To pause or to reset: Ms Fang's dilemma

Hello again guys, I have another long question to answer from one of my readers. Let's call her Fang (obviously not her real name) and without revealing any details that could identify her, let's just say Fang has found herself in a rather tricky quagmire. She told me that she is in a difficult situation now because she has messed up her H2 physics at A levels, she confesses that it wasn't her forte, she never liked it and it was forced upon her by her mother. Thus with her predicted results, she is faced with the prospect of either resitting her A levels or going to a private university like SIM to get a degree (hell no, please no). She did ask me what I thought about the SIM UB programme (ie. the SIM - University of Buffalo NY programme) and if that could provide any kind of salvation to her situation. Furthermore, she cannot retake her A levels as a private candidate for one of her subjects cannot be taken as a private candidate and thus she is indeed stuck between a rock and a hard place given her limited options in the face of terrible A level results. I then asked her what she wanted to do for a living and she told me that she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher - but upon further questioning, it turns out that this is merely something she did as a part time job whilst in JC and she realized, "hey, I could do this, it is not too difficult". There is so much to unpack here - allow me to deal with the following issues for Fang.

How do we hit the reset button at this stage and how far do we go? 

I think at this stage, it is pointless for Fang to resit her A levels given that she can't do it as a private candidate and she truly loathes physics. Her mother had forced her to do physics as an A level subject because she did well for it at O levels despite having little interest in the subject. There are two ways to look at this issue of course: on one hand, you could argue that anyone could study physics at A levels and treat it as an intellectual challenge, to understand the concepts well enough to get a decent grade at the exam. After all, in the working world, we will often encounter puzzling, difficult challenges that we have to get our heads around and this is good training for Fang's brain. On the other hand, you could also argue that Fang's time could have been better spent doing another subject which she is far more interested in - then at least you wouldn't have to deal with the problem of motivation, if Fang is naturally already interested in the subject and has a thirst for knowledge. But regardless, let's be realistic here: we can now see that Fang cannot get her head around physics and has absolutely no interest in it - let's not flog a dead horse, it is pointless and we have to recognize that her mother's decision was the wrong one. Given that Fang had essentially taken the wrong subjects for A levels, we might have to go back even further to hit the reset button - that was why I suggested that she looked at the various courses available at the local polytechnics and see if she can gain admission into a course which she is genuinely interested in based on a combination of her O and A level results. This would be a very sensible option to cut her losses at this stage.

This is not her fault, but it is her responsibility. 

Is it painful to write off two years of JC and hit the reset button at this stage? Of course it is, but faced with shockingly bad A level results that won't get her into any decent universities, Fang doesn't have many options at this stage. In hindsight, what Fang should have done was to pull the plug on her misguided attempts to do A level physics a few months into her time at JC, but for some reason, she just turned a blind eye to everything that was going wrong in the belief that if you ignored a problem, it would somehow go away. I do think that a good teacher should be able to spot a problem like that, but Fang told me that things at her school were chaotic to say the least and she had six teachers in her first year at JC for physics, so it was hardly a conducive environment to learn anything. So I definitely feel that at some level, she had been let down by both her parents and her teachers and this mess isn't her fault - she is very much the victim here. But here's an important lesson for Fang to learn: sometimes in life, we will find ourselves in a terrible situation through no fault of our own, but it is still our responsibility to clean up that mess and find a solution. Too many people simply throw a hissy fit and say, "this is not my fault!" Whilst that may be true, focusing on the 'this is not my fault' part of the problem would do nothing to help you find a solution to clean up the mess - so I am very glad that Fang has at least started to find her own solution to this situation by talking to me and may I also refer you to a famous video by Will Smith on this issue.

What do you want to do with your life then Fang? 

I then asked Fang what she wanted to do with her life and what she said made me roll my eyes in disbelief, like where do I even begin to help this young person. I'll summarize here: she has done some teaching at kindergarten level because, well, there's not a lot of part time work that a teenager can do. You're not qualified to do anything - so you either work in a restaurant and do something like wash dishes or clear the tables or you deal with very young children in kindergarten when you're effectively babysitting them rather than trying to teach them anything. So even highly intelligent teenagers destined for the world's top universities often find it quite frustrating when they are stuck doing those kinds of jobs during their school holidays. Fang found that this was a job that she could do with ease, it wasn't very challenging and then she started saying that she wasn't the ambitious type - that she was quite content with earning less money than her peers as long as she could avoid the kind of stress and responsibility they face in the corporate world. It seems that she has it stuck in her head that as long as she takes a job that doesn't challenge her much, she would be content and happy. She believes that it would be far easier being the only adult in the classroom, facing a bunch of 5 year old kids who are barely toilet trained compared to working in an office environment surrounded by highly qualified, highly skilled professionals who are all brilliant experts. She then backs it up by saying that she isn't the kind of person who wants to spend a lot of money on luxuries and she is content with a very modest salary - she is trying to convince me she has found a solution.

This is when I am going to hold Fang to account because I believe she is making the same mistake my nephew made a few years ago as a secondary school teacher. In short, he is very good at mathematics, it is his favourite subject at school and thus he declared he wanted to become a maths teacher without doing any research into what kind of jobs mathematics graduates could do. He was only looking for examples and solution from within his own very limited experience of life as a young student in a secondary school in Singapore instead of, for example, speaking to a working adult like myself who would have a very different perspective on the matter based on the many years of experience in the working world. Thus Fang is only looking at her own (very limited) experiences for inspiration about what she wants to do with her future career - I told her that she needed to speak to a hundred working adults and find out more about what they do for a living, she has started with me, that's one down, great - only 99 to go. And I was so confident that if she spoke to even just 50 adults, she would have discovered at least ten other career options that she would gladly consider apart from being a kindergarten teacher. Besides, being a kindergarten teacher can be extremely frustrating if you have very demanding parents who want to have a say in how their children are taught - so you're not just having to deal with the children in the classroom, but the parents as well. In any case, a good teacher needs to understand child psychology in order to do the job well and not everyone has that natural ability, it is simply not something you can learn from books.

What is the true path to happiness?

Furthermore, choosing a "simple" career doesn't guarantee happiness - right now, I can see where Fang's frustrations stem from. She spent two years trying to get her head around the physics A level syllabus only to fail miserably, boy I can see why she is longing for a "simple" job, one that she can perform with ease and she probably thought, "hey I was pretty good at babysitting those kids at kindergarten!" But of course, that's incorrect on so many levels - Fang may suck at physics, but she may excel at another topic that she is a lot more interested in. Often people who pick 'simple' careers (ie. lowly paid, unskilled work which do not require much training or education) are those who have no other options, they cannot become highly skilled professionals like doctors, lawyers or engineers because they either have not had the opportunity to get the education/training or they are simply not smart enough. Take for example the security guard whom I often see at my local supermarket - I greet him because he seems friendly enough and I'm one of the few people who acknowledges him as a human being. He has even less responsibilities than the staff at the supermarket given that he just stands at the door all day and night, doing virtually nothing. I can tell that he appreciates the little bit of social interaction I offer as he is extremely bored. Furthermore, such jobs are very lowly paid so whilst it may be an 'easy' job, I am sure that guy isn't exactly happy with his job. No, happiness in your work should come from finding something that you are truly interested in and passionate about, rather than something 'simple' and 'easy'. I think Fang just wants to be happy at the end of the day (well - don't we all?) but she is totally barking up the wrong tree by equating happy = simple.

Perhaps using the security guard at my local supermarket is a bit of an extreme example of a 'simple' job that requires little or no skill - but I swear he does nothing. The one time I witnessed somebody tried to shoplift, the shoplifter ran down the street and the security guard just said, "I'll call the police now." He was probably thinking, "I'm not running down the street chasing after that guy, no way! I'm not paid enough to bother." The problem with choosing a simple option is that it isn't rewarding - that sense of reward, of accomplishment only comes when you have achieved something truly amazing. I see this in my sports center - I train gymnastics 3 to 4 times a week but in the same building there's also a dance studio where rather fat, middle-aged women do yoga classes where let's just say they are not exactly challenged physically. I note how the yoga instructor would compliment them for simply getting off the sofa and turning up at the yoga class and that's when I get cynical: what we do in the gymnastics class is far more difficult but we do it because we get a much greater sense of reward when we do manage to perform these far more complex skills. As the saying goes: you reap what you sow. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment you achieve when landing a triple twisting back somersault is far greater than that of lying on a yoga mat, doing breathing exercises whilst listening to an Enya CD. Thus I need to warn Fang that chasing after the 'simple' options in life will ultimately leave her very dissatisfied - she wants to be a kindergarten teacher as it is 'simple' rather than because she has this ambition to become an expert on early education.

Beware of boredom! 

It really isn't hard to find a job as an adult, but it is bloody hard to find an interesting one that is well paid, fun and rewarding. Allow me to tell you about my friend Diana (not her real name) here in London, she is a graduate with a degree from a respectable British university. However, she failed to find a good job after she graduated and in desperation, because she was sick and tired of being unemployed, she took on an admin role - she told us it was temporary just to earn a bit of money whilst looking for the perfect job. Well, I'm afraid Diana stagnated - all her experience since graduation had been with administrative roles (she was even a PA for a while to a chief executive in a big firm) but she never did anything but admin. Recently, she changed jobs and she said, "but I'm still a PA, I'm resigned to my fate. Unfortunately, I'll never be a CEO, I'll be the one who gets the coffee for the CEO in the morning." I feel bad for my friend Diana - she is extremely intelligent (not to mention a really nice person and good friend), I know that if given the right opportunity, she will probably excel but somehow that opportunity never came and she is just extremely bored now working as a PA. Is Diana's job easy? Yes it is, she is vastly overqualified for this kind of work (which really doesn't require any kind of degree). But is she happy? Hell no, she is extremely bored as she isn't challenged (nor is she being paid that much). So I want Fang to be aware of Diana's story - not everyone with an 'easy' job is happy, sometimes it is quite the opposite, as in Diana's case. Poor Diana is just so bored out of her mind at work and yearns for a more interesting, challenging job! Fang, you really don't want to end up like Diana because Diana is a very frustrated woman!

So how about the SIM UB programme? 

I had a look at the SIM UB (University of Buffalo) programme and it still faces the same problem as all other private university programmes: the low admission criteria. It is ridiculously easy to enroll in the courses on that programme and when you couple that with the fact that they boast that 73.32% of graduates in that programmes achieved Latin honours in 2019 - and I'm like, wait, what? In case you're not familiar with the term 'Latin honours' (no, it has nothing to do with one's ability to speak Spanish), it means certain titles (in Latin, just to be pretentious) which indicate whether you're in the top 20-30% of your class "cum laude", top 10-15% of your class "magna cum laude" or top 1-5% of your class "summa cum laude". Wait, the numbers just don't make sense, how can 73.32% of the graduates be in the top 30% of their class? Okay, let's go with this for a moment and assume that these numbers are correct - that means that the vast majority of the students doing the SIM UB programme outperform the American students who are based the campus in Buffalo, New York in spite of the very low admission standards. That doesn't make sense - depending on which ranking system you use, UB is currently ranked between 70th to 80th in the US (out of 165 major universities that are worth bothering with - we're excluding smaller private education institutions) so whilst it isn't exactly prestigious, it isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel yet. You see, the problem seems to be that there isn't any kind of hard and fast rule when it comes to giving out these 'Latin honours' and every university seems to be free to set their own rules. Thus one can't help but feel that they are simply being given out like cheap sweets are a Chinese New Year celebration: everyone gets one just for turning up.

But okay, even if I were to overlook the questionable statistics of 73.32% graduating with Latin honours, it still begs the question - so what if you're the king of the castle when the university you went to is rank about 75th in the US and has shockingly low admission standards? What does that prove? I'm afraid it only raises more questions and doubts - such as, why did you choose such a programme? Why didn't you try to apply for a better university? After all, if you were a student with excellent results, you would never consider SIM or Buffalo - no, a Singaporean would opt for somewhere like NUS whilst an American would be setting their sights on an Ivy League university if they had the right grades. Don't get me wrong - I am sympathetic, I know there are students who are keen to prove themselves at such universities: they will attend every lecture, they will work extremely hard, they will make a genuine effort to try to prove themselves worthy. They know they have messed up in their previous exams and are keen to make up for it - but the crux of the issue is that at this stage, a student at SIM is simply not sitting for the same exam as the one at NUS, nor will s/he be graded according to the same standard. There's just no way for a gatekeeper to make any kind of comparison at this stage given that they have done completely different programmes, at different universities and were graded according to completely different standards. Oh and mentioned earlier, we all know that private universities like SIM will give you accolades and excellent results like cheap sweets at a Chinese New Year celebration - so even if you do work very hard there, your good results will at best be met with extreme cynicism. Sorry Fang, but you have totally barked up the wrong tree there!

Who are you trying to kid, yourself?

This reminds me of a news report on the SCMP Youtube channel about Chinese websites which allow you to fake being rich for as little as 6 RMB (£0.67, US$0.87 or S$1.17) - basically, you get to buy a clips depicting anything from expensive hotels to sailing on a yacht with beautiful women and even being in a sports car (of course, with beautiful women). The target market are poor people who will never be able to afford this kind of lifestyle, but want to give others on social media the impression that they are living it up like crazy rich Asians. These people who buy the footage know that they aren't rich just by posting these clips, but they're hoping to fool others into believing that they are rich. If anything, they're also doing this to try to boost their own self-esteem in maintaining some kind of facade.This is very similar to people who get their degrees from the SIM-UB programme - sure they get to dress up in their graduation gown for their big day and they are issued a degree complete with fancy Latin accolades, but who are you trying to kid? It doesn't take more than a minute or so for a gatekeeper to look up the admission criteria for such programmes and see how they give out top grades like (yes I keep saying this as it is January) cheap sweets at a Chinese new year party. Just like the people who buy those clips of luxury lifestyle from the Chinese websites, these SIM graduates want to feel like, "hey I am a graduate too, I am smart too like all those people who went to Oxford and Cambridge." Yeah right, who are you trying to kid? At least those clips to help you fake it on social media costs just 6 RMB, whereas a degree from SIM can cost up to S$77,000 - good grief. There are so many far more useful things that Fang can do with that kind of money.

And besides, even if you do get a degree... 

After talking to Fang, I realized that she still doesn't know what the hell she wants to do with her life - so spending three years doing a degree at a private university only kicks that can down the road for another three years, that's procrastination. She still needs to figure out what she wants to do for her career eventually when she graduates. So imagine this situation, maybe three years from now, just as Fang is mid-way through a degree programme, she discovers at last that she is really interested in something like food science, she sees a health craze that has taken not just Singapore but the world by storm. She becomes utterly fascinated by not just this miracle health food, but how people all over the world have become obsessed with this health craze overnight on social media. She starts to read up about the industry and learns about how various people and companies in the supply chain are making money from this health food - it is at that point she decided that this is so interesting, I want to make this my career. I am passionate about this health food and I am motivated to make this work - this is interesting and fun, I have found my calling. Then she realizes at that stage, oh damn, my degree has absolutely nothing to do with food science - it is not going to help me make my dreams come true. That's hardly a good position to be in, knowing that you are obliged to complete a degree that will serve you no purpose whatsoever in your future career! Of course, not all undergrads know what they want to do for a living - but at the very least, they should at least find a topic that they are very interested in as the subject of their degree, otherwise Fang will be right back where she started from with A level physics: she may pick a seemingly useful subject to study at university, only to realize that she has no interest in it and hence has no motivation to do the degree as a result.

In conclusion, Fang needs to hit the reset button but she also needs to hit the pause button before rushing into any kind of decision and making the same mistake! Things went badly wrong for Fang at JC level because she didn't know what she wanted to do and so her mother made the decision on her behalf, which turned out to be the wrong one. Now before she rushes into another mistake, she needs to take some time to figure out what she wants to do with her life - the problem right now is that she has been so freaking traumatized by her awful experience with A level physics, she just wants to pick something very easy and simple for a career. Good grief. That's never the answer because it will only lead to boredom, dissatisfaction and ultimately unhappiness. No, if Fang wants a happy, successful and rewarding career, she needs to figure out what she wants to do with her life, she needs to find her passion and that would mean listening to her heart (instead of her mother). I can't tell Fang what to do next, only she can figure out for herself what her next step ought to be. So that's it from me on this topic, over to you readers, what do you think? What kind of advice would you give Fang? What should her next step be? How can she gather relevant and useful information to help her make up her mind about her future career options? Should she give up on A level physics or try to resit her A levels? What are the factors that will truly bring you happiness and satisfaction in your ideal job? And what do you think about people who willingly pay for a degree from the University of Buffalo or SIM? Please leave a message below, many thanks for reading.