Ian On The Red Dot

After I had finished my A-Levels, I started considering applying to a bunch of tier-2 American universities and top Canadian universities. The memory of which American universities I did apply to is hazy (if I had applied at all) but I remember clearly applying to 4 top Canadian universities. 3 replied offering places for courses I was interested in.

I didn’t accept any of the places.

The main reason was cost (which is why it was likely I didn’t apply to any of the American universities).

My mom used emotional blackmail to get me to stay:

“You’ve been in NS for 2.5 years. Now is time to stay with the family and not run off to some foreign country”*

* Above is paraphrased. My mom’s emotional blackmail skills are way better than the words above will give her credit for.

My dad had two points:

1. I had already got into NUS, and NUS was good enough.
2. It was cheaper to study in NUS, after all, the government was giving a grant and studying overseas would stretch the family finances at that point.

I’m not going to go into how students are able to work while overseas to cover part of the cost and expenses.
I’m also not going into the debate about the (perceived) value of an overseas degree from a foreign university versus NUS’s.

What I want to talk about is the messed up mentality of my generation’s parents when it comes to considering costs and benefits.

And I will do it will a very simple example.

My generation’s parents are more likely to take a loan of $50,000 to buy a car then take a $50,000 loan for their child to study overseas in a foreign university.

And when they do, it is usually because the child couldn’t get into a local uni.

I think the decision on whether to take a loan should be independent of the fact that a place in a local uni has been secured and whether a grant is given.

How the C/B analysis should be done is like this:

Cost of NUS (after considering grants) versus Benefits of studying in NUS.
Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income) versus Benefits of studying overseas.

Benefits of studying overseas / Benefits of studying in NUS (>|=|<) Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income) / Cost of NUS (after considering grants)

Instead of:

Cost of NUS (after considering grants) (>|=|<) Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income)

Benefits of studying in NUS + absence of addition cost (>|=|<) Benefits of studying overseas.

Thinking too much in absolutes instead of relative.
Following how it is socially more common to take a loan to buy a car than to pay for an overseas education.

I really hope my generation will overcome this mental block for our kids.

NY Mag has an article cautioning excessive praise for your children

Some excepts:

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together.

Psychologist Carol Dweck:

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

In one, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

In another, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another school—they’ll never meet these students and don’t know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie.

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

On a personal note:

Notwithstanding the rather confusing environment I had at home (an environment I concede I must try to have a fresh perspective in light of the article), I grew up in a system filled with effusive praise for my intelligence, one that reached its peak when I streamed ’successfully’ to the top of Singapore’s ranking system. Being part of that system, I developed a lot of bad habits and ineffective mental models. It was around my NS time that I entered what one might consider a rather bleak period in my life.

And I wasn’t prepared to handle it. I’m still not sure if NS made the handling of the period worse or it played an integral part of the breaking process needed to start from scratch. What I do know is that unlearning was hard and I resisted that process.

During my university days, I was still stuck with a lot of the baggage from the earlier years. I’m now painfully aware that I was ‘handicapped’ by my ‘if-I-cant-make-it-perfect-then-I-won’t-do-it-because-I-don’t-want-to-fail-perfection’ mentality. The friends who knew me since my JC days, those that I made along the way, those that stuck through those periods with me, and those who I made over many nights of quite contemptible self-pity were witnesses, to be slightly dramatic about it, a rather self-destructive phase of my life.

I’m pretty sure I’m not out of the woods yet. I’m not sure I’ll ever be. What I do take comfort in, is that I’m beginning to be aware of what was happening to me during those periods, and how the way I was ‘nurtured’ and ‘praised’ affected me and how I allowed it to affect me.

This awareness is now a compass I’m carrying.

On another note:

“At least you did your best” is a meaningless platitude. It does nothing for the receiver who is neither comforted nor provided with a plan to improve. One shouldn’t shy from criticisms or brutal evaluation of performance if it comes with concrete points for improvement. We tend to do a lot of criticizing and evaluating but little of the latter needed to make the criticisms and evaluation meaningful.

You can read about what happened during the event at E27 and Sg Entrepreneurs.  I just have one thing to comment about the night and that is what I learned about Trey who is the programmer of the F8-winning application.  He isn’t a computer science student nor a computer engineering student.  He is majoring in philosophy.

When he shared this about himself, I started wondering about the oft mentioned lack of innovation in Singapore.  And I wondered if it is because students in Singapore are not interested in knowledge across domains.  In other words, are we too specialized?

In NUS, we are made to take modules outside our faculty as part of the university requirements.  Most of the people I knew in Engineering would try to bid for the easier modules – the non-Arts faculty modules.  There was the general consensus that Science modules would be easier for an Engineering student, followed by Business, then Arts.

The friends I had in Arts would try their best to stay away from Engineering modules and go for the Science or Business ones.

There is a tendency to choose the easiest possible module from another faculty with interest in a module sacrificed as a result.

Of course, not all NUS students are like that.  There are those who do choose a module out of interest and worry about grades later although I cannot help but feel they are the minority.

What are the backgrounds of the people interested in being entrepreneurs in this Web 2.0 phase?  More importantly, do we have cross-domain knowledge?  Do we pursue interests outside the domain we are supposed to specialize in?

Why would that be important?  There are many reasons, but one of them is that a problem in one domain can be abstracted such that solutions to that problem which have been solved in other domains could be applied to it.  Increasing our knowledge in other domains adds to our arsenal of problem solving tools, tunes our pattern recognition and trains the abstraction of problems.  These can help us in being more innovative.

I wouldn’t presume that it was Trey’s philosophy background that helped him in being the winner with his application.  But maybe, just maybe, it was because he wasn’t in a computer science course that he didn’t have the ‘we must add more features’ hang-up that programmers arguably seem to have.  Maybe, just maybe that helped him spot that application which was simple in concept and technicalities but was what people wanted and needed.
It is time for us to step out of our little circles.