Meetings with Hong Bin always bring unwarrented enlightenment. This time, he chose to shed light on the redundancy of the Diploma that we had slogged to attain in Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
Diploma in Multi-Media Computing...a lodestone to tech savvy teenagers of 1999. A cash cow in the eyes of parents who want their children to hitch a ride on the IT wave at the end of the 20th Century. It's a course that promised a good foundation in multimedia skills and computer programming. Basically I should have been a master of anything that starts with e- .
However, thanks to Ah Bin's wisdom of the second, I just realised how far off target i fell thanks to Multimedia Computing (MMC). Instead of becoming Masters of the trade, we became the Jack of NOT too many trades. Simply put its Chapalang Course. They took a bit of everything and cramped it in. We got quantity but where the hell was the quality?
The irony was that i was getting outdated even as i was progressing to my second year in the course. I studied Flash 3, six months later ALI ( my junior of 1 year) was studying Flash 4. I can't believe that i enrolled into this course to keep up with the times.
Anyway coming back to the point, a pseudo reality check in the hallways of SIM, confirmed that neither Ali, Hong Bin nor myself had pursued a job or further studies in relation to our field of study. Further information came from the Guru of the second (Hong Bin), that more of my classmates were dropping this field as they were squeezed dry but paid peanuts...
It just makes me wonder at times, how many of us really pursue what we had studied. From the housewives with PhD to the Post-Grad Prata Man. Have we hit a saturation point that the degree doesn't count anymore? Are the tongue in cheek jokes of the coffee shop ah pek about requiring a PhD to sweep the roads going to become reality?
Where are we really heading? There is an E-Theory. That the ever growing internet would one day grow so big that everything will crash. I know that my analogy does not make much sense but i just needed to justify my diploma in MMC... anyway yeah, have we pusued the degree so much that we even require it do a physically skilled job?
When the courses provided doesn't meet the market expectations, it becomes a disillusionment to the students who fork out ridiculous amounts of cash to study it.
I fear that education has become too commercialised and true knowledge has become buried deep beneath wads of cash and cheques. How ah, like that?
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