By Hadis Tsai
Liu Shao-Hsiung, a graduate of the Department of Chemical Engineering, now works as a general manager for ASUS’s Vietnam branch. Recently he attended a tea party held at NTU, where he said laughingly, “I’ll never forget the first time I entered the job market, when my supervisor yelled at me in a pejorative tone, ‘You have NTU disease, don’t you?’ I was speechless.” More Than a Party The university authorities ended this symposium with a call for more dialogue between NTU and leaders from different business fields. NTU president Si-Chen Lee held an “Inquiry Tea Party” to welcome these leaders and to discuss the graduates from our university. Numerous directors thought it was incredible that they had actually been invited to complain about what they have long been fed up with. “They are absolutely brilliant, but I doubt they have learned anything about teamwork in college,” one director argued. “They have everything outstanding – a prestigious school background, impressive language proficiency, soaring aspiration – but their poor emotional qualities really frighten us,” another member added. Merciless comments relentlessly bombarded NTU’s image throughout the meeting. Several managers hit the nail on the head when they said of NTU students that they tend to live in their own superior world even after they graduate. As a rookie in the job market, they refuse to debase themselves to do the kind of trivial work that other college students are willing to do. They don’t want to play second fiddle to people with inferior backgrounds. They are too pompous to cooperate; they usually have admirable proposals but few of them are feasible. Champion or No? Faced with this blizzard of complaints President Lee continually nodded in agreement. Then he provided the latest survey on “The Students that 1000 Big Businesses Most Like to Hire,” in which Taida students won first place two years in a row, which was different from past competitions, where National Cheng Kung University always took the lead. But it was also reported that due to new additional assessment criteria this year (such as language proficiency and worldview) the survey actually favored NTU for the first time. SCIENTIFIC NAME: NTU Disease SYMPTOMS: Arrogant, bigheaded, refusing to cooperate, biting off more than one can chew Curable NTU Disease The truth is: NTU disease does exist. It’s a kind of superiority complex inside you and me. Though it’s hard to confess it, at least I think I have NTU disease to some extent. We tend to think we are the best students in Taiwan, so we deserve the best. Picture this: when we are reproached by our boss, we are inclined to grunt an apology or rumble to ourselves instead of reflecting humbly; when we first meet our peers we are prone to judge them by their backgrounds rather than by their performance, and this contributes to the image that NTU students have swelled heads and that they are unwilling to work with others. Regrettably, if we can’t admit it we will never escape this stereotype. If we won first prize in the survey only because of the new criteria I think we are not truly the champions. We need to understand that we are from the most reputable college in Taiwan but not necessarily the best students in the world. If we are prestigious but we are plagued, what does it really mean to be the top students of Taiwan? So I humbly hope that we, NTU students who believe ourselves to be the salt of the earth, can stop for a moment and think: not only about our praise but also our modesty and our compatibility with others. a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|