Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Meaning
Freddy used to be one of my favourite trainers at Adam Khoo's. He's not exactly that good-looking, he's relatively old, and I can totally see him faking his enthusiasm when dealing with primary school kids, but he was doing his job, and he's really good at it. Combining childish jokes with serious messages, he's good.
I remember his opening message. He wrote on the board, proclaiming:
"Studying is meaningless!"
,much to the cheers and enthusiastic claps of the children. (The teacher sitting behind was smiling, frowning and shaking her head at the same time, of course.)
When the cheers gradually softened, he said,
".. unless you know what you want to do with it."
That quote struck me.
It was end of year 2 then. It triggered me thoughts on why am I here in NUS, and specifically, why am I majoring in econs.
Learning? After 2 years in NUS economics, I've seen enough to conclude that most of what I learnt in school would not apply to my work in the future. Economic policy planner? The models we learn give us a basic concept, but they are too superficial. The most useful thing I learnt was perhaps econometrics, mainly on how to deal with numbers and statistics.
That brings me to the 'signalling' model I've studied in Micro and Labour Economics. According to the model, studying DOES NOT improve your productivity, it merely filters and let the 'high ability' people 'signal' themselves to be as such. Hence the different kinds of academic qualifications, and the different kinds of honours class.
In the real world, of course, this is grossly unfair. There are certainly capable people who do not have a university degree, and of course, incapable people who has a university degree. But the plain fact is the world has chosen this as the signal of ability, and you have to obtain this signal to be rendered 'good', no matter whether you really are.
That steered my direction immediately. Sadly, even though I was still stimulated by some of the modules I've learnt, I've dropped things I know I couldn't score, e.g. i did not take Malay 3, and I took 'easier to score' modules like soci stats, pysch stats despite not aiming to learn much from them.
Actually I'm not sure why I typed this post. Just wanted to share how I made something meaningless to something more 'meaningful', no matter how superficial the reason was.
lowtide blogged @
1:54 pm
