnight oil trying to stay awake cramming for their examinations. Look at where they are and who they are today! At this point I wish I studied finance or some useful degree back then.
Specialist skills is just as important as wearing a condom if you are not expecting a kid. If I were wise old sage talking to young kids while seating atop a very high mountain in Tibet I would say this: “Don’t listen to the wanker who tells you that you should follow your dreams and go to university to study business, or commerce or management and marketing as a degree.” What you have to go thru the next 10-20 years after that might just be what I am going thru today, totally unsure about the future.
Unless you are lucky to become somebody famous like my Uni mates Joey Yap, the famous feng-shui master or Kid Chan, the celebrity photographer, chances are you’d have to work your ass off from a very low place in a company who wouldn’t understand why they need to pay you the one thousand bucks extra a month just because you graduated from an overseas university when they can pay 2 ‘O’ levels grads to do the same job as what you are doing.
Courses like Accounting, or Finance or Banking or even Electrical Engineering never sounded cool back when I was in university. To us they were reserved for geeks and nerds. Well if we only knew what would happen 10 years down the road, we wouldn’t be thinking the way we did back then.
I am not saying all that overseas education taught me nothing, after all, I was in a managerial position in my last job, I was just not satisfied with the choices that were made back then. And we thought we knew it all!
I got this from the Straits Times in Singapore. It was an article by Su Guaning, the president of Nanyang Technological University in his address to the Student Network Forum.
I would like to share with you this view of employability by the founder of Visa International, Dee Hock:
“Hire and promote/First on the basis of integrity;/Second, motivation;/Third, capacity;/Fifth, knowledge;/And last and least, experience”
“Without integrity, motivation is dangerous;/Without capacity, understanding is limited;/Without understanding, knowledge is meaningless;/Without knowledge, experience is blind./Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”
Your time in university is about acquiring knowledge to help you in your chosen career. Do not simply become a passive recipient of knowledge. Isn’t that meaningful? I wish this guy had came around 10 years ago and told me that.
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