"I studied business so I can never practice it"

11 Mar, 2025

We had our first supervisor meeting recently. It was pretty nerve-wracking to speak with my supervisor live (as we had all corresponded with him via email prior to this).

I respect my supervisor a whole lot. He has published numerous papers and several books, not a small feat here at a private university in Malaysia. He had Martin Seligman as his supervisor (one of the proponents of the positive psychology field), and most importantly, you can tell he isn't there for the money.

I've had conversations with friends who took up his electives or the core subjects he taught. We could tell he could probably do whatever he wanted and is one of those lecturers who genuinely loves teaching. He made 8 a.m. classes palatable! I fell in love with positive psychology, the study of emotions, and the vast literature in the field because of how he expressed his enjoyment of it.

Have you ever had a teacher, or a lecturer or perhaps a mentor figure that's like that? One who made you enjoy learning, just for the sake of learning.

For myself and a lot of my peers, it's Dr. E. He has his own blog sharing sharing cited articles, and posters from the class assignments he has worked on that are properly credited, and he also has his own podcast. Pretty cool.

Something he shared today, was that he took a business-related PhD before getting his masters in Applied Positive Psychology. I was pretty surprised!

Well... he ended that topic with:

"I studied business so I can never practice it"

It was a sort of joke, but it grabbed my attention so much that I opened up my notes app and wrote it down. A lot of people in academics don't stay in the field because they can't afford to - not because they don't want to.

It's been pretty common to hear lecturers leaving - I can recall at least 4 that have taught my cohort and had left in the last 2 years I've been at this university. One of them told us that the university was not paying well enough to sustain his family and kid, so he had to get a consulting job. Another one told us that a competing university offered a more senior position.

Dr. E has shared many criticisms of the university's decisions. One of them is the push of the usage of SPSS (a prominent statistics software, but costly) in classrooms and graded assignments, whilst not providing licenses to students who are already paying for resource fees. This led the entire cohort to resort to certain measures of sailing the high seas to work on our course assessments.

On the topic of SPSS, I also felt that it was odd that the university had us first use JASP (an open-source alternative to SPSS, that is frankly more intuitive to use lol) and then switched to SPSS and made it mandatory to utilize in our assessments. Oh well. Maybe they really wanted to make use of those licensed copies they had in the computer labs.

There's also a lot of talk about the management cutting costs with administrative work being increasingly piled onto the lecturers instead of hiring more appropriate people to get to those. Not to mention that there's been a clear step-up in the marketing of the university on social media.

There's also been news that the university cut off a whole other department and the course that they were offering. We have a handful of friends from that department, and they all expressed concern about how their degrees might be seen negatively by potential hires because of this.

Anyhow, there's not much of a happy ending to this, unfortunately. I guess I was inspired to write this as I'm reminded that there are passionate educators like Dr. E who continue to teach and work in academia, despite all these challenges. He has an interesting situation where he seems to be comfortable with the flexibility of his job and his love of research in general.

I don't blame those who quit the field though, I can see how draining it is and how I probably couldn't sustain in it.

[29/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #personal