Putting degrees, graduates and universities in perspective
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Title : Putting degrees, graduates and universities in perspective
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Follow your heart, forget the university
And that's just financial services. Let me give you another example. My friend Tara did a degree in engineering but found that she wasn't able to find a job that really suited her. She was obsessed with fitness and did a 'useful' degree only to please her parents - instead of using public transport in London, she would either jog or cycle her way around town. One day, she stopped at a traffic light and saw someone with a really cool bike and started a conversation - it turns out that guy was on a bike that was quite high-end, offering racing bike technology to ordinary commuters who just want to get around town quickly. She tracked down the small bike shop selling those bikes and found out that they were hiring - with her passion for cycling and fitness, she was a great fit for the team. No degree in the world could have prepared her for the job, there isn't a degree in cycling or bicycles. Sure there are degrees in sports science and business that may have had some relevance, but Tara already knew so much about cycling anyway - she didn't need a university or a degree to teach her what she needed to know, she had that knowledge already anyway because it was her passion. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't put too much faith in universities teaching you anything useful - like Tara, you should follow your heart and pursue your passion because you're going to already have a wealth of useful knowledge in the things you're truly passionate about. Tara is doing very well today in that company as part of their business development team.
Start your own business, be your own boss
Ultimately, if you don't want to be judged for your academic record, the best solution is to be your own boss, then you will never have a boss to ask you stupid questions! So staying with the case study of my friend Tara, if I were to look at one of her bikes, I would be more interested in how good the bike is, if the price is reasonable compared to some of the other similar bikes out there, if it is a worthwhile investment - I wouldn't be asking Tara or her boss what university they went to and what their results are. The latter is simply not relevant to my decision as to whether to choose to buy that fancy bicycle or not. If I am getting a quality product at a good price, who cares whether or not Tara had a good degree? Why should that even matter? Starting your own business is difficult - it is bloody hard work, but along with that comes a certain respect from people who realize just how much of a risk you are taking, shouldering all the responsibility of the business and all you employ - that is the kind of accolade that no degree in the world can buy you. It is one thing to prove that you're intelligent enough to get into a top university like Oxford, but being able to start a small business and run it successfully takes a completely different set of skills and is far more demanding. You want respect? Well this is one way to can definitely earn it, but it won't be easy.
There are some things they just can't teach you in university.
Many of my regular readers will know that I work in sales - yes it is within corporate finance but even within financial services, you can come up with the best products and services in the world but without us sales people looking for new business, making sure that we find new clients to spend loads of money with us, the company isn't going to make money. Nobody goes to university to learn how to sell and shockingly enough, there are a few dodgy universities out there who are willing to give you a BA (Hons) in Sales, but I just roll my eyes at the concept of a degree in sales. That's like trying to learn how to swim in a classroom without getting wet rather than in a swimming pool. The kind of sales tactics you require will depend so much on the kind of product you're handling and the kind of customers you're selling to - there is just no way a degree can predict what kind of sales job you will have in the future, so they end up trying to teach you a bit of everything. That means a lot of what you learn will be totally useless and irrelevant to your future job, which makes me think - what's the point of a degree which will be mostly useless then? The best training you can get with sales is actually selling and if you have a good manager, then s/he will guide you along the way and help you climb that steep learning curve quickly.
So let's talk about sales
Sales isn't the most glamorous job in the world but people are attracted to it for one simple reason: money. You can make an insane amount of money if you are a successful salesperson - if you have a good product and the company is willing to offer you a good commission structure, you could potentially be making millions a year in just commission alone whilst your peers are slaving away for a fixed salary - you could make in a month what they make in a year, easily. I had a colleague Chris who was given the job on the basis of the fact that he was an Oxford graduate - sure he was intelligent but could he sell? No, he couldn't - it takes a certain kind of personality to be good at sales, to be able to engage people and most importantly, close the sale. Oh dear, they had to sack Chris eventually as his sales figures were dismal. We're talking about being extremely good with people and that's a gift you're born with. Experienced sales directors know exactly how to recruit the right kind of people onto their sales team because they can identify individuals with the right traits - by the same token, if someone is just not cut out for sales, then no amount of sales training can give them the right kind of skills to excel at sales. By that token, this means that sales directors really don't care if you have a degree or not - as long as you can demonstrate that you have the right kind of personality to be good at sales, they will gladly train you up and give you a chance.
Become a specialist
There are loads of people out there who have very specialist skills in a niche area and there simply isn't a degree out there which can help them - so either they have achieved success in their field without a degree or even if they do have a degree, they'll be the first to admit that their degree is totally irrelevant to their work today. I have talked about a lighting engineer I met years ago - sure there are courses out there to do with lighting design, but the best lighting designers are employed by the best companies in the industry and are being paid millions, compared to the very modest salaries earned by the losers who end up teaching these lighting design courses. This is why I am so very skeptical about learning anything from teachers in general - if they were any good at what they do, then they wouldn't end up as teachers. I'm sorry if that sounds particularly evil but it is so true. So this lighting engineer I met is the expert he is today because he has learnt the best tricks of the trade by working alongside the very best experts in the industry, everything was learnt through work experience. Likewise, I have a friend here in London who is a supplier for the growing vegan market here in the UK - there isn't a business or a F&B course out there specifically dealing with the vegan market, yet she spotted a gap in the niche market and went for it, branding herself as a vegan food specialist. Such is the nature of business: you need to go out there and hunt for opportunities - you can't expect a teacher to teach you how to do things like that in a classroom, so stop putting so much faith in your teachers.
Am I telling you anything new?
Not really - the kind of advice I have offered you above is what actually applicable to most people really. A tiny percentage of each cohort get snapped up by some prestigious scholarship scheme and they get put in a fast track programme to management once they graduate - as for the rest of us, it is simply making the best of whatever we have. We make the best of an imperfect situation and take our chances with the paths we choose. For most of us, we face a somewhat uncertain future and we have to hope for the best whilst being prepared to deal with the worse. That's reality: now what really pisses me off is the way universities over-promise their students what their degrees can lead to in the working world. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that teachers are equally guilty of misleading their students. Oh yes, I do have an axe to grind with teachers here: here's something a lot of teachers are guilty of. If the teacher said, "if you don't do your homework, I will be angry with you but it probably wouldn't matter in the long run as you won't remember any of this in a few years from now - you certainly wouldn't need it in your working life. In fact, I am wasting your time with this stupid crap, you are better off hanging out with your friends and creating some happy childhood memories after school today than bothering with this stupid homework." That's what an honest teacher would say, but oh no, teachers often have big egos and exaggerate the importance of what they teach. "This is vital for your future, if you don't take this module seriously, it would affect your A level results, you won't get into the course in the university of your choice and it will be the end of your dreams - you will be condemned to a life of doing work you hate for too little money; with that in mind, do your homework properly!"
I blame the teachers, the universities and the parents.
Singaporean parents are equally to be blamed for putting so much pressure on their children to excel in school despite the fact that many of them are indeed working adults who have forgotten most of the crap they've learnt at school years ago. Yet they are equally guilty in perpetuating the myth that all you need is a good education and employers will be lining up to give you a good job for life - yeah, that is true if you're like the top 1% who will go to Oxford as a scholar but for the rest of us more normal folks, you can't depend on your academic record to somehow set you up for life. And when I read the marketing bullshit, the badly written lies on the website of crap universities languishing at the very bottom of the league tables, I just roll my eyes and think, "how stupid do you have to be to believe the lies they tell here?" I then think, should the government step in and stop universities like that from doing this kind of advertising, because they are literally tricking stupid people into spending a lot of money on their useless degrees? The government will go as far as to resort to all kinds of measures from plain paper packaging to health campaigns to stop people from smoking - why do they bother to do that? Do we not trust people to be intelligent enough to make up their own minds about smoking - or do we assume that some people are just so very stupid that they should be saved from their own stupidity? If we will do that with the issue of smoking, then why shouldn't the government do the same with universities selling degrees not worth the paper they are printed on?
So whose fault is it anyway?
In short, a lot of people are at fault for blatantly misleading young students today and there's a good reason why this conspiracy persists: education is big business. A university at the bottom of the league table may be giving their students a degree not worth the paper it is printed on, but the students are still charged a lot of money to get those degrees and the university is employing a lot of people. There is a grey area between teachers who have a noble desire to help their students and those who are blatant snake oil salesmen who are merely interested in making money from stupid students and gullible parents - such is the complexity of life. A teacher who exaggerates the importance of his lesson may do so out of insecurity and a lack of self-confidence: if he loses the respect of his students, if his students lose interest in the topic, then he would struggle to teach his lessons - so he resorts to exaggerating how important the topic is just to scare the students into paying attention even if he knows at the back of his head, that none of his students would ever find this topic useful in the future. Is this a noble but flawed teacher who has told a white lie just to get the job done, or a charlatan who is knowingly and deceitfully misleading his students? Throughout the education industry, we have a range of guilt amongst various professionals there - but the result is that you get young students thinking that their future careers depend on their results. So you have unrealistic young people with good degrees wondering why they are struggling to adapt to the work environment along with young people who have condemned themselves just because they didn't get the results they had hoped for - both situations are a result of the many lies they have been told.
But students are equally guilty too.
Here's a bitter pill for many students to swallow: you're mostly useless to us employers. What value can you add to any business as a student? Can you drive a bus like a bus driver? No. Can you repair a toilet that is blocked like a plumber? No. Can you repair an iPhone that has been damaged? No. All you can do is study and no one is going to pay you money to do that. In fact, most students have so little skills that their work experience is limited to the most menial tasks that require no training whatsoever. Students need to realize that they desperately need to acquire as many skills as possible that will get them paid work in the job market - some degrees like medicine and engineering can help more than others, whilst degrees in something more academic like mathematics, the pure sciences and especially the arts and social sciences are quite useless when it comes to giving students any kind of useful skills that can help them find a real job. Yet students continue to lie to themselves that they need to keep on studying even if it means going to a private university for a useless degree because that's all they know, all they have done all their lives is be a student and they're just not ready to join the work force yet. So they lie to themselves that studying for this degree is going to be useful, when all it really does is delay their entry into the job market by a few years. Their mentality is often, "I'm spending so much time and effort studying, it has to be meaningful, it has to be relevant and useful, right? Otherwise, why the hell am I studying so hard for?"
Enough of the studying already!
Students, let me spell this out for you: the answer to your problem is not more studying, hell no. If anything, most of you have studied way too much and your brain will conveniently forget most of the useless crap you've studied once you've found a job and you'll realize, oh shit, most of the stuff I did in school is irrelevant and useless. If you're not one of those brilliant scholars who can prove how intelligent you are by scoring a scholarship to Oxford, then the sensible thing to do is to make sure you get a life outside school - yes that means less studying and going out to experience life outside school. Get involved in your local community, pursue your hobbies, go do some volunteer work, get a part time job even if the money is crap, find programmes where you get to travel and spend your school holidays abroad - there are loads of options for you to widen your horizon and try to identify something you're truly passionate about and would like to pursue as a career. Even something as simple as spending more time talking to the people around you is going to help: if you have older friends, neighbours and older family members, spend time with them to try to learn more about what they do for a living - would you like to follow in their footsteps or would you rather do something else? With that in mind, if you're clearly not academically inclined to get into a good university, I would say it would make even more sense to make even more of an effort to find out what else you would like to pursue outside the narrow limits of your studies.
In conclusion
My message is simple: there are a small number of people who are extremely lucky to be snapped us as scholars as students, they then have a career path laid out in front of them as they work off the bond of their scholarships. Then there are those who have such rich parents they have little to worry about because their parents will gladly support them if nothing works out. Then there are the rest of us who just have to make the best of what we have and that's the reality we have to deal with - it's hardly an easy challenge but there's so much that we can do to help ourselves as long as we realize that our fate lies in our own hands and we control our own destinies. You are the best person to help yourself. I got so frustrated with one of my readers who left a message on my piece about autism, she is an adult who thinks she may be autistic and she wants to get a diagnosis and I'm like, no even if you do get an diagnosis, then you're just expecting someone like a doctor to fix you - you're not even interested in helping yourself, you want someone to do that job for you. So yeah, life is difficult you get what you're given and you need to be your own best friend by being prepared to help yourself. I hope that helped. Leave a comment below, let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading.
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Title : Putting degrees, graduates and universities in perspective
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news-today.world | Hi guys. Recently I had a question from a reader on one of my older posts about degrees from private universities - this guy has just had such terrible A level results that the only universities that would grant him a place would be these private universities with notoriously low entry standards. I'm not going to speak about the specifics of this guy's circumstances, but rather address the issue of what your options are realistically if you should ever find yourself in such a situation. I have previously been accused of being elitist - an accusation which I think is unfair because there's a huge element of shooting the messenger for the message: it's not my fault that employers prefer Oxford graduates to graduates from private universities, but somehow pointing out that fact makes me elitist? Go figure. I wonder what these delusional folks want: someone to tell them a message like, "hey you messed up your A levels so badly that you ended up in a private university, but don't worry, nobody is going to notice and everyone is going to think you're as brilliant as a scholar who went to Oxford." Yeah, right. Look, let's deal with some of the harsh realities of the working world and some practical solutions here.
Why do students want to go to top universities?
It is notoriously hard to get into a university like Oxford or Cambridge: you need to work your socks off to get straight As at your A levels and even then, you're often competing with the very best students from all over the world who want a place there as well. So if you are brilliant enough to make it through their selection process, that's a stamp of approval that you are indeed something special and worth hiring. It's not even that the courses themselves are that brilliant at such universities - students benefit far more from the fact that they are studying together with equally intelligent and talented students. When you put a group of super intelligent students together, they will be able to motivate each other, challenge each other, compete with each other and bring out the best from each other. The networking opportunities at such universities are also brilliant of course, since many of these students would go on to do great things. But the bottom line is that with a degree from a top university like Oxford, you're always going to find it easy to get a job no matter what you apply for because employers are going to assume that you'e super intelligent.
But in Singapore, everyone needs a degree to get a job...
Now let's look at this assumption and make sense of it. Whilst it is true that many employers would state that you must have a degree to apply for the position, let's look at what actually happens in reality. Do you compete on an equal footing with every other applicant just because you can tick the box "I have a degree, I am a graduate"? Clearly not. The playing field is not level, far from it. The scholar with an Oxford degree is always going to be picked before the guy from NUS and the graduates with degrees from private universities are going to be at the very back of the queue. Clearly, not all degrees are equal - that's reflected in the fact that the students with the best A level results go to top universities like Oxford or Cambridge on scholarships, then those with good grades end up in local universities like NUS or NTU, then those with terrible grades end up in private universities. Simply being able to tick a box and declare yourself a graduate doesn't actually get you any closer to getting the job if you are competing with applicants with degrees from better universities since there is clearly a pecking order when it comes to graduates. There is clearly a blind spot amongst Singaporeans, so why do they think that they are in any way better off with a degree that is just going to send you to very bottom of the pecking order then?
Aiyoh, why are you so elitist, why are you discriminating against SIM graduates?
Like I said so many times before, don't shoot the messenger for the message. If there's only one job available and there are say 20 applicants, then it is the job of the HR manager or the director responsible for hiring to choose the best possible candidate for the job. If the company hires the wrong person, then the company would be wasting a lot of time, money and resources training the wrong person for the job who eventually would have to leave because s/he can't do the job and the company would have effectively made a huge loss because of that wrong hire because now they have to start that process all over again.The companies therefore tend to be rather risk-averse: sure they could potentially take a chance on a graduate from somewhere like SIM or even hire a non-graduate, but that would be a riskier decision than say going with a more traditional option like an NUS/NTU graduate. Companies are just simply being cautious, they are afraid of making mistakes - I'm not saying that they'll never give a candidate from a private university a job, I'm just saying that you've got an uphill struggle trying to convince them that it is definitely worth their while taking a gamble and giving you a job. So if you have something outstanding on your CV (like if you represented your country at the Olympics) to make them think you're outstanding in spite of your poor A level results.
Put yourself in the shoes of the HR manager
But of course, you're going to argue that not all Oxford graduates are going to be brilliant at their jobs especially if they are poorly prepared for the work environment or quite simply, they may be brilliant at scoring As for exams but completely unsuitable for the job. Let me play this out for you: imagine the HR manager hired an Oxford graduate, the guy turns out to be totally useless and they let him go after a few months. The boss is most likely to say something like, "oh what a shame, he was such a smart guy, an Oxford graduate at that, now we have to replace him." There would be very little blame on the part of the HR manager for choosing the Oxford graduate. But imagine if the same thing happened with a graduate from a private university, the boss would be like, "what on earth were you doing, hiring someone like that? You told me he was special, he had potential, I trusted you and now look at how much time and money we wasted on that guy - we now have to start that process all over again. You're just a HR manager, not some fairy godmother trying to give these people a second chance by leveling the playing field!" Indeed, if a HR manager keeps making such bad decisions, then even s/he will be fired too - that's why they have no incentive to take any risks with gradates with degrees from private universities. They have bills to pay, families to feed, they want to keep their jobs too you know.
Is there anything at all that I can do to make up for the fact that I went to a private university, so that I will be treated the same as an NUS/NTU graduate in the eyes of the HR manager when applying for a job?
No, is the simple answer. I'm going to give you the honest answer and once again - I stress, don't shoot the messenger. Look, we are dealing with a situation whereby there are many applicants for just one or two positions - HR managers are looking for a reason to say no and reject a candidate, rather than trying to find a reason to give someone a chance to prove themselves. So if the HR manager sees that you've done so badly in your A levels that you ended up in a private university rather than say a respectable one, that can mean a number of things: firstly, you could be plain stupid and that's a simple reason for a HR manager or gatekeeper to reject you. Secondly, you could have been going through a really tough patch during your exams: true story, I have a good friend whose father died during his A levels, so that resulted in some pretty terrible results as he was awfully messed up emotionally at that time. Now as a friend, of course I react with sympathy to this story, but a HR manager would be cynical: is he just trying to come up with a plausible story to prove that he's not plain stupid? Or even if you go as far as to produce a death certificate to prove that you're not making up the story, then the HR manager might be harsh and think, "are you going to fall apart emotionally every time something goes wrong in your life? I've heard of people who have managed to deliver great results regardless of what ever crisis they may have going on in their lives - are you going to miss a week at work or mess up royally just because say you get dumped by your girlfriend or if you have a big argument with your best friend? Are you emotionally mature enough to deal with such situations and still continue working?"
Does this sound harsh? Of course it does - but bear in mind HR managers are constantly looking for reasons to say no to otherwise very credible candidates who may have brilliant CVs, so imagine how easy it is to say no to you if they realize you have messed up your A levels. Like if you can't even handle your A level exams, how can you handle the more difficult challenges at work? And even if there's no excuse as to why you did so badly for your A levels, say you just didn't study hard enough and you weren't prepared - do you think they are going to be forgiving when they're looking for excuses to say no to you? Your parents may be forgiving, HR managers and gatekeepers are not. It is all to easy for them to look at a bad exam result as a reflection of some kind of flaw in your character: were you too immature to realize just how important the exams were, or did you lack the discipline to study hard enough? Either way, even if you do have a very valid reason why you did terribly for your A levels, I'm afraid you're not going to find the kind of sympathy or even the benefit of the doubt from gatekeepers and HR managers. Sure you can go out of your way to do internships, get work experience, participate in sports and travel around the world to make your CV look exciting but bear in mind the gatekeeper is looking for faults on your CV, so short of lying about your A levels results and the circumstances which led to you ending up in a private university, I'm afraid whatever you do is going to be too little, too late.
The Tsukiji Fish Market auction
One of the top tourist attractions in Tokyo is the Tsukiji fish market where you can witness the auction of the day's best fish - this auction usually starts around 4 am and ends at 10 am.The focus is usually on the extraordinary prices that the very best sashimi grade blue fin tuna can fetch, but in reality that represents only the very top end of the fish that gets sold at Tsukiji market - there is plenty of other less fine, ordinary fish that gets sold daily at the market and this is the kind of fish that may end up in fast food restaurants and supermarkets, to be sold at very modest prices for the ordinary retail consumer looking for a bargain. Even the fish of very poor quality isn't simply thrown away, it is usually processed into products like fish cakes (kamaboko) where the fish is pureed and mixed with various spices and other ingredients before being pressed into fish cakes. Now you may be wondering, Alex this is interesting but what has this got to do with the topic we're discussing? Well, the fact is the way graduates are recruited in the job market isn't really that different from the fish auction. The very best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge are going to snapped up by the best companies and they are willing to pay a lot of money to make sure that these graduates work for them and not their competitors.
What happens lower down the food chain is far more interesting because this affects the vast majority of us who are not exactly Oxford scholars. Not all jobs are attractive and some jobs are mediocre whilst others are awful - make a job attractive (for example, with good pay, great conditions, exciting projects to work on etc) and you will get the very best people applying for it. But if you are offering a job with lousy pay, awful conditions and pretty mundane projects to work on (and add to that, a terrible location to work in), then don't expect to find many applicants at all, never mind good ones. In order to get the job, you just have to be the best candidate on the list of all who applied - so it is not as if those who have bad degrees or no degrees will never be able to get a job, it just means that they will end up getting some of the less attractive jobs that fewer people have applied for. The same way the price of the fish at Tsukiji market is determined by market forces, the kind of job you will end up with is ultimately determined by the kind of demand there will be for your kind of graduate. What I am describing here, is merely a very basic principle of economics: how supply and demand ultimately determines the price in the market. This is really nothing new, in fact it should be pretty obvious to most of you I'd hope.
However, I took issue with the person who asked the question about what he could do to improve his chances of getting a good job now that he's in SIM. I have a feeling that he's in denial about his situation - to stay with the Japanese fish analogy, that's like a restaurant saying, "hey we're cutting corners by buying a very cheap fish for the sashimi dish today, but don't worry we'll be serving it with a very fine soy sauce so that makes up for the fact that the fish is cheap and not particularly good." But of course, you're not going to fool anyone - the diner would recognize exactly what is going on. Any Japanese food fan would know that you'd rather have really good quality sashimi with a cheap soy sauce from your local supermarket than a really cheap cut of fish served with your finest Japanese artisan soy sauce imported from Osaka. Ultimately, the main course is the raw fish, not the soy sauce. Likewise, an SIM graduate who has some interesting work experience, internships and language skills will be an interesting candidate of course, but the question, "why did you end up in SIM then?" is still going to come up in the interview and it is unlikely to be an easy question to answer. In short, by all means, everyone needs to do whatever they can to make them more attractive as a candidate in the job market, but be realistic about just how much difference you can make with things like internships - you're just buying a more expensive brand of soy sauce to make your main course more attractive. Sure it helps, but not that much.
Am I condemned to taking the jobs that no one else wants to do then?
Far from it! There are many options for those who are not academically inclined and thus do not shine under the rigid Singaporean education system. Some jobs are directly related to the kind of training you get in university - so for example, a dentist learns everything s/he needs to know about being a dentist whilst studying dentistry at university. However, there are plenty of jobs out there which gladly recruit graduates who know absolutely nothing about the industry because they will give you all the training you need in order to do your job well. Banking is one such industry - whilst there are plenty of finance-related degrees out there, the top banks always recruit graduates from the very best universities like Oxford and Cambridge even if those Oxbridge graduates have degrees in anything from engineering to history to biology. Why? This is because the banks have very good training schemes that will teach all new hires everything they need to know on the job and quite frankly, many of the finance-related degree courses are pretty shitty anyway. They are way too general and are taught by staff who couldn't hack it in the business world. You'd much rather hire someone who's extremely intelligent to train, then to hire someone who is at best mediocre but has taken some finance-related courses at university. Okay, that's the situation with the biggest, most prestigious investment banks - but what about the rest of us who are not Oxford or Cambridge graduates then?
Think smaller companies, forget the big names
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say 'corporate finance' and if I get a blank look, I would simplify that to 'banking' - that's when I usually get the question, "so which bank do you work for?" You see, most people who don't know much about financial services only have one form of contact with banks - that's their bank where they have a savings account, so they mistakenly imagine that everyone who works in banking will work for a bank like that - this is completely untrue of course. There are plenty of smaller companies within the financial services industry which perform more niche functions and have no contact with ordinary folks looking to save their money (known as 'retail banking') - heck, one of the world's biggest investment banks is Morgan Stanley and they do not do retail banking at all. It suffices to say that there are plenty of smaller companies in the financial services industry who are not prepared to offer very attractive packages for new graduates but still offer a first step into the industry for the individual to gain some valuable work experience. I say, if you're an SIM graduate, you should think about starting with a smaller company like that who would be willing to hire you: pay your dues, accept the less attractive conditions and then in a few years, once you have proven yourself in that role, then you can move on to a more senior job with a better company.
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| So you have a degree, now what? |
Why do students want to go to top universities?
It is notoriously hard to get into a university like Oxford or Cambridge: you need to work your socks off to get straight As at your A levels and even then, you're often competing with the very best students from all over the world who want a place there as well. So if you are brilliant enough to make it through their selection process, that's a stamp of approval that you are indeed something special and worth hiring. It's not even that the courses themselves are that brilliant at such universities - students benefit far more from the fact that they are studying together with equally intelligent and talented students. When you put a group of super intelligent students together, they will be able to motivate each other, challenge each other, compete with each other and bring out the best from each other. The networking opportunities at such universities are also brilliant of course, since many of these students would go on to do great things. But the bottom line is that with a degree from a top university like Oxford, you're always going to find it easy to get a job no matter what you apply for because employers are going to assume that you'e super intelligent.
But in Singapore, everyone needs a degree to get a job...
Now let's look at this assumption and make sense of it. Whilst it is true that many employers would state that you must have a degree to apply for the position, let's look at what actually happens in reality. Do you compete on an equal footing with every other applicant just because you can tick the box "I have a degree, I am a graduate"? Clearly not. The playing field is not level, far from it. The scholar with an Oxford degree is always going to be picked before the guy from NUS and the graduates with degrees from private universities are going to be at the very back of the queue. Clearly, not all degrees are equal - that's reflected in the fact that the students with the best A level results go to top universities like Oxford or Cambridge on scholarships, then those with good grades end up in local universities like NUS or NTU, then those with terrible grades end up in private universities. Simply being able to tick a box and declare yourself a graduate doesn't actually get you any closer to getting the job if you are competing with applicants with degrees from better universities since there is clearly a pecking order when it comes to graduates. There is clearly a blind spot amongst Singaporeans, so why do they think that they are in any way better off with a degree that is just going to send you to very bottom of the pecking order then?
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| What kind of graduate are you? |
Aiyoh, why are you so elitist, why are you discriminating against SIM graduates?
Like I said so many times before, don't shoot the messenger for the message. If there's only one job available and there are say 20 applicants, then it is the job of the HR manager or the director responsible for hiring to choose the best possible candidate for the job. If the company hires the wrong person, then the company would be wasting a lot of time, money and resources training the wrong person for the job who eventually would have to leave because s/he can't do the job and the company would have effectively made a huge loss because of that wrong hire because now they have to start that process all over again.The companies therefore tend to be rather risk-averse: sure they could potentially take a chance on a graduate from somewhere like SIM or even hire a non-graduate, but that would be a riskier decision than say going with a more traditional option like an NUS/NTU graduate. Companies are just simply being cautious, they are afraid of making mistakes - I'm not saying that they'll never give a candidate from a private university a job, I'm just saying that you've got an uphill struggle trying to convince them that it is definitely worth their while taking a gamble and giving you a job. So if you have something outstanding on your CV (like if you represented your country at the Olympics) to make them think you're outstanding in spite of your poor A level results.
Put yourself in the shoes of the HR manager
But of course, you're going to argue that not all Oxford graduates are going to be brilliant at their jobs especially if they are poorly prepared for the work environment or quite simply, they may be brilliant at scoring As for exams but completely unsuitable for the job. Let me play this out for you: imagine the HR manager hired an Oxford graduate, the guy turns out to be totally useless and they let him go after a few months. The boss is most likely to say something like, "oh what a shame, he was such a smart guy, an Oxford graduate at that, now we have to replace him." There would be very little blame on the part of the HR manager for choosing the Oxford graduate. But imagine if the same thing happened with a graduate from a private university, the boss would be like, "what on earth were you doing, hiring someone like that? You told me he was special, he had potential, I trusted you and now look at how much time and money we wasted on that guy - we now have to start that process all over again. You're just a HR manager, not some fairy godmother trying to give these people a second chance by leveling the playing field!" Indeed, if a HR manager keeps making such bad decisions, then even s/he will be fired too - that's why they have no incentive to take any risks with gradates with degrees from private universities. They have bills to pay, families to feed, they want to keep their jobs too you know.
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| Are you a safe or a risky hire? |
Is there anything at all that I can do to make up for the fact that I went to a private university, so that I will be treated the same as an NUS/NTU graduate in the eyes of the HR manager when applying for a job?
No, is the simple answer. I'm going to give you the honest answer and once again - I stress, don't shoot the messenger. Look, we are dealing with a situation whereby there are many applicants for just one or two positions - HR managers are looking for a reason to say no and reject a candidate, rather than trying to find a reason to give someone a chance to prove themselves. So if the HR manager sees that you've done so badly in your A levels that you ended up in a private university rather than say a respectable one, that can mean a number of things: firstly, you could be plain stupid and that's a simple reason for a HR manager or gatekeeper to reject you. Secondly, you could have been going through a really tough patch during your exams: true story, I have a good friend whose father died during his A levels, so that resulted in some pretty terrible results as he was awfully messed up emotionally at that time. Now as a friend, of course I react with sympathy to this story, but a HR manager would be cynical: is he just trying to come up with a plausible story to prove that he's not plain stupid? Or even if you go as far as to produce a death certificate to prove that you're not making up the story, then the HR manager might be harsh and think, "are you going to fall apart emotionally every time something goes wrong in your life? I've heard of people who have managed to deliver great results regardless of what ever crisis they may have going on in their lives - are you going to miss a week at work or mess up royally just because say you get dumped by your girlfriend or if you have a big argument with your best friend? Are you emotionally mature enough to deal with such situations and still continue working?"
Does this sound harsh? Of course it does - but bear in mind HR managers are constantly looking for reasons to say no to otherwise very credible candidates who may have brilliant CVs, so imagine how easy it is to say no to you if they realize you have messed up your A levels. Like if you can't even handle your A level exams, how can you handle the more difficult challenges at work? And even if there's no excuse as to why you did so badly for your A levels, say you just didn't study hard enough and you weren't prepared - do you think they are going to be forgiving when they're looking for excuses to say no to you? Your parents may be forgiving, HR managers and gatekeepers are not. It is all to easy for them to look at a bad exam result as a reflection of some kind of flaw in your character: were you too immature to realize just how important the exams were, or did you lack the discipline to study hard enough? Either way, even if you do have a very valid reason why you did terribly for your A levels, I'm afraid you're not going to find the kind of sympathy or even the benefit of the doubt from gatekeepers and HR managers. Sure you can go out of your way to do internships, get work experience, participate in sports and travel around the world to make your CV look exciting but bear in mind the gatekeeper is looking for faults on your CV, so short of lying about your A levels results and the circumstances which led to you ending up in a private university, I'm afraid whatever you do is going to be too little, too late.
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| What answers do you have for the difficult questions? |
The Tsukiji Fish Market auction
One of the top tourist attractions in Tokyo is the Tsukiji fish market where you can witness the auction of the day's best fish - this auction usually starts around 4 am and ends at 10 am.The focus is usually on the extraordinary prices that the very best sashimi grade blue fin tuna can fetch, but in reality that represents only the very top end of the fish that gets sold at Tsukiji market - there is plenty of other less fine, ordinary fish that gets sold daily at the market and this is the kind of fish that may end up in fast food restaurants and supermarkets, to be sold at very modest prices for the ordinary retail consumer looking for a bargain. Even the fish of very poor quality isn't simply thrown away, it is usually processed into products like fish cakes (kamaboko) where the fish is pureed and mixed with various spices and other ingredients before being pressed into fish cakes. Now you may be wondering, Alex this is interesting but what has this got to do with the topic we're discussing? Well, the fact is the way graduates are recruited in the job market isn't really that different from the fish auction. The very best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge are going to snapped up by the best companies and they are willing to pay a lot of money to make sure that these graduates work for them and not their competitors.
What happens lower down the food chain is far more interesting because this affects the vast majority of us who are not exactly Oxford scholars. Not all jobs are attractive and some jobs are mediocre whilst others are awful - make a job attractive (for example, with good pay, great conditions, exciting projects to work on etc) and you will get the very best people applying for it. But if you are offering a job with lousy pay, awful conditions and pretty mundane projects to work on (and add to that, a terrible location to work in), then don't expect to find many applicants at all, never mind good ones. In order to get the job, you just have to be the best candidate on the list of all who applied - so it is not as if those who have bad degrees or no degrees will never be able to get a job, it just means that they will end up getting some of the less attractive jobs that fewer people have applied for. The same way the price of the fish at Tsukiji market is determined by market forces, the kind of job you will end up with is ultimately determined by the kind of demand there will be for your kind of graduate. What I am describing here, is merely a very basic principle of economics: how supply and demand ultimately determines the price in the market. This is really nothing new, in fact it should be pretty obvious to most of you I'd hope.
However, I took issue with the person who asked the question about what he could do to improve his chances of getting a good job now that he's in SIM. I have a feeling that he's in denial about his situation - to stay with the Japanese fish analogy, that's like a restaurant saying, "hey we're cutting corners by buying a very cheap fish for the sashimi dish today, but don't worry we'll be serving it with a very fine soy sauce so that makes up for the fact that the fish is cheap and not particularly good." But of course, you're not going to fool anyone - the diner would recognize exactly what is going on. Any Japanese food fan would know that you'd rather have really good quality sashimi with a cheap soy sauce from your local supermarket than a really cheap cut of fish served with your finest Japanese artisan soy sauce imported from Osaka. Ultimately, the main course is the raw fish, not the soy sauce. Likewise, an SIM graduate who has some interesting work experience, internships and language skills will be an interesting candidate of course, but the question, "why did you end up in SIM then?" is still going to come up in the interview and it is unlikely to be an easy question to answer. In short, by all means, everyone needs to do whatever they can to make them more attractive as a candidate in the job market, but be realistic about just how much difference you can make with things like internships - you're just buying a more expensive brand of soy sauce to make your main course more attractive. Sure it helps, but not that much.
Am I condemned to taking the jobs that no one else wants to do then?
Far from it! There are many options for those who are not academically inclined and thus do not shine under the rigid Singaporean education system. Some jobs are directly related to the kind of training you get in university - so for example, a dentist learns everything s/he needs to know about being a dentist whilst studying dentistry at university. However, there are plenty of jobs out there which gladly recruit graduates who know absolutely nothing about the industry because they will give you all the training you need in order to do your job well. Banking is one such industry - whilst there are plenty of finance-related degrees out there, the top banks always recruit graduates from the very best universities like Oxford and Cambridge even if those Oxbridge graduates have degrees in anything from engineering to history to biology. Why? This is because the banks have very good training schemes that will teach all new hires everything they need to know on the job and quite frankly, many of the finance-related degree courses are pretty shitty anyway. They are way too general and are taught by staff who couldn't hack it in the business world. You'd much rather hire someone who's extremely intelligent to train, then to hire someone who is at best mediocre but has taken some finance-related courses at university. Okay, that's the situation with the biggest, most prestigious investment banks - but what about the rest of us who are not Oxford or Cambridge graduates then?
Think smaller companies, forget the big names
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say 'corporate finance' and if I get a blank look, I would simplify that to 'banking' - that's when I usually get the question, "so which bank do you work for?" You see, most people who don't know much about financial services only have one form of contact with banks - that's their bank where they have a savings account, so they mistakenly imagine that everyone who works in banking will work for a bank like that - this is completely untrue of course. There are plenty of smaller companies within the financial services industry which perform more niche functions and have no contact with ordinary folks looking to save their money (known as 'retail banking') - heck, one of the world's biggest investment banks is Morgan Stanley and they do not do retail banking at all. It suffices to say that there are plenty of smaller companies in the financial services industry who are not prepared to offer very attractive packages for new graduates but still offer a first step into the industry for the individual to gain some valuable work experience. I say, if you're an SIM graduate, you should think about starting with a smaller company like that who would be willing to hire you: pay your dues, accept the less attractive conditions and then in a few years, once you have proven yourself in that role, then you can move on to a more senior job with a better company.
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| Gaining relevant work experience is so vital. |
Follow your heart, forget the university
And that's just financial services. Let me give you another example. My friend Tara did a degree in engineering but found that she wasn't able to find a job that really suited her. She was obsessed with fitness and did a 'useful' degree only to please her parents - instead of using public transport in London, she would either jog or cycle her way around town. One day, she stopped at a traffic light and saw someone with a really cool bike and started a conversation - it turns out that guy was on a bike that was quite high-end, offering racing bike technology to ordinary commuters who just want to get around town quickly. She tracked down the small bike shop selling those bikes and found out that they were hiring - with her passion for cycling and fitness, she was a great fit for the team. No degree in the world could have prepared her for the job, there isn't a degree in cycling or bicycles. Sure there are degrees in sports science and business that may have had some relevance, but Tara already knew so much about cycling anyway - she didn't need a university or a degree to teach her what she needed to know, she had that knowledge already anyway because it was her passion. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't put too much faith in universities teaching you anything useful - like Tara, you should follow your heart and pursue your passion because you're going to already have a wealth of useful knowledge in the things you're truly passionate about. Tara is doing very well today in that company as part of their business development team.
Start your own business, be your own boss
Ultimately, if you don't want to be judged for your academic record, the best solution is to be your own boss, then you will never have a boss to ask you stupid questions! So staying with the case study of my friend Tara, if I were to look at one of her bikes, I would be more interested in how good the bike is, if the price is reasonable compared to some of the other similar bikes out there, if it is a worthwhile investment - I wouldn't be asking Tara or her boss what university they went to and what their results are. The latter is simply not relevant to my decision as to whether to choose to buy that fancy bicycle or not. If I am getting a quality product at a good price, who cares whether or not Tara had a good degree? Why should that even matter? Starting your own business is difficult - it is bloody hard work, but along with that comes a certain respect from people who realize just how much of a risk you are taking, shouldering all the responsibility of the business and all you employ - that is the kind of accolade that no degree in the world can buy you. It is one thing to prove that you're intelligent enough to get into a top university like Oxford, but being able to start a small business and run it successfully takes a completely different set of skills and is far more demanding. You want respect? Well this is one way to can definitely earn it, but it won't be easy.
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| Are you motivated enough to start your own business? |
There are some things they just can't teach you in university.
Many of my regular readers will know that I work in sales - yes it is within corporate finance but even within financial services, you can come up with the best products and services in the world but without us sales people looking for new business, making sure that we find new clients to spend loads of money with us, the company isn't going to make money. Nobody goes to university to learn how to sell and shockingly enough, there are a few dodgy universities out there who are willing to give you a BA (Hons) in Sales, but I just roll my eyes at the concept of a degree in sales. That's like trying to learn how to swim in a classroom without getting wet rather than in a swimming pool. The kind of sales tactics you require will depend so much on the kind of product you're handling and the kind of customers you're selling to - there is just no way a degree can predict what kind of sales job you will have in the future, so they end up trying to teach you a bit of everything. That means a lot of what you learn will be totally useless and irrelevant to your future job, which makes me think - what's the point of a degree which will be mostly useless then? The best training you can get with sales is actually selling and if you have a good manager, then s/he will guide you along the way and help you climb that steep learning curve quickly.
So let's talk about sales
Sales isn't the most glamorous job in the world but people are attracted to it for one simple reason: money. You can make an insane amount of money if you are a successful salesperson - if you have a good product and the company is willing to offer you a good commission structure, you could potentially be making millions a year in just commission alone whilst your peers are slaving away for a fixed salary - you could make in a month what they make in a year, easily. I had a colleague Chris who was given the job on the basis of the fact that he was an Oxford graduate - sure he was intelligent but could he sell? No, he couldn't - it takes a certain kind of personality to be good at sales, to be able to engage people and most importantly, close the sale. Oh dear, they had to sack Chris eventually as his sales figures were dismal. We're talking about being extremely good with people and that's a gift you're born with. Experienced sales directors know exactly how to recruit the right kind of people onto their sales team because they can identify individuals with the right traits - by the same token, if someone is just not cut out for sales, then no amount of sales training can give them the right kind of skills to excel at sales. By that token, this means that sales directors really don't care if you have a degree or not - as long as you can demonstrate that you have the right kind of personality to be good at sales, they will gladly train you up and give you a chance.
There are loads of people out there who have very specialist skills in a niche area and there simply isn't a degree out there which can help them - so either they have achieved success in their field without a degree or even if they do have a degree, they'll be the first to admit that their degree is totally irrelevant to their work today. I have talked about a lighting engineer I met years ago - sure there are courses out there to do with lighting design, but the best lighting designers are employed by the best companies in the industry and are being paid millions, compared to the very modest salaries earned by the losers who end up teaching these lighting design courses. This is why I am so very skeptical about learning anything from teachers in general - if they were any good at what they do, then they wouldn't end up as teachers. I'm sorry if that sounds particularly evil but it is so true. So this lighting engineer I met is the expert he is today because he has learnt the best tricks of the trade by working alongside the very best experts in the industry, everything was learnt through work experience. Likewise, I have a friend here in London who is a supplier for the growing vegan market here in the UK - there isn't a business or a F&B course out there specifically dealing with the vegan market, yet she spotted a gap in the niche market and went for it, branding herself as a vegan food specialist. Such is the nature of business: you need to go out there and hunt for opportunities - you can't expect a teacher to teach you how to do things like that in a classroom, so stop putting so much faith in your teachers.
Am I telling you anything new?
Not really - the kind of advice I have offered you above is what actually applicable to most people really. A tiny percentage of each cohort get snapped up by some prestigious scholarship scheme and they get put in a fast track programme to management once they graduate - as for the rest of us, it is simply making the best of whatever we have. We make the best of an imperfect situation and take our chances with the paths we choose. For most of us, we face a somewhat uncertain future and we have to hope for the best whilst being prepared to deal with the worse. That's reality: now what really pisses me off is the way universities over-promise their students what their degrees can lead to in the working world. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that teachers are equally guilty of misleading their students. Oh yes, I do have an axe to grind with teachers here: here's something a lot of teachers are guilty of. If the teacher said, "if you don't do your homework, I will be angry with you but it probably wouldn't matter in the long run as you won't remember any of this in a few years from now - you certainly wouldn't need it in your working life. In fact, I am wasting your time with this stupid crap, you are better off hanging out with your friends and creating some happy childhood memories after school today than bothering with this stupid homework." That's what an honest teacher would say, but oh no, teachers often have big egos and exaggerate the importance of what they teach. "This is vital for your future, if you don't take this module seriously, it would affect your A level results, you won't get into the course in the university of your choice and it will be the end of your dreams - you will be condemned to a life of doing work you hate for too little money; with that in mind, do your homework properly!"
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| Are teachers misleading their students all the time? |
I blame the teachers, the universities and the parents.
Singaporean parents are equally to be blamed for putting so much pressure on their children to excel in school despite the fact that many of them are indeed working adults who have forgotten most of the crap they've learnt at school years ago. Yet they are equally guilty in perpetuating the myth that all you need is a good education and employers will be lining up to give you a good job for life - yeah, that is true if you're like the top 1% who will go to Oxford as a scholar but for the rest of us more normal folks, you can't depend on your academic record to somehow set you up for life. And when I read the marketing bullshit, the badly written lies on the website of crap universities languishing at the very bottom of the league tables, I just roll my eyes and think, "how stupid do you have to be to believe the lies they tell here?" I then think, should the government step in and stop universities like that from doing this kind of advertising, because they are literally tricking stupid people into spending a lot of money on their useless degrees? The government will go as far as to resort to all kinds of measures from plain paper packaging to health campaigns to stop people from smoking - why do they bother to do that? Do we not trust people to be intelligent enough to make up their own minds about smoking - or do we assume that some people are just so very stupid that they should be saved from their own stupidity? If we will do that with the issue of smoking, then why shouldn't the government do the same with universities selling degrees not worth the paper they are printed on?
So whose fault is it anyway?
In short, a lot of people are at fault for blatantly misleading young students today and there's a good reason why this conspiracy persists: education is big business. A university at the bottom of the league table may be giving their students a degree not worth the paper it is printed on, but the students are still charged a lot of money to get those degrees and the university is employing a lot of people. There is a grey area between teachers who have a noble desire to help their students and those who are blatant snake oil salesmen who are merely interested in making money from stupid students and gullible parents - such is the complexity of life. A teacher who exaggerates the importance of his lesson may do so out of insecurity and a lack of self-confidence: if he loses the respect of his students, if his students lose interest in the topic, then he would struggle to teach his lessons - so he resorts to exaggerating how important the topic is just to scare the students into paying attention even if he knows at the back of his head, that none of his students would ever find this topic useful in the future. Is this a noble but flawed teacher who has told a white lie just to get the job done, or a charlatan who is knowingly and deceitfully misleading his students? Throughout the education industry, we have a range of guilt amongst various professionals there - but the result is that you get young students thinking that their future careers depend on their results. So you have unrealistic young people with good degrees wondering why they are struggling to adapt to the work environment along with young people who have condemned themselves just because they didn't get the results they had hoped for - both situations are a result of the many lies they have been told.
Here's a bitter pill for many students to swallow: you're mostly useless to us employers. What value can you add to any business as a student? Can you drive a bus like a bus driver? No. Can you repair a toilet that is blocked like a plumber? No. Can you repair an iPhone that has been damaged? No. All you can do is study and no one is going to pay you money to do that. In fact, most students have so little skills that their work experience is limited to the most menial tasks that require no training whatsoever. Students need to realize that they desperately need to acquire as many skills as possible that will get them paid work in the job market - some degrees like medicine and engineering can help more than others, whilst degrees in something more academic like mathematics, the pure sciences and especially the arts and social sciences are quite useless when it comes to giving students any kind of useful skills that can help them find a real job. Yet students continue to lie to themselves that they need to keep on studying even if it means going to a private university for a useless degree because that's all they know, all they have done all their lives is be a student and they're just not ready to join the work force yet. So they lie to themselves that studying for this degree is going to be useful, when all it really does is delay their entry into the job market by a few years. Their mentality is often, "I'm spending so much time and effort studying, it has to be meaningful, it has to be relevant and useful, right? Otherwise, why the hell am I studying so hard for?"
Enough of the studying already!
Students, let me spell this out for you: the answer to your problem is not more studying, hell no. If anything, most of you have studied way too much and your brain will conveniently forget most of the useless crap you've studied once you've found a job and you'll realize, oh shit, most of the stuff I did in school is irrelevant and useless. If you're not one of those brilliant scholars who can prove how intelligent you are by scoring a scholarship to Oxford, then the sensible thing to do is to make sure you get a life outside school - yes that means less studying and going out to experience life outside school. Get involved in your local community, pursue your hobbies, go do some volunteer work, get a part time job even if the money is crap, find programmes where you get to travel and spend your school holidays abroad - there are loads of options for you to widen your horizon and try to identify something you're truly passionate about and would like to pursue as a career. Even something as simple as spending more time talking to the people around you is going to help: if you have older friends, neighbours and older family members, spend time with them to try to learn more about what they do for a living - would you like to follow in their footsteps or would you rather do something else? With that in mind, if you're clearly not academically inclined to get into a good university, I would say it would make even more sense to make even more of an effort to find out what else you would like to pursue outside the narrow limits of your studies.
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| Do you do sports and have an active social life? |
In conclusion
My message is simple: there are a small number of people who are extremely lucky to be snapped us as scholars as students, they then have a career path laid out in front of them as they work off the bond of their scholarships. Then there are those who have such rich parents they have little to worry about because their parents will gladly support them if nothing works out. Then there are the rest of us who just have to make the best of what we have and that's the reality we have to deal with - it's hardly an easy challenge but there's so much that we can do to help ourselves as long as we realize that our fate lies in our own hands and we control our own destinies. You are the best person to help yourself. I got so frustrated with one of my readers who left a message on my piece about autism, she is an adult who thinks she may be autistic and she wants to get a diagnosis and I'm like, no even if you do get an diagnosis, then you're just expecting someone like a doctor to fix you - you're not even interested in helping yourself, you want someone to do that job for you. So yeah, life is difficult you get what you're given and you need to be your own best friend by being prepared to help yourself. I hope that helped. Leave a comment below, let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading.
That's an article Putting degrees, graduates and universities in perspective
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