Life-Changing Decisions

While having lunch, a colleague asked me some very interesting questions and feedback with regards to Singapore education especially students. My colleague is from Indonesia and he completed his colege studies before arriving in our little island for his degree in Engineering. He mentioned to me that polytechnic students in his course seems to be able to get into momentum much easier than college students.

My colleague was on a contract, and he is looking to get a permanent position in the front operations of my company as compared to the back operations. He felt quite bad as he already knew that he will not be offered a front operations position due to the fact that there are better candidates than him. He is an engineering student and currently we are in the financial sector. In fact i pretty much believe that he actually has an edge in another sense. It is not difficult to be part of the financial sector regardless of the degree you hold, but it will be almost impossible for any person with a business or financial degree to have a part in the engineering sector. Since this is the case, i will believe that it is more logical to have a specialised degree for a specialised industry. With that, you will probably be more versatile in terms of the task you may be able to perform in any job. At least this is my perspective, but anyone can disagree with their own rational.

A question was popped to me with regards to the process that i went through to make a decision to enrol myself in a polytechnic instead of a junior college. The very simple answer will definitely be that i do not enjoy wearing uniforms and adhering closely to school hours. Any polytechnic can provide me with a more flexible education. As far as this question dependable on individual views, i have always believed strongly that a decent polytechnic student with good attitude should be able to do better than a college student. Pretty biase views, but until now i still believe in it. Lets put things in perspective. A polytechnic student spends 3 years to complete a diploma, but a college students spends 2 years. Sound like an advantage, but what if the polytechnic student decides to pursue a degree closely similar to what he/she did for diploma? He/she will probably get a 1 year exemption to go to year 2, and that puts he/she right back with the college people. On top of that, he/she will probably already have decent experience in doing what everyone is supposed to do for their course. This seems like a quick comeback by the diploma holder. There can be hundreds and maybe thousands of scenarios that a person will probably be able to come up with to rebut my reasoning against college students, but this scenario definitely still stands. There is also another saying, which can be a logical rationale. In this little island, having a diploma is not enough to get you anywhere unless you are doing sales. What happens if a college student did not make it through 'A' Levels? Theres actually quite a handful of such people who drop out of college to join a polytechnic after a year.

Please do not feel too personal against the post above as it is just a way to look at things. You may appreciate it as something that was never brought to your attention before or you can just take it personal. It is afterall just a blog post about my views about life that affects my decisions. At least my colleague nods in agreement with me although his a college student. It was not even emphasised that college students tend to be more arrogant as brought up in my previous blog post.