What I hope to learn in CS3216

Just a few days ago on my very first diving trip, I met a fellow young Singaporean, Shawn, who just graduated in bioengineering. He was about to begin his career in consulting with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the big boys in management consulting. While it is not uncommon that people end up working in a field far removed from their course of study in university, being curious (and to kill time during the transit time between dives), I sought to find out more about his story. I've always liked to know why people do what they do, or how things came about.

I shall not bore with details but what I learnt was:

1. Bioengineering was never what he really wanted in life. He just didn't know what he wanted in life when faced with the decision to make a choice. Sounds familiar?

2. He learnt about consulting about a year before his graduation in a chance encounter, which I imagine resembles the one I had with him. He never had any training or experience in consulting work. Yet a year later, he managed to ace through 5 interviews to land a 2 year contract with BCG.

So what does all this have to do with what I hope to learn in CS3216? First, Engineering Science (my major) is not really what I wanted. I was just as lost back then and still is. Given another chance, I might pursue Computer Science or Quantitative Finance, or maybe something else, who knows. I think there must be something wrong with the education system when a large proportion of students feel this way, and subsequently work in an unrelated field. In that sense, university education seems very ineffecient, but that's another topic for another day. My point here is simply that we, or at least most of us, don't know what we want to do or will do with our lives. Furthermore, most of the knowledge we obtain in college are either too "textbook-like", irrelevant or inapplicable in the real world, or just plain obselete. Plus, with our marriage with technology and its rapid evolution, we have to learn to adapt to everchanging environment fast. Sticking with a single specialty just doesn't cut it anymore. We have to be able to pick up new skills and adapt to new environments as we go along. My hope is that CS3216, with some nudging at appropriate times to guide us along, will provide a conducive platform that allows us to learn how to learn new things.
To be fair to other modules, not many subject matters have the capacity to act as a platform to provide such education, it's just that we're dealing with technology here, which is rapidly evolving, making it easier and also more suitable.

Secondly, I hope to retain what I have learnt. A quote by George Savile: Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
If I were to forget what little HTML, PHP, app creation skills I am about to pick up, I hope I still remember how to learn. That if I were to have to pick up something completely new, I would not only have the resolve to conquer it, but also a systematic method to approach it. Back to Shawn. So how did he land a job he had no experience in? Well, in his own words, "you don't really need any background la. They take in people from all sorts of background. To be a good consultant, you need to be a problem solver, pick things up quick, takes initiative blah blah". Sounds like the skills you need to be a good anything actually. What we should note here is that the lack of requirement on hard skills. It seems that as long as one has what it takes, any hard skill can be picked up. Furthermore, it has been shown that people learn things faster when they need it. As such, not only to this module, but in general, my pursuit in education has become that of achieve "having what it takes", which in my current limited understanding means able to take a lot of crap thrown at me, adapt quickly and thinking beyond set boundaries.

If none of this made sense to you, my apologies. I have never been good at articulating myself. However, I can confidently say that the diving trip was awesome! Thank you for reading.