Thursday, July 31, 2008

Picture perfect

Is the picture as perfect as I assume it is?

When we are in love with something, the tendency is to heighten all the positives and shrugging off all the negatives.

I'm supposed to be in Uni on Saturday to help them 'capture' the heart and soul of to-be students. You know, playing the part of the salesman where I need to extol all the virtues of the campus - its powerful research background, its top-end teaching technologies, its competent lecturers and the fact that only the creme de la creme can get into the course.

Until now, I always felt that my Uni life is like a fairy tale - I'm given the opportunity to develop myself. I got to be involved in a lot of things and make a lot of friends - which somehow make my Uni life a truly enjoyable experience and felt that Pharmacy is a great course. Of course there's some not-so-good experiences, but in the greater scheme of things, its insignificant, right?

By pure coincidence this week, I was assailed by numerous suggestions that the course is not as good as it is. Like what the Uni taught us was hugely irrelevant in the workplace. Or more and more people was disillusion about pharmacy that they wanted to do something else after graduating. How the quality of lecturers is getting worse. Or lectures are boring or disturbed by noisy students. How they simply change the name or structure of the course or campus without much consultation with students etc etc. Its just like a few firefly suddenly light up together so that you can see the snake on the ground. Just enough to sow seeds of doubt.

For me, I believe the first rule in selling something is about believing what you sell. If this keep going on, I would probably do a bad job on Saturday. I'm bad at lying. How can I convince people that the course is too good to be true when it is?

"We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things: and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe betide him who would endeavour to erase them."
Johan Wolfgang Goethe.
Do hope you are right, Mr Goethe. Lucky for me most of my time will be doing campus tours. Nothing hard to promote buildings...

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