One day, a Mississippian went to Harvard University of Business School after he was accepted for the MBA program.
Amazed at the beauty of the campus and the marvelous structures, he got lost in the midst of locating the Business Department. He saw a distinguish young man walking towards him, so he asked the young man for direction.
“‘cuse me sir, can you please tell me where the Business Department is?” the Mississippian spoke in very strong Southern accent.
“Where are you from? We do not use verb at the end of a sentence because we are in Harvard, a very prestigious, if not the most prestigious, school in the world. We will only use proper English here,” The distinguish young man replied in an arrogant tone.
“Oh my bad,” the young Mississippian replied, “so can you please tell me where the Business Department is, asshole?”
That is one of the famous jokes I heard during my university time.
All the universities have a deep root and all the students and faculty has a strong sense of self-belonging and prestige in the universities. Most of the good universities have been around for centuries and normally they have a very colorful history, and the faculty members love to introduce the freshmen to a brief history, like who founded the university, when was it founded and how it grew, during the orientation. Of course, not everyone will remember exactly when and who founded it, but all the students will understand the history of it, the philosophy of their universities, and how they became who they are today.
Furthermore, almost all the students feel proud of their universities. Just look at the College Football game. There is rivalry, and there is RIVALRY. The students will show up to the game at the stadium, filling all the possible seats (there are around 20,000 seats available for a medium size university, and up to 80,000 seats for big universities), chanting in unison the slogan, flagging the logos, wearing the alumni shirts, showing off the team color, shouting for their teams. Yes, the support the teams get is enormous and it was one of the experience one cannot forget for the rest of his life.
But things are a bit different in Malaysia.
Recently I talked to a fresh graduate and I asked him about his university. His answer floored me to no end.
ME: “So tell me, what is XXX University about?”
F.G.: “It’s a place to study.”
ME: “Huh?”
F.G.: “You know, its a place where all the students study, a higher learning center.”
ME: “I know. I mean, do the XXX University has history, like how it was founded, the philosophy and how it became what it is today?”
F.G.: “Hey, it’s just a university, so what kind of history or philosophy you want?”
Note: F.G. represents Fresh Graduate
Besides, if you flip through the newspaper, you will be lucky to find any sports news on the local universities. Now I wonder if our local universities have any sports club or not, and do they organize any sports activities at all.
i found ur blog out of an accident.i was wanted to read about the hospital perfume hoax.but i find ur blog worth for me to comment.
well first of all,i AM a student of MULTIMEDIA UNIVERSITY in Malaysia…well…
i guess,the culture here is VERY different from most,if not all,of the other universities in Malaysia.I have frens all around malaysia’s universities and i myself sneaked into a few for “experience” (or more of a fun)
i agree that most of the students doen’t really care of their uni’s history or watsoever.but most of all,i dun even think they enjoy their uni life.(in the sense that,they enjoy their uni ages,but not life in uni.)from a large group of ppl that i see,uni student spend their uni life clubbing,loafing,shopping,cinema-ing,and most importantly,taking MCs,faking attendance,beg for unbarring,and burning the midnight oil.
i see these as the things most of the students do,but not all.
Look back into my own uni,i found a different culture.here,every new intake,our president himself will talk about the same old story of how he get this uni built,then how he gets his wife…EVERY SINGLE INTAKE.
in this uni,u have a few different philosophy,according to different faculty,but the one that most applies would be,”We grad with REAL experience,not knowledge from books we get.”.anyway i don’t really think ppl care about this,but about sports,yes i think it’s quite famous here.every year at least once there’s sports week.where all the sports club have their tournament up,and every year at least once inter-faculty tournament.where sports divide into the different faculties and compete.and every sports club at least join or host once of the inter-university tournament every year.
sports club in MMU is very active,and i think it’s hard for u to list out any sports club that we don’t have here. reason is,the uni fund students who can built up a new club,we claim everything from uni to make the club a success.of course,in return,we make our uni famous of having various sports and sometimes famous in profession in few sports.
i myself is the president of archery club,used to be vice president of karate-do club and committee in squash club.
u can visit our website,though it’s not really complete but u can see our past events.our club is kinda new,as it’s an expensive sports and we faced enourmous dificulty to get the cheapest accessories and approval from uni.
but here we are,a young club with some exciting n memorable experience.
if there’s chance,i would like to introduce u to our club.
First of all, thanks for dropping by. And thank you for inviting me to visit your club. I will be thrilled to have this opportunity so that I can have more firsthand experience about local uni life.It is great to find that there are some people/students out there are actually participate, actively, in uni life, and get a hold of many events.
Again, thanks for the info.
I myself am from oversea uni so I do not have much experience in local uni. But I did visit a few local uni’s and all I can say is, the experience I got wasn’t that… pleasant. That’s why I wrote something about it. :>