Recently came across a few books in the commercial press on the topic of "what i wish i knew when i was 20".. Surely these books do have some content to sell and if a 20-year-old man would really follow the advice i can see it working...
I also have something to offer to the secondary school students (though i think none of them are likely audience of this blog). it's about one's own education.
what comprises a degree
depends on who you ask - this is going to mean very different things for different people. most would see a degree in terms of:
(1) the granting institution
(2) the faculty / major
(3) the honor (as in, first, second upper/lower and third)
for those who dig deeper, these are also interesting to the employer:
(4) whether it is acquired in distant learning (esp Lond degrees)
(5) supervisor for final year project
(6) courses taken
For the items 4-6 they would need your transcript to know it.
and getting a good first degree is important
the reason why a good first degree is important is that a second degree (or taught master for the matter) is never going to cover up the blemishes introduced by the first degree - unless the second one is really a spectacular one. studying for a second degree mean that you will need to dedicate time which you could spent to polish your career path. these also raises question in the job interviews on why you do not get into your target school in the first place (hint: this prompts the interviewer that you may be a lazy person)
what is a good first degree? it's simple:
(1) the best local schools - nobody is going to blame you for not going overseas
(2) oxbridge, icl, lse, st andrew, durham, ucl
(3) ivy league, pacific-12
for the purpose of hong kong students - (1) meant hku, cuhk and hkust. it is not that the other schools do not have good degrees[1] - it's that people look at the degree name, then the bracket, then the rest.
and then not that japan universities are not good - in fact, u of tokyo is very good in most aspects and are great rivals with hku in terms of ranking - note that hku's ranking is more of a research thing than a teaching thing and many of us would consider u of tokyo having better teaching and better students than hku.
why not a good second degree/master degree?
the simple reason is that it is less recognized - most boss understand what taught master meant - it's just exchanging money for degree - and often one do not learn much because of (1) its part-time basis, and (2) because of daytime work. if you do fulltime on these taught master then it raises question on how much your time is really worth - to be honest, to a productive man, a year off just for a master degree is way too much.
for the (overseas) research master, it may as well be better, but then the career choice would then be much more limited - mostly to companies with R&D, as well as in the academic/teaching field. it is also a more difficult business - professors detaining research students just to complete projects are not something that is unheard of.
[1] for example, polyu BA in design is of course best in the field, but we are talking about general degrees. general ones.
Came across you post on RandomCoil....so I thought I'd pay a visit.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting take on education, though there are somethings that are worth exploring...
It would seems that your definition of a good first degree is somewhat narrow in a sense that those are the schools that most people "recognized", but there are also tons of good ones in states that you might not have heard of. Top Liberal Arts schools such as Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Wesleyan and regional universities such as Rice are academically comparable, at undergraduate level, to any of the Ivies.
The second issue is regarding a good first degree is that undergraduate admission is a very competitive and tricky game. For example I know top student who graduated 1st (not top 1%) in the class of a private high schools with 4-5 AP's at 5's got rejected by every Ivy, including the IT's. His academic capability is as strong as others, yet he missed something that these schools want.
Eventually he enrolled at one of the Pacific-12 and got his Masters' in Engineering at Stanford. That's just goes to show you that unless one is a genius, going to a local school or a lesser school at undergraduate level is entirely ok.
And frankly a lot of Lawyers I know graduated from HKU/City U and went on to take Ivy's/LSE LLM just to show that they are at an academic level higher than what's limiting them, so I think a second/postgraduate degree is every bit as relevant an indicator as the first degree in terms of assessment.
It is true that the scope of the "good first degree" in this particular blog post is extremely narrow -- and to be honest, I agreed with you! The definition so-put on the post however, reflects the rather realistic, shallow definition which adapted by some (or many) of our fellow citizens, and unsurprisingly some of them are bosses :)
DeleteAs for the additional qualities required to go into an ivy league school - it is more than the academic capability. it's more of a personality thing (well-rounded students, etc.)
I guess I can put it in another way, getting a first degree may not be the only route to success, but it certainly makes it easier to success (in the academia or business field) because of the recognition and abundance of alumni taking the leader role...
Disclaimer: I graduated locally :)
It really depends I guess. As a Doctor you would probably know that the community of doctors are mostly Hong Kong graduates due mainly to the barrier of entry. So in that sense the community is no different from an Ivy league alumni club (with legal backing even!).
DeleteHowever do you feel that the fellow doctors are helpful in terms of your career advancements? Or that the leaders who went to the same medical school with you in different years are helpful?
The reality about having foreign top school degrees is that, the network you can built depends a lot on your background in HK. Granted, a lot of them already are very connected with their parents help, so the foreign degree really is just an added plus. That's probably just a piece of the puzzle to make the picture complete, but probably not as strong as what you may have thought.
Will share a lot about graduates finding work in HK and the difficulty of it maybe when you write another post. A good first degree always help, just that is is not magical as one would think.
Disclaimer: I graduated from a Pac-12 school :)
> However do you feel that the fellow doctors are helpful in terms of your career advancements? Or that the leaders who went to the same medical school with you in different years are helpful?
DeleteWell, there are only two schools in HK that allow students to read medical degree, and it is quite true that people will still identify themselves as HKU- or CU- graduates and continue to talk on how they had their weakness developed (HKU medicine degree being quite famous among its graduates to have fairly poor teaching in several disciplines, my working specialty included.)
> The reality about having foreign top school degrees is that, the network you can built depends a lot on your background in HK. Granted, a lot of them already are very connected with their parents help, so the foreign degree really is just an added plus. That's probably just a piece of the puzzle to make the picture complete, but probably not as strong as what you may have thought.
I guess to some extent, the "famous secondary school" club in HK is more like what they had in the ivy league alumni club. after all, we are only talking about top 5% when we are talking about the three major univs, and we could be talking about top 0.5% when we are talking about matriculation graduates of a "traditional famous secondary school"...