Backyard discrimination

I was at the Monash University recently to use its library. The library was AWESOME! It had clear signs telling you where to go to look for the required reading materials, and just about anything else- unlike this particularly pathetic Malaysian private Higher Education Institution (HEI) that I will talk about by year-end. I immediately blended in with the student crowd in Monash- probably because there were so many Asians everywhere. And I wasn't even officially a student there! Amazing!

Picture above: Nice landscaping

Picture above: This building is called the "Ming Wing". I was told that many people had jumped off this building before out of sheer frustration.

Inside the student centre

Picture above: A scene that's so familiar in so many American teen or youth sitcoms- boy runs down from staircase and notices his dream-girl standing nearby, talking to a group of girl friends, or vice versa...

Picture above: Here's a picture of me posing outside the Sir Louis Matheson Library. I'm a self-conscious person. So I kinda edited myself out from the picture. That library was so cool... unlike the one from where I got my previous postgraduate qualification from- the jokers over there manage the library as though it's an army concentration camp, and the library's just only slightly bigger than my mum's kitchen and dining room combined!

We shall now talk about one of the most stressful places I ever made myself enroll into for my previous postgraduate studies. The only reason I went there was through a casual recommendation by a medical doctor who went there for a part-time course. He didn’t complete the programme because “that place had some issues the time I was there”, so he said. But hey, personal recommendations through friends and relatives are one of the six reasons why a potential student ends up choosing a particular HEI, with the other five being the following reasons that I won’t discuss in detail about:

(a) Knowledge and awareness of study destination

(b) Cost issues

(c) Environment

(d) Geographic proximity

(e) Social links

Heck, even my postgraduate research focused on customer experience in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). But all I got from this HEI that I went to was a whole load of sh*t. I paid them everything, owed them nothing, but still got sh*t from them. Life can be quite unfair sometimes.

There used to be many middle-aged working people who signed up for this HEI’s selection of postgraduate programmes when I first enrolled there. These people sounded very experienced in their chosen working areas. One was merely taking up the programme to gain extra knowledge (he already got another postgraduate qualification before that). These people spoke with confidence in the classroom without fear of being looked down upon. They knew their stuff. They were the Baby Boomers and the relics of Generation X. And many spoke fluent English. I was the quiet mouse who merely listened to them showing off their knowledge. I was the Gen-Y little kid in the classroom who still had a lot to learn. In many class presentations, these older people preferred to have me use THEIR ideas. Little kid had to listen, you see.

Baby boomers and Gen-X people

Almost a year later, the student crowd slowly changed to that of mostly fresh graduates and international students. The students mainly came from India, Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa. There were a few from Indonesia and China.

There were also a couple of young executives who took up the course- they looked lifeless and lethargic, typical of any junior executive who had just survived the ordeal of being bullied by seniors at the workplace, added with stressful after-office-hours traffic jams just to attend 2.5 hours of evening classes for just a few times in a week. I noticed that they found difficulty in adapting themselves to a class that had so many “foreigners” around them. And they could barely converse in the English language, making things even worse. I’m glad my few years of interaction with international students finally paid off. I was suddenly made group leader for a few class presentations. So this little kid suddenly became the blind leader leading equally blind people. AWESOME!

There has been a sudden change in the student demographics in this HEI for its postgraduate programmes and I find this phenomenon somewhat perplexing. A change in marketing, advertizing and student recruitment strategies, perhaps?

The Gen-Y people

Let’s now get to the boring part, shall we? The part where an irate customer starts complaining about the substandard services provided by this private HEI. And this is just the introduction for now…

There’s a youngish-looking security guard at this HEI. He looks suspiciously like Jack Tweed. Yeah, Jack Tweed, that good-for-nothing publicity-seeker. During those few times I had to be at this God-forsaken HEI, he’d stop me and ask questions belligerently as to why I need to enter the building (to be explained in detail by year-end). Oh for God's sake, I didn't pay you people so much money only to be ill-treated like that!

I didn’t go to this place often, especially ever since starting on my so-called extensive research work. Me, a somewhat decent-looking, innocent kid in office clothes, gets treated like a terrorist each time I made my rare visit to this particular Malaysian HEI. But this silly security guard gets all soft and crumbly like an excited over-heated apple pie when a sexy Kazakhstan girl in a tight singlet and khaki pants walks past him. I’ve seen that happen before and it ain’t fair! Bias! Stereotyping! Ethnocentrism! Whatever!

Even when my friend followed me to this HEI to see what this place was like and perhaps study there, he wasn’t even allowed to enter the building. He wasn’t wearing formal office clothes, so that’s another reason why he wasn’t allowed entry into the building- an organization just like any non-Michelin-three-star-rating, artificial and snooty restaurant where waiters speak with fake French/Italian accents. I had to leave him, a person who had yet to experience working life, outside the building just like this poor dog in the picture below…

Picture above: Dog's owner was inside the restaurant whereas dog was tied outside. Location: Brighton

And I suppose they’re gonna come up with this weird rule next year whereby uninvited guests are supposed to be chained to lamp-posts so they won’t be a threat to this particular HEI community.

I have had the opportunity to attend a short-term course at an international school before. Yes, security there is tight because they’re guarding children of important people. But the security guards there used a different approach when dealing with decent-looking strangers, especially those innocent-looking ones such as me. They SMILE. They were FRIENDLIER, unlike those retards from this God-forsaken private HEI that I had decided to go to previously for my postgraduate studies. Who or what were those HEI retards guarding anyway? Sexy Kazakhstan girls?

This particular HEI is not even a world-class university- it's an HEI with first-class furniture and third-class mentality. It’s not even an international school inundated with kids of important dignitaries running around, hence the tight security. It’s not even guarding any valuable national treasure or military intelligence secrets. It’s just one of the more than 500 private HEIs in Malaysia. It’s just another private HEI that has to fiercely compete with other private HEIs to survive in the education business. So far, it seems to be doing well, what more with impressive marketing strategies utilized on a regular basis.

I shall write more about this insane, stress-inducing HEI by year-end, using a different writing approach, inclusive of modified swear words, after which I shall move to another blog or stop blogging.