Firstly, it is important to be flexible in terms of thinking about one's further education - many people have plotted out their plans from an early stage and are determined to follow it; whilst many do manage to stick to their original plans, life can sometimes throw you a curved ball and you would have to change your plans to adapt to the new situation. So in Tom's case, perhaps he had thought that he could follow the secondary school => polytechnic => local university path which is a pretty well trodden path, but obviously at this stage, Tom would have to accept that he cannot do this and he would need to come up with an alternate plan. Clearly, we have identified the cause of the problem in his case: before he actually managed to fix his own electric guitar, he couldn't make the connection between the course content and being able to apply what he had learnt in the real world. Though Tom didn't complain about the teaching or the teachers at his poly (which I shall not name), I do think that the teachers are partly to blame for this situation in failing to motivate Tom as a student. By his own admission, Tom has confessed that he didn't have a good attitude when it came to learning but surely the teachers at the poly ought to bear some responsibility in terms of ensuring that the students are motivated enough to want to learn about the subject matter, rather than just assume that they are old enough to take care of themselves? I have actually seen tutors at university go out of their way to assist students who are having a tough time at university and I do think that to some degree, Tom had been let down by the system: this is why I'm rather sympathetic.
Let's rule one option out right now
So what should Tom do if he is unable to go on to do a degree in engineering at a local university? Well, the first thing to rule out is to do a degree in engineering with a private university like SIM. Hell no, that's totally the wrong thing to do. There are many Singaporeans who do not think this through - they simply say, "you need a degree to get any kind of job in Singapore, die die also must have degree even for the most basic starting positions." I get the feeling that people tell themselves this message to justify getting a crap degree from a private university not worth the paper it is printed on - but the problem is that this doesn't solve the problem that you're always going to pale in comparison when you're competing with a graduate from a much better university. The gatekeeper is always going to view the NUS graduate in a far more positive light than the SIM graduate, because we all know how hard it is to get into many of the courses at NUS whilst in the case of a student who ended up in SIM, there would be so many questions to ask like, "what went wrong? Why did you fail to earn yourself a place in a better university?" Thus if you're armed only with a degree from a private university like SIM, you're hoping for the highly unlikely situation to arise whereby the only applicants for the position you have applied for are all also from SIM and somehow, not a single graduate from a better university like NUS applied for that position. That may seem very unlikely, unless of course, the starting pay is so low that most young gradates with any self-esteem would look at that job and say, "no way, I'm not working for that little money. I deserve better than that, there are better jobs out there." Thus by that token, you're always going to be struggling to compete with NUS graduates if all you have is a degree from a private university, let's rule that out for Tom right now before he makes that costly mistake.
Here's the problem facing Tom at the moment: you need pretty darn good grades if you want to get into a popular engineering course at NUS. You're competing with all the students who chose the A level route and don't forget, there are also loads of foreign students who want to study at NUS. Competition is very stiff for the limited number of places available for the engineering courses there, so that means that they will only accept the very best applicants of each cohort. So what happens if you fall short - let's say your grades are not terrible, but just not good enough to earn yourself a place in a popular engineering course in NUS or NTU, what do you do then? Well, there aren't that many options - you are left scrambling to see if you can actually get yourself into another less popular course like business administration or arts & social science which is hardly ideal if you wanted to study engineering and had no interest in anything else. The other option would be to do an engineering degree in a private university - which as discussed previously, is a very bad idea. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place if you simply are not the straight-A perfect Asian student in Singapore. Now let's compare this situation to the UK: we have a grand total of about 130 universities in the UK and we do have our annual university league tables . If you don't have the grades to get into a university in the top 10, then you simply apply to a university ranked between 11th and 20th. Failing which, you can always apply to one ranked around 25th or even 30th or 40th which are not 'elite', but still a pretty respectable place to get a degree for someone like Tom.
Here's the problem with the Singaporean situation - the kind of grades you need to gain admission into a popular NUS engineering course would be on par with what you need for a top 10 university in the UK, yet the kind of grades you need for an SIM course would be the same as any university ranked between 100th and 130th on the UK league tables, ie. they'll gladly accept anyone who can pay the fees, even if you've failed everything. So in the case of our friend Tom, let's say he has the grades to gain himself a place in Leicester university that is ranked about 24th in the UK league tables: respectable, decent, pretty okay but not elite. Well there simply isn't that option for Tom to find a local university like Leicester in Singapore - short of his parents coughing up the money to pay for Tom to go do his degree in the UK, he is unfortunately condemned to be in the same category as those who failed all their exams and have no alternative but to get a degree from SIM. This is an extremely harsh and unfair situation of course, students who live in a bigger country naturally have a much wider selection of universities to choose from, hence in the UK, with a population of 67 million people, we have a much larger number of universities here compared to a much smaller country like Singapore with a population of just 5.8 million. So in Singapore, you have universities catering for those elite straight-A brilliant students whom you'll find in the NUS law faculty as well as those who are plain stupid (who will end up in SIM), but those in the middle like Tom are completely neglected. Oh the curse of being plain average - I hope he has rich parents who can send him abroad to somewhere like Leicester university. I think this would be the most ideal outcome for Tom given his current options but of course, this option requires a lot of money and I challenged myself to come up with a cheaper option next.
Allow me to tell you about this guy I know - let's call him MB. He owns a company that designs and manufactures tone bones pickups for electric guitars (very niche indeed). So what was his degree in? You might guess either music or engineering: after all, you need a background in music to be able to play a guitar in the first instance, then you need the engineering know-how if you are going to manufacture spare parts like that. Or perhaps a business degree, since he is running a small business. Well that was a trick question: his degree was in geography. Yup, like me, MB studied geography at university and his work today has absolutely nothing to do with geography. He had a short stint as a guitarist in a rock band but never made any money from it, but decided that he truly moved playing the electric guitar so much he wanted to do something to do with guitars since it was his passion. So on one hand, yes MB is a graduate from a good university, but on the other hand, so what? It's not as if anything he studied at university has anything to do with his business today. He was a man who had good business acumen which he picked up along the way, whilst doing various part time jobs when at university - combine that with his passion for electric guitars and whilst he's not exactly fabulously wealthy, at least he is making a decent living from his passion and enjoying his work everyday. Does MB regret getting a degree in geography? Well, not really - back then, he didn't know what the hell he wanted to do with his career, so going to university was simply a way to broaden his horizon and learn more about himself. However, the only really useful thing he did at university was to get involved at the campus music scene by joining a rock band there and he soon realized that music (and not geography) was his true passion. So if Tom already has an electric guitar, maybe he can think outside the box the way MB did to create his own career path. After all, the only degrees out there involving guitars are focused on performing as a guitarist (hey you wanna be the next Slash, Eric Clapton or Carlos Santana?) rather than more the technical aspects of it and so someone like MB had to figure out practically everything for himself.
Finding out what you want to do for a living.
This is not easy and we have to deal with this challenge in a sensible way: your education is meant to prepare you for the working world. However, without having had at least some work experience, how do you know what kind of career you would like? I found this out myself as I revealed in a blog post 5 career paths that I didn't go down - nothing wrong with them, it's just careers that seemed cool and interesting to me as a student, but without having had any work experience as a teenager, I had no clue if they were really suitable for me or if I was going to thrive in those careers. Given how young Tom is currently (well he is still in poly today), I think he still has plenty of time to figure out what he wants out of his future career and the only real way to do that is by getting some work experience and opening his eyes to what some other older working adults do for a living: there is of course a process of elimination - finding out what you want to do involves finding out what you definitely don't want to do! It would be useful for Tom to take a step back, see the wider picture and gain some perspective because right now, he is rather obsessed with the fact that he cannot gain admission into a good engineering course at NUS or NTU with his current GPA, but rather than focus on the short run, what he ought to do is ask himself: what do I really want to do for my career? After all, whilst he has some interest in engineering, are there other jobs that he can do apart from engineering or options that do not involve a degree in engineering? These ideas need to be inspired by working experiences in the real world, rather than moments of brilliance in the classroom.
This was something my nephew toyed with a few years ago - to be fair, he was only a student in secondary school then and his favourite subject was mathematics. He is very good at it and it is undoubtedly his best subject in school. Given his complete lack of work experience then, he did toy with the idea of becoming a mathematics teacher because it was a correlation he could make in his head: I'm good at maths, I find maths class at school a breeze so being a maths teacher would allow me to stay in this environment where I can thrive. And of course, my parents are retired teachers so he did toy with the idea of becoming a maths teacher back then because he wanted to put his maths skills to go use. But of course, there are loads of career options for people who are good at mathematics without going down teaching - from actuary to accounting to investment analysts - there are actually a lot extremely lucrative jobs for those who excel at mathematics and becoming a school teacher really does pale in comparison to all of those options. Indeed, teaching is far more about communicating knowledge to students than about the subject itself - I remember having a terrible physics teacher back in secondary school, she was absolutely brilliant in physics of course but she wasn't a good communicator. I remember how she threw the textbook against the wall in exasperation when I didn't understand what she was explaining, "why aren't you paying attention? What is wrong with you?" Back then, she just made me feel stupid but in hindsight, she was the awful teacher who didn't know how to deal with slower students who weren't brilliant in physics.
Fast forward a few years, my nephew has not only completed his O levels but has had some work experience, so when we went on holiday recently together, I asked him if he still was interested in becoming a maths teacher and he reassured me without any hesitation that he had long given up that idea, much to my relief! He was truly barking up the wrong tree as teaching is about communicating knowledge to students rather than demonstrating how brilliant you are in the subject. There's a huge difference between being a student studying mathematics at university and being a mathematics teacher in a secondary school. My nephew would be brilliant at the former and totally suck at the latter because they require a totally different set of skills - whilst my nephew may be absolutely brilliant at mathematics (which would enable him to get a degree in mathematics from a good university), he lacks the social skills that would make him a good teacher and let's face it: secondary school teachers don't have to be that brilliant in the subject matter, but they need to be excellent communicators with their students to pass that knowledge on. So turning back to Tom, there may be an element of him making that same mistake that my nephew did: he discovered that he may be good at some aspects of engineering after all after having successfully completed a few projects, but it doesn't mean that he would have to make engineering his only career option because there may be plenty of other things that he may be good at and would bring him satisfaction later on in his working life. He needs to base those decisions on experiences in the real world, outside the classroom. Ironically, Tom is berating himself for not having studied hard enough and being too distracted by life outside the classroom, I'm now asking him to look at real life outside the classroom for the answers to this question.
I could sense Tom's excitement in the way he described how he managed to repair his electric guitar based on what he had learnt in school, but I would urge him to exercise a little bit of restraint. After all, there are loads of things that we can be good at but do we really want to turn them into our careers? A good example would be my gymnastics: I was a former national champion gymnast and am also a qualified gymnastics coach - yet today, I do not make a living from gymnastics, I work full time in corporate finance. I am just a volunteer coach at my local gymnastics club, through their adult gymnastics programme and I also help out with my university's gymnastics club as a coach. I don't get paid as a gymnastics coach, I give my time freely without any financial gain. Furthermore, I still train gymnastics as well to keep fit and enjoy the sport. I did write in a blog post last year why I have absolutely no desire to pursue a career as a gymnastics coach but the bottom line is that just because I was a brilliant gymnast doesn't mean I would be any good as a coach. I realized that I simply didn't have the patience with less talented gymnasts because I couldn't push them to train the way I pushed myself to train. I had the right character to become a gymnastics champion but not the right character to become an understanding, empathetic coach. Thus I was the first to recognize that I would make a terrible coach and given that the pay for gymnastics coaches is pretty poor, it was easy to rule that out as a career choice. There are things in our lives which we are pretty good at, but we may choose to simply pursue those activities as our hobbies for pleasure rather than try to make it the focal point of our careers because it simply wouldn't lead to a fulfilling career.
So in the case of Tom, we have found out that he likes electric guitars and knows how to repair them - great, but should he try to make a career out of that or should this simply be one of the activities that he pursues as a hobby? I don't have the answer for that, only Tom can find that out for himself. After all, for a career to be rewarding and successful, think about what it must give you: you want to be reasonably well paid for your work, you want a happy working environment, you want nice colleagues you can get along with, you want a good work life balance, you want to feel like there are many chances for progression and be confident about your future. I felt that gymnastics coaching simply couldn't give me all the things I wanted out of a career, so I decided to treat it as a leisure activity, a hobby that I do for pleasure rather than money. Am I super enthusiastic about corporate finance? To be frank, no - there are times when I find it quite boring, but the four key factors for me is that I am good at my job, I have a fantastic work-life balance, I work for an excellent company with a great team and it is very lucrative; so all that is enough to convince me that this is the right career choice for me despite the fact that I never really thought I would end up working in corporate finance when I was much younger. So for Tom, he may discover that there's something else he may be very good at later on in his life - he may not necessarily be extremely interested or excited by the job, but other factors (such as a good working environment or money - hey it costs a lot of money to do the fun things in life I enjoy like going on holiday) may entice him to go down that career path. So don't get too excited about having fixed your electric guitar and let's look at the wider picture please.
I have carefully gone through all the conversations I've had with Tom and I note that he didn't once say something like, "it is my life long dream to become an engineer, that is my ambition and my dream ever since I was a young child!" Nope, nothing to that effect, not even close. Don't get me wrong, I just wanted to point out that he is more concerned about ending up in a bad university with his current GPA rather than missing out on his dream career as a result of his poor grades. After all, Tom did tell me that he applied for five other courses (note that engineering was not one of those choices!) at various polytechnics after secondary school but didn't get any of those choices - whilst he didn't tell me what those other choices were, it does tell me that he has other interests, that he has at least considered in the past going down other career paths instead of engineering. So rather than a young man who is desperate to become an engineer, I think Tom is simply a young man who doesn't quite know what he wants to do for his future career and that's perfectly normal given how young he is. Heck, when I was his age, I didn't know what I want to do either - I tried different things and changed my mind many times along the way. It was a journey of discovery for me where I learnt more about myself, what I wanted to do, what I could excel at, what I sucked at, what I enjoyed and what I hated. Gosh, sometimes I do envy people who know from a very young age exactly what career they wanted to pursue and that does make life a bit less complicated, when you have a very clear goal. Hence by that token, I really don't think it is a major catastrophe if Tom doesn't get a degree in engineering and he just has to pursue his other interests instead. So actually, no major loss there.
What is the point of a degree then?
I think Tom wants an engineering degree because he is doing what is expected of him, he is fulfilling society's expectations - or perhaps he wants to make his parents happy. But given that we know that he isn't even that sure he wants to pursue a career as an engineer and that he ended up in his current course quite by accident, should this be something he should rush into? No. Would I have done a geography degree in hindsight? No, given how it had proven to be quite useless. I got on in the working world by teaching myself whatever I needed to know along the way. There are broadly speaking two kinds of jobs in the working world: there are jobs which require a specific degree as an entry requirement (such as medicine, you need a recognized medical degree and many years of training before you can work as a doctor) and those which don't require any specific degree (way too many to name). This is when a degree is desirable but not compulsory - in my case, I am not just a graduate but a scholar, but is any of my stuff I studied at university even remotely connected to what I do for work these days? No, not at all. So if Tom is willing to keep an open mind about what his career options are in the future, then there are actually plenty of career options which do not require a degree that he can pursue. Many people imagine that such jobs are lowly paid, like working in a fast food restaurant or cafe - but a lot of jobs in banking don't require any specific degrees because the employer will give you all the training and product knowledge you need - they do not expect you to be anything more than a fast learner with a good attitude.
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