Written by: Miraz Hossain
What pops up in your mind reading or hearing the title above? Is it the Dhaka University campus teeming with thousands of people on one of those admission-test days? Or is it the throng of students queuing up at the doors of the coaching centres based in Farmgate?
Whatever it is, labelling it as war is the least of things we should do. Language is much more powerful than we can conceive. It can put a lasting impact on your brain and damage your perception of certain things.
If you rather term competition as a game or contest or just competition! It automatically sounds fun! But when the kids with tender brains hear ‘War’ over and over, they might ask for the Shield of Achilles before signing up. When in reality your institution doesn’t matter as much as your skill does.
Make it easy. Don’t over-glorify. My loath is for the boro bhais (seniors) who lure the students into coaching centres with the great expectations that their life will drastically change once they get into public universities, especially at DU! I am sorry to break it to you guys—that’s a stark lie!
DU or any university will not spoon-feed you or provide you with some magic pills. C’mon, it’s just a university, not a magic wand! It’s a regular place where you will go, learn and exchange knowledge following a curriculum. Or maybe, just maybe you can produce some authentic knowledge of your own!
If you want to change your life, be precisely sure what you really want. What does ‘change’ actually mean for you? If change means making money, kindly ponder how money flows. Let me help you. If you can develop a skill or product that you can sell, no matter where or what you study, you will make money for sure.
There’s no denying that the companies or government will pay you a fraction of what you bring to the table for them. It’s your skill that matters more than your fancy degrees!
I know people who studied at mid-range private universities in Bangladesh but excelled internationally competing with peers from top-class universities in the world! I met people with national university backgrounds changing business models in the country.
You might say, these are just a few examples and public universities have a slew of them. Yes, it’s true. But only because public universities net the brightest minds from the country and many of them would flourish anyway even from the dung!
Yes, indubitably circumstances matter and surely play a significant role but that mattering circumstance doesn’t exist in our public universities—speaking as a student of Dhaka University. If you speak of good circumstances and can afford public university tuition, you better opt for that.
Keeping in mind that we are a country with people who mostly don’t have the financial backup to fund a private university education inside the country let alone abroad! (Though our Per Capita Income might fool you by showing average growth)
When a private university is out of your league you are left with two remaining options: public universities and colleges under the national university.
Now look at the numbers, imagine our public universities have 1 lac seats for an academic year and there are 4 lac college graduates (plus the second timers). Even if I combine the motivation of Sauidy Coach, Hervé Renard, Solaiman Sukhan, or Donald trump, it will still remain statistically impossible to accommodate most of the students into public universities. Even if you all get 90+ percentiles.
So what’s the point of making something so important as much as to call it a war which is certainly uncertain? Rather you prepare yourself for making a change, for contributing. It will not only bring money but also make your study, work, and life at large more enjoyable. Otherwise, you will keep cursing the person who invented the necessity of studies until you die. How can you prepare yourself? Read. Write. Learn. Learn like crazy; read voraciously not limiting yourself to your favourite cup of tea. Read anything and everything.
There is another tendency of sneering at the people who are into knowledge hunting. The culture is rotten and you must rebuild the culture for yourself and for the next generation. I urge you to cultivate knowledge, promote learning, follow learned people, and make sages celebrities. You will have a wonderful future ahead.
To put it simply, there can be a Ukrainian war or an Afghan war. But there is no admission war for sure. Don’t fall victim to this. You give it a shot. If you get it, you get it. If not, move on. The rest of the world is ahead.
Things like admission exam is a war or public universities are paradises are propaganda of coaching mafias who con millions of your family’s head-earned cash. There is a burgeoning coaching business for even college admission nowadays! Don’t fall for such scams. Yes, you will get help from private tuition or coaching only if you really need it. My advice is not to go with the hype.
You are now a part of the global village. Learn from the myriad of sources out there. Make yourself a piercing bullet which will go through even the strongest bar. Don’t prepare yourself for university rather prepare yourself for the world with the skills and knowledge you need for the 21st century.
Let me give you an example, a friend of mine could not make it into public universities, and like most of us, his family was not affluent enough to buy him private university tuition. So he ended up studying at one of the 7 colleges affiliated with Dhaka University. To be honest, he deserved that. He did not study enough to stand amongst the toppers around the country to get into those most sought universities. However, during his stay at the National university—I don’t know what possessed this guy— he studied like crazy. He wrote thousands of words weekly, read national and international newspapers, studied research papers, and published one before he graduated. He eventually ended up getting a fully funded scholarship in the US which even eluded his brightest friends who went into top universities in the country.
Your education is now in your hand. If you are willing, you will find the circumstance you need. You will find thousands of ways to get shit done. Think beyond universities, think beyond the country. By the way, to subscribe to the world getting out of the country’s cocoon, you need to learn the lingua Franca—English! Learn English as early as possible. It will unlock a whole new horizon for you,
Go for skill not for school! Go for education, not for institution! Go for mastery not for glory! Glory will follow eventually!