Before tossing the mortarboard

The graduation post is long overdue. Mostly because there wasn’t a transition period, no time for me to reflect, panic or prepare for a life ahead in corporate slavery. I practically went straight out of school to the airport for the grad trip, and was then shoved into full-time permanent work – my email correspondence with the boss began when I was in the middle of the red light district of Sydney.

So that was it, my graduation.

Before graduation, I spent four years in a business school struggling to master some academics admist learning how to please bosses, smoke clients and get a high-paying job. I learned a lot, but I forgot even more. “It’s just a way of thinking”, some would say that’s what you take away from a tertiary education. I agree that it does seem like that, although the more cynical of us might ask if it’s a way of thinking you know better than others who haven’t got that piece of thick paper, perhaps?

I like to think of it as a change in perspective. Compared to the rote learning back at JC where the amount I learned was measured by what I could remember at the exams, this feeling of not having learned much, and not knowing a lot is rather refreshing. On one hand, you could say my university education lacked the depth and rigor of technical studies. On the other hand, my university education has also led me to realize the great amount of great things that I do not know. The possibilities are endless, my interests are diverse, but there are just so many things I don’t know and probably won’t ever learn in my lifetime.

I would think the most you will ever be able to learn, is the extent of your ignorance. I would be most knowledgeable and wise indeed, if I could just accurately measure how much I don’t know, instead of how much I do know.

University has also exposed me to the academic ideal (or intellectual snobbery), in which I surprisingly found myself interested in learning something simply for the sake of knowing it. Back in JC, I was adamantly opposed to the A’level syllabus which didn’t seem to include anything practical. “Why do I need to memorize the Krebs Cycle and all its byproducts?”, I would whine. But that familiar question, “how could you be interested in learning something you can’t apply?”, became the response of a friend who couldn’t understand why I say I want to study finance theory when I had zero interest in investment and trading.

“Doesn’t being able to apply the knowledge make studying something interesting?” One thing I know for sure, is that the application of accounting in the real world made me lose all interest (whatever little I had) in accounting.

In these few years, I’ve also changed my outlook on my career. Sure, I still want a career that would make going to work bearable and the hard work meaningful. But no, I won’t search for a job that is exactly in line with my passions in life. What came together in a package with intellectual snobbery, was this bit of artistic stubbornness, naive romanticism… whatever. It’s a plain refusal to violate intellectual and artistic pursues with the dirty, ugly business of commerce and the filth of money which seems to be too big a focus in business schools.

Perhaps it’s the rhectoric of getting rich and being commercially successful that eventually sickened me. I love money, and I’ve nothing against capitalism, but I feel a need to separate my money making tools from my interests. It’s a fervent need to protect them because using what you love to make money feels too much like selling your wife and daughter into prostitution. I guess, you could be the most unscrupulous businessman selling something you don’t believe in, but what’s important is to be able to return home to do whatever you love, spending money on your interests instead of tainting them by selling them for money.

And certainly, no graduation reflection is complete without a mention of friends. University is about making friends, and I made good ones. It’s a wonderful thing, but a tad too often, personal success becomes measured by the popularity of a person. Before having good friends and the good opinions of friends go to my head, I guess I have to remind myself that everyone has friends, even the biggest bastards and bitches, and some may even have more than I do. If you think that someone who doesn’t like you is mistaken, what about those who do like you?

In two days, I will be wearing an old fashioned, oversized black robe and ridiculous looking square sort-of-hat in the middle of town. It is supposed to be a meaningful day, a proud moment. I hope the speeches will be good.