And then...to Malaysia! Thoughts upon Suddenly Deciding the Next Move
Looks like the traveler is ready to pack his bags and hit the road once again...to another place, full of unknowns, and full of excitement. This time, the destination is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and with it, my very first time heading into the Southeast Asian region. What awaits me is a business development internship in a local Internet start-up, bound to be filled with unpredictability and sudden changes in a emerging market of god-knows-whats-gonna-happen-in-a-few-years. Balancing the ever-changing tasks of an internship as well as writing my dissertation in a whole new country is going to be a wild ride...
Of course, this is not a sign that "this guy got what he wanted, and its all good and done." Maybe not in terms of academics, but in terms of job search, the year was definitely on emotional roller-coaster. And up until now there were certainly many very shocking and hard-to-swallow disappointments that made me realize just how tough the competition really is for the fewer jobs still available to an ever-increasing number of graduating students. Just from personal experience, many good prospects died, including doing journalism in Singapore, consulting in Dubai, and development in Ghana, just to mention a few.
In fact, just as many other LSE students facing graduation in a few months, I am still very much in a professional limbo as the internship is not a 100% guarantee of a future full-time position, or would it suffice to add so much experience in the course of the next 3 months so that the next job search would be easier. Indeed, it does open up a new field of personal history in terms of knowledge in start-up operations and Southeast Asia, but considering thoughts upon entering LSE, one has to be skeptical on just how effective the past year's education had been.
For one thing, it is almost common knowledge that fr those who have previous full-time work experience to go back to any non-professional graduate school, the main motivation is really about career change. In that aspect, it seems that many people here at the LSE have been pretty unsuccessful. As much as the students themselves have "high motivations for doing something completely new," the current economic situation does not give firms much encouragement in snapping up new employees with no previous backgrounds.
Indeed that was exactly my situation with regard to Malaysia. Certainly, on the surface, I am doing something completely new because it is my first job in emerging markets (outside China) and first in a start-up, but my being hired has much more to do with what do I know about IT beforehand rather than what do I want to know from now or what have I learned in the past year at the LSE. Certainly, I have Rakuten, especially its China project, to thank, but it really makes me wonder if I am taking up right kind of position.
Many people say that one should not plan one's future too much ahead, and that life's excitement is about unexpected change that takes one to unexpected corners of the world. I am certainly of this belief. Life is a journey to continuously find oneself and to shape one's individuality. But is there a point at which one somehow becomes satisfied? Is there an end and a final destination to this supposedly life-long journey? Drawing a blank upon one's life 10, 20 years later, while filled with optimism on flexibility, also perpetuate certain fears of excess risk.
And that risk is all the more magnified when realizing that the current Master's degree will most likely be an "exit degree," one that completely terminates one's educational career. From now on, there would be no illusion that going back to school again will lead to some sort of re-branding or at least self-polishing to shoot oneself into the higher echelons of whatever firm or organization one choose to work for after graduation. From now on, there will only be a climb, a tedious climb up the hierarchical ladder in those places, based on performance and sinking huge chunks of time on repetitive tasks.
And so here I am, with my thought coming back to a full-cycle since I first wondered about the same question when I decided to accept the offer to come to the LSE more than 14 months ago: what am I really going to do with my life? If a "world traveler" was a paying profession, I would be making millions, but unfortunately it is not. Despite all my obvious excitement to head to country number six for long-term residence, my mind is already starting to dread the day when I am sitting in my one-room apartment in Kuala Lumpur wondering what I am doing here...
Of course, this is not a sign that "this guy got what he wanted, and its all good and done." Maybe not in terms of academics, but in terms of job search, the year was definitely on emotional roller-coaster. And up until now there were certainly many very shocking and hard-to-swallow disappointments that made me realize just how tough the competition really is for the fewer jobs still available to an ever-increasing number of graduating students. Just from personal experience, many good prospects died, including doing journalism in Singapore, consulting in Dubai, and development in Ghana, just to mention a few.
In fact, just as many other LSE students facing graduation in a few months, I am still very much in a professional limbo as the internship is not a 100% guarantee of a future full-time position, or would it suffice to add so much experience in the course of the next 3 months so that the next job search would be easier. Indeed, it does open up a new field of personal history in terms of knowledge in start-up operations and Southeast Asia, but considering thoughts upon entering LSE, one has to be skeptical on just how effective the past year's education had been.
For one thing, it is almost common knowledge that fr those who have previous full-time work experience to go back to any non-professional graduate school, the main motivation is really about career change. In that aspect, it seems that many people here at the LSE have been pretty unsuccessful. As much as the students themselves have "high motivations for doing something completely new," the current economic situation does not give firms much encouragement in snapping up new employees with no previous backgrounds.
Indeed that was exactly my situation with regard to Malaysia. Certainly, on the surface, I am doing something completely new because it is my first job in emerging markets (outside China) and first in a start-up, but my being hired has much more to do with what do I know about IT beforehand rather than what do I want to know from now or what have I learned in the past year at the LSE. Certainly, I have Rakuten, especially its China project, to thank, but it really makes me wonder if I am taking up right kind of position.
Many people say that one should not plan one's future too much ahead, and that life's excitement is about unexpected change that takes one to unexpected corners of the world. I am certainly of this belief. Life is a journey to continuously find oneself and to shape one's individuality. But is there a point at which one somehow becomes satisfied? Is there an end and a final destination to this supposedly life-long journey? Drawing a blank upon one's life 10, 20 years later, while filled with optimism on flexibility, also perpetuate certain fears of excess risk.
And that risk is all the more magnified when realizing that the current Master's degree will most likely be an "exit degree," one that completely terminates one's educational career. From now on, there would be no illusion that going back to school again will lead to some sort of re-branding or at least self-polishing to shoot oneself into the higher echelons of whatever firm or organization one choose to work for after graduation. From now on, there will only be a climb, a tedious climb up the hierarchical ladder in those places, based on performance and sinking huge chunks of time on repetitive tasks.
And so here I am, with my thought coming back to a full-cycle since I first wondered about the same question when I decided to accept the offer to come to the LSE more than 14 months ago: what am I really going to do with my life? If a "world traveler" was a paying profession, I would be making millions, but unfortunately it is not. Despite all my obvious excitement to head to country number six for long-term residence, my mind is already starting to dread the day when I am sitting in my one-room apartment in Kuala Lumpur wondering what I am doing here...
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