The stone soup, Moroccan diet tea and SIM

I had a huge spike in traffic to my blog of late when one of my older posts was used in a discussion about whether or not a distance learning programme from SIM is the equivalent to a degree from that actual university issuing the certificate. I then hastily put together a response to the Reddit thread but today, I want to look at the root of the problem. My stance on it is simple: who the hell are you trying to kid? Anyone in recruitment and HR who is even half serious about granting you an interview would dig a little deeper and verify where you studied because it is not something you can hide. In any case, we can easily ask you for your A level results and verify if you had done well enough to earn yourself a place at that university - if we see atrocious results, then we know you took the SIM route. You see, a gatekeeper's job is to differentiate between a genuinely intelligent candidate and one who is trying to pass himself off as one. Furthermore, if a lecturer at a private university tells you that "oh the certificate is the same, no one will notice the difference" and you're dumbnaive enough to believe that lie, then that's when I roll my eyes in disbelief. Some people will choose to believe such lies because they really want it to be true and they will ignore the evidence before them. So when someone tries to point out that an SIM degree is worthless, they scream, "elitism! How dare you discriminate against SIM graduates?" Dunning-Kruger effect much? If you're not familiar with Dunning-Kruger, don't worry I'll be covering it in my next post.

Have you ever tried a diet tea?

Here's what I think lies at the root of the problem: look, I come from an autistic family. My parents are severely autistic and I am somewhere on the autism spectrum too, as are other members of my extended family. But having realized I have a problem, I have gone out of my way to develop my social skills and catch myself when I realize I am expressing a lack of empathy - this has made me acutely aware of when others are also lacking empathy. In this case, there are clearly two points of views here which couldn't be more different: firstly, there is the teenager who has screwed up his A levels so badly that SIM is the last resort. Someone from SIM reassures him that an SIM degree is still valid and respected out there, so he will have a future if he works hard. The teenager hears that reassuring message and really wants that to be true - so he chooses to believe it wholeheartedly. Then there is the other point of view - that of a gatekeeper out there (someone like me) who decides which candidates get invited to a job interview and which candidates get rejected that the first stage and I tell him that anyone who goes down the path of a private university will always be at the back of the queue, behind those who went to universities which are ranked a lot higher on the league tables. My severely autistic parents have a habit of ignoring any evidence that is contrary to their point of view and they will only listen to people who already agree with them. Thus this is why I am only too aware of what is going on here.

The first message is encouraging and reassuring, the second is a slap in the face. It is perhaps a rather tall order to expect the teenager in that position to even take the latter into consideration, given that it is too tempting to believe the first message. So he responds by screaming, "elitism! Why are you prejudiced against us?" But at the end of the day, after the poor guy graduates from SIM, who is he going to face when it comes to applying for a job? Can the kind, encouraging lecturer from SIM give him a job or is he going to have to get out there and face unkind gatekeepers like me? When I explain it like that, it becomes very clear whose really opinion matters on the relative value of degrees from private universities. The staff member from SIM is merely doing his job in making sure that the students get the kind of emotional support they need and there's really nothing wrong with encouraging students to make the best of their situation. But why are the SIM staff encouraging their students instead of telling them where they really stand in the real world? Allow me to share a little story from my travels in Morocco which does illustrate what is going on in this situation.

Is it wrong to discriminate against stupid people?

When I was in Marrakech, I befriended two lovely British ladies in my hotel - they were ever so nice but neither spoke any French or Arabic and they were quite naive when it came to traveling around on their own. They had already told me stories of being ripped off by the locals in the market place, being taken to hideously expensive restaurants and I invited them to hang out with my partner and I, so we could help them overcome the language barrier since I speak French fluently and can manage the basics in Arabic. So when we went shopping one evening, the shopkeeper noticed that the two ladies were fascinated by a product called "le thé de régime Marocain"(Moroccan diet tea) and it looked like just a mix of dried fruits and flowers with some ordinary tea to me. It had a lovely aroma but I didn't see how drinking that concoction was somehow going to make you lose weight. The salesman in the shop barely spoke any English, so I stepped in as the translator for my friendsas they asked him questions about the tea. He started by promising them all the health benefits of drinking this tea: your skin will appear more radiant and younger, it will boost your metabolism, it has plenty of natural antioxidants which will accelerate the healing process in your body's tissues after you do exercise, drink this tea regularly for a mini-detox, to remove the toxins that have built up in your intestines, drink it before a meal and it will stop your body from absorbing some of the fats in the food, even your hair and nails will look better after just a few weeks of consuming this tea. When he told us that the tea would make them more alert and lift their spirits, I rolled my eyes in total disbelief, looked over at the two ladies and thought are you two actually believing any of his sales pitch? 

But the two ladies were totally taken in by him, they loved by told how beautiful they would become with his magical diet tea. I could tell that this salesman was an expert in manipulating tourists into paying a lot of money for what is essentially a mix of tea, dried fruits and flowers by telling them exactly what they want to hear. But wait this gets better - I didn't know these women that well and they were having fun shopping, I didn't want to cause a scene by telling them not to buy the tea. As the man was packaging up the tea, he started giving them instructions on how to use the tea. He told them to drink a large cup of eat before each meal - I was like, duh - it fills you up so you will eat less, you could be drinking just a cup of water and have the same effect. Then he told them to make sure they raise their heartbeat by exercising before drinking the tea, so the body will absorb all the beneficial minerals of the tea more readily. Finally, he said that sugar would reduce the effectiveness of the tea, so to avoid eating foods high in sugar content when using the tea. Great, so do more exercise and stop eating sugary foods - that will help you lose weight without having to buy an expensive diet tea. I just stood back in awe and thought, I'm going to learn from this Moroccan shopkeeper because I definitely need to learn tricks like that as a salesman. Many of you would be familiar with the story of the stone soup but for those of you who are not, here it is in a nutshell from Wikipedia below, along with a Youtube video below if you would rather watch a video. 

Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor. The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty and nutritious meal.

Whether or not these ladies actually drank the Moroccan diet tea or just hot water would have made no difference at all, as long as they followed the advice of the shopkeeper: drink a cup of hot tea before a meal to subdue your appetite, do plenty of exercise and cut down on sugar.For the ladies, the tea was just the stone in the stone soup story, it was a catalyst to get them to do something constructive to help themselves lose weight. Indeed, the diet tea functioned as no more than a reminder for the ladies to practice these healthy living habits, rather than actually doing anything for their bodies. When it comes to diet teas, there have even stories of some commercial diet tea makers who have included laxatives in their diet tea to ensure that there is definitely some kind of weight loss by inducing diarrhea. Now if these ladies did everything they were told, I am sure they would have reaped some health benefits and they would probably convince themselves that it was well worth the money they spent on that Moroccan diet tea - but this just goes to show how some people are given to confirmation bias when they want to be convinced that they have made the right decision.

Should I have told my friends not to buy the diet tea?

Now the staff at SIM would undoubtedly have done exactly what the Moroccan shopkeeper have done: they would be giving their students very helpful advice on how to increase their chances of getting a good job. Some of the more generic advice for students would include the following, I would hope that a lot of it would be quite obvious to you. 

• learn a foreign language or two
• get some work experience and internships
• spend some time living/working/studying in another country
• taking additional courses outside the university to boost your skills set
• participate in external activities to demonstrate you have a wide range of skills, such as teamwork or being creative 
• you may not be qualified enough to get a well paid job, but you can still develop certain skills by volunteering with charities that will gladly give you the chance to develop those skills
• do a lot of research to identify the kind of job you would like and what the entry requirements are, so you know where you stand and what you need to do to get there
• make a genuine effort to network with older, working professionals who will be able to give you the kind of insight that one can only have after many years in the working world
• make sure your internet footprint is clean - what will gatekeepers find out about you should they do an intensive Google search on everything you've ever said online? 
• get plenty of practice with interviews, so you will not freak out when the time has come for you to go for your first real job interview

That's just a list of the most common advice that can be given to any university student anywhere in the world. Indeed, if a student makes sure that he covers all ten points listed above, then he would have done a lot to have boosted his chances of at least getting through that first round of securing that job interview. However, all this good advice has little to do with the actual degree that the student is doing - the same way all the good advice the Moroccan shopkeeper gave my two lady friends had little to do with the tea itself. Indeed, you could say that in both cases, both the SIM student and my lady friends were paying a lot of money to get some good advice, because what they were really paying for wasn't going to do them any good anyway. But if they simply acted upon the good advice they were given, they could actually do a lot to help them achieve what they wanted. The SIM degree and the diet tea are in fact no more than the stone in the stone soup. If you were to look at the success stories of the SIM graduates who have gone on to great success, you can certainly see a pattern: these people are resourceful, ingenious and hardworking. They didn't sit back and think, "great, now I have this SIM degree, everyone is going to respect me!The job offers from the top companies are going to be pouring in and I can just select the one I like best." These successful SIM graduates didn't get their good jobs simply because of their SIM degrees, but it was everything else they did on top of what they had to do at SIM to graduate. 

There is much you can do to help yourself get ahead in life: try networking!

A few months after that holiday to Morocco, I caught up with the two ladies in London as they invited me out to catch up. I couldn't resist asking them if they saw any significant health benefits or weight loss from that Moroccan diet tea. One of them said, "oh it was rubbish, I drank it but it did absolutely nothing for me. I even tried drinking a lot of it but all it did was made me want to go to the toilet a lot to wee it all out. What a waste of money." The other lady looked surprised. "It actually worked for me! I followed his advice and did as I was told: I drank a big cup of it before each meal. It exercised to increase my heart rate before drinking it each time and I stopped consuming sugary snacks like chocolates and biscuits." Well, whilst it was clear that the first lady didn't do any additional exercise or cut down on her sugary sweet treats, this experiment also made it abundantly clear that the diet tea did absolutely nothing to help the second lady lose weight. When I pointed that out to the second lady, she had a moment of realization. "Oh my goodness. I have to call my friend Rachel now.She's going to Marrakech this weekend and I was going to send her to that shop to get like a year's supply of that diet tea for me." The fact is she was more than capable of doing what it took to lose weight - she just didn't have the confidence to believe in herself and would rather place her faith in some exotic, magical diet tea from North Africa.

The fact is there is a huge gulf between what we do as a student and the challenges we face in the working world when we are paid to do a job. Some students are better prepared for this difficult transition than others and as a gatekeeper who looks at CVs, it is pretty clear to me who are the ones who are going to make this transition easily and which are the ones who are going to struggle. So if a student from a private university like SIM has demonstrated that he has clearly taken all the steps to prepare himself for this transition, then gatekeepers are going to see him in a far more favourable light than say a student from a good university who has clearly not made any preparations for this big transition to the working world. The magic of the stone soup can only work if you buy into the magic of the stone soup and go along with it, willingly doing everything you are told to make the soup tastier otherwise you are just boiling a stone in hot water and it will taste of nothing. In the case of graduates,many of us will eventually end up doing jobs that have little or even nothing to do with what we studied at university - that is why we can never rely solely on our degrees to get us a job, we have to do so much more over and on top of what we have studied at university just to beat the competition in the job market.

Are you ready to join the big bad working world?

It all sounds quite logical but the one last piece of the puzzle that irks me is the attitude of those who have gone to private universities like SIM - even those who have done well are usually reluctant to admit that their degrees are effectively worthless. Their success cannot be attributed to their degree, but rather, they can claim a lot of credit for having done a lot of very useful and ingenious things to help themselves get ahead in a very competitive world. Admitting to having made a mistake would tantamount to 'losing face', so they start defending the indefensible by telling people how well some SIM graduates have done in their working lives but conveniently omitting the part where they talk about what these people have done to help themselves get ahead in life,deliberately creating the impression that all credit can be given to SIM. It doesn't work like that and as a gatekeeper, I know that only too well.It would be utterly fascinating to find out in more details about these SIM success stories, what else did they do to turn their lives around to go from someone rejected by NUS/NTU to someone who can compete with the best from NUS/NTU? After all, we know that an SIM degree is as useful as the stone in the stone soup - you should really be far more interested in what else they did. 

I have come across loads of successful people who have rather straightforward stories - they went to good schools, they have always achieved great things academically, they ended up at a top university and that led to good jobs and great success. Whilst logical, such stories don't actually teach us anything new. It just seems like these successful people won the genetic lottery and were just born with such talent and brains that great success was inevitable. With all due respect, the odds were in their favour from the start. I am far more interested in the people who have stumbled along the way, made huge mistakes and somehow managed to recover from those mistakes- what did these people do to overcome the odds, to achieve success when all the odds are set against them? Furthermore, what did those SIM staff members say to them to get them to start making that pot of stone soup which eventually led to their success? Or if that recipe didn't come from the SIM staff, then where did they find that recipe for success under such testing circumstances then? If we can uncover that secret, then think about how many more people we can help recover from their terrible mistakes.

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic for now. What do you think? What is the secret behind the recipe of the stone soup? Is there anything wrong with giving people a stone soup recipe or a diet tea regime if it will help them achieve what they want? Why do people sometimes feel the need to buy a diet tea even if they probably know it wouldn't work? Why does the stone soup help some people? Or are we just so illogical that we can be blind to reason at times because we just want to hear what we want to hear? Do leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.