Going to College Doesn’t Make You Smart

I remember the first word I said after I’ve found out my SPM results, “crap”, Yeah that’s it, crap, now what?, well, my mother told me that I should go and apply for college, at that time I was pretty naïve and all I thought was that, without a college degree, I’m pretty much a hopeless prick and the only job I could’ve get would’ve been “jaga”.

So here I am, waiting for my final semester to begin, and all I could think of is, what the hell does a “Degree” has anything to do with jobs (or a diploma for that matter). I remember my father used to say, “If you have a diploma (any kind of diploma will do), you can be an inspector in the Malaysian Police Force” – my father was a policeman - . So that’s it?, diploma equals inspector, easy isn’t it, so let me get this straight, let’s say that you have a diploma in say, “accounting”, and you’ve learned all the ledgers, balance sheets, economics, etc and now, you’ve found yourself standing in the middle of “balai polis” as an inspector, and one day, your boss says, “hey, we’ve found a dead hooker in a lake, go do your thing, investigate! ”, you will soon realize that you’re not going to be able to use anything you’ve learned in college, not one bit. And the worst part is, it doesn’t matter what kind of courses you’d taken in college, it is not going to matter, unless it is CSI related (forensic), yeah, that might help.

Here's another thing, CGPA, for those of you who’s never been to college, CGPA stands for “Cumulative Grade Point Average”, in other words, it means The-Sum-Of-How-Much-Info-You-Can-Crammed-Into-Your-Head-In-One-Semester-Before-You’ll-Forget-All-About-It-The-Following-Semester. To me, CGPA doesn’t really make sense, for example, I’m currently studying for my Degree in Mechanical Engineering, and my current CGPA is 2.7 (it’ll probably get lower by the time I graduate, if I’m able to graduate at all), all I need to do after I’ve graduated is find a good cable (people on the inside) or work in a crappy engineering company for a couple of years before moving to a bigger company for the obvious reason (money). I’ve heard lots of stories about people who’ve never learned engineering (at least’s not formally) working in an oil and gas company doing engineering related stuff, Now why does such thing happened, well, first of all, if you live in Malaysia, seniority is No.1 and the rest is No.2 (that includes your SPM result, CGPA, and all the other crap that you think might help you in a job interview) , and apparently, Companies in Malaysia are too lazy to train new employees all the basic crap, so now, if you’re a top fresh engineering graduate, you can be considered the same level as someone who’s never seen a screw driver before, and that theory implies to any other courses, management, IT, Human resource, you name it, and by the time you've been considered as a “senior”, HR won’t even ask for your CGPA, they don’t even care, all they want to know is; how long have you worked in this kind of field, what important stuff have you learned in your previous experience, do you have good work ethics, and the most famous; how low can we pay you for us to drain your energy and force you to work like a dog in our company.

The idea of getting a degree or trying to archive higher CGPA has been with us since our days in primary school. That was the days before we even knew what “sex” means. Remember when we were getting brainwashed to get 5As or 8As in our PMR, yeah, I remember that day, it sucks. School only praises the left-brained students; left-brainers tend to be good at analytical things; like math, physics, chemistry, so naturally, teachers love them, and for the right-brainers, school was a pretty boring experience; the endless homework, the Am-I-Suppose-To-Understand-This-Sh*t, and etc etc. Daniel H. Pink, author of the book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” wrote;

“ The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't ”

- Daniel H. Pink

He also wrote that computers can replace the analytical ability posses by left-brained people but it is impossible for computers to replace the creative ability posses by right-brained people.

So there you go, going to college doesn’t make you smart, it’ll just makes you qualified for something that does not need qualification, like being a policeman, supply-chain manager, government servant, even primary school teacher. Degrees are like visas or passports, it is just a protocol, it is just “you must have this, before you can do that” kind of protocol. I think this protocol should only be use to enter hardcore jobs; like doctor, or pilot, but if you’ve decided to become say; an air traffic controller, you’d be better off not going to college and use your pathetic SPM results instead.