Practical responsibility

I’ve received now quite a few comments in the course of the day. I plan to share them with you eventually once I’ve judged that the danger of misinterpretation has passed.

Of course essentially all remarks, even the complaints, were of a thoughtful nature and I’m very grateful to have received them. Needless to say, I’ll do my best to take them reasonably into account. In any case, I hope my own handling of obligations, faulty as it may be, appears sincere enough to allow insertion of a few words about a constructive approach to a personal sense of responsibility, hoping all the while that they don’t appear unbearably preachy. As I do so, I wish to make clear my intention in doing so:

My hope is for *every one* of the students in my class to be successful in the path of life he or she chooses.

This hope is of course rather grand, and you may be skeptical about any possibility of its fulfillment or even about the sentiment itself. For example, an overly cynical person might ask why I care at all. Since I don’t believe such cynics to exist among the students here, we could move on to a somewhat more serious doubt a skeptic might address to me, personally: Why these students, of all people in the world? After all you were born and raised elsewhere, made a career somewhere else again, and then seem to move around the world all the time. Why should you care in particular for the students in your class? To such a question, there is no easy answer. Certainly, any sense of obligation to one group needs to tempered by a universalist consciousness that benefit to one could be a loss to another. Nevertheless, perhaps because of the truth inside the cliche `think globally, work locally’ my honest commitment at the moment is primarily to the students I meet here and now.

With that preliminary over with, let me go on to a moralistic injunction:

In taking an exam, be in the habit of taking your own portion of the responsibility very seriously.

Even though I’ve described it as moralistic, and the moral dimension is an important one, I wish here to just discuss the practical aspect of this advice. That is to say, as I speak of `success,’ I’m sure we all know that the moral aspect of success is a crucial one. But today, I’ll focus purely on the practical side.

Now, one can go on endlessly about the fairness of the exam content, the exam schedule, similarity to previous exams and so forth. When I write a sentence of that sort, my intention is not to downplay your sense of frustration (and suffering, as alluded to in an earlier post). Indeed, as I hope I’ve expressed clearly enough, I do value your perspective and input. However, in this discussion, I am going to entirely sweep the details of the argument under the rug for the sake of making one important practical point.

The context is this: As I understand it, the majority of you are not bound for an academic career and will seek employment as soon as you leave the university. Then you must know that a crucial ingredient in an application packet is a set of references. According to monster.co.uk, 60 percent of employers claim they have had to turn down otherwise successful applicants because of inadequate references. I strongly suspect that this percentage increases substantially when one considers only jobs of the most desirable sort. Now I’m sure many of you have had work experience of a temporary nature. But I gather from conversations with several of you that for the most part, the job after you graduate, at least the one desired, will be your first serious one, that is, the first one likely to lead to a career. If so, I suspect that references from your professors will be regarded as quite valuable to a prospective employer. This is certainly true in the US (I’ve written many myself and have spoken to many personnel committees on the phone), but given the transnational character of business in our times, it doesn’t seem likely to be much different here. Let us ask then why it should be important. It certainly seems to give the professors enormous power, possibly arbitrary. (In fact, I hope you don’t interpret this whole post as some kind of a threat .) But we should first admit that the truly capricious cases are likely to be rare in human life, just as entirely thoughtless comments from students about professors are in the definite minority. Through an evolution of social know-how, institutions have a way of understanding this statistical rarity, and hence, taking the effects of caprice in due strides. But still, why ask the professors about prospective employees, whose expertise may often be related to the actual work only in marginal ways? There is one `obvious’ reason, that I will put in emphases:

A professor’s perspective is likely to be one well-approximating a managerial perspective.

That is, in addition to specific skills, a professor who knows you somewhat will have experienced your work in a way analogous to a manager in a company, and will have tried to evaluate it as well in similar ways. Here, we need to note that work refers not just to the part that reflects technical skills, but, very importantly, `work-ethics,’ to use a term that’s unfortunate but unavoidable. That is why I spoke of sweeping the detailed arguments about specific fairness under the rug for the moment. It’s not hard to imagine the challenges of industry coming at you in often unpredictable packets of pressure that many buckle under and but which the (potentially) successful people meet with flexible skills and mental resources. You might find it convincing or not to compare practical challenges with an examination, but what’s uncontroversial is that a manager in a company has typically much less patience for complaints of `unfairness.’ Of course he/she will be looking for someone who is able take personal responsibility and initiative seriously, and `get the job done’ in a varying range of challenging situations. If anything, the sentiment I’ve encountered most often from industry leaders I’ve met (at least in the US) is that university professors, similar in their role to managers as they may be, are far too lenient to train the right sort of personality. Obviously, it’s much easier to be expelled for poor performance from a company than from a university.

From a student’s perspective, the university provides the service of an advanced degree and, hopefully, the means of acquiring useful skills (as I’ve said, I’m leaving aside for now the loftier points). From an industrial perspective we provide a means not just to train the workforce, but also to discriminate within it, and to sort out the potential leaders. From the view of societal economics, this `filtering’ demand on the university is a perfectly reasonable one since the portion of the budget coming from governmental or industrial sources outweighs the tuition income in any sizable university. (Once again, I know this for a fact in the US. Perhaps it’s even more true here.) For the reasons outlined above, in this process, a professor’s opinion can end up playing an even a more important role than transcripts. (Once again, this is not a threat.) Of course, you can choose to avoid altogether using a professor as a reference. But then, you’ll be ceding at least one advantage to someone who is able to get a good reference from a reputable `surrogate manager’. (Incidentally, I’ve read in several independent sources that `personal’ references are practically worthless, even for people new to the workforce.) In any case, I hope it’s obvious that the importance I’m attaching here to a professor’s opinion is not because of direct benefits or losses that may result from it. The point, which I’ll repeat for clarity, is rather that whether or not you ask him/her for a reference,

a professor’s view of you is likely to be a good indicator for the view of an employer.

If you would like to examine this issue from yet another angle, consider going into business with a friend, seriously. When the wishful thinking is done away with, you might see the difference between someone to have a good time with and a reliable business partner. (I’m not denying the common enough confluence of the two.) In fact, if there’s a professor both of you know well enough, you might do well to seek his/her advice about the friend before taking out that big loan! (Yet again, I remind you I’m ignoring moral issues.)

The key theme here then is that in all these processes of evaluation (taken literally, measuring the value, unfortunately monetary, of someone), the ability to be responsible to one’s work plays an enormous role. I’ll leave it to you now to convince yourself further that this is the case. I did once write a letter for a lady who was in my linear algebra course at Purdue University. She was quite weak in the prerequisites, and received a `C’ even after hard work. (In the US system, this mean roughly, `below average.’) However, it was clear through the term that her basic diligence was far above average, in fact, extraordinary. When she came by during office hours, always with great punctuality, she typically had reams of paper where she had worked out exercises for herself (with considerable difficulty, I might add) far beyond what was required, and the textbook looked worn out by repeated readings. Nor did she complain at all about receiving the C. Of course, I discussed all this at length in the letter I wrote for her. Frankly, I never learned how her case worked out. But it is one situation I recall where the work ethic should have far outweighed in importance the mark received. By the way, if I briefly come back to situations that I’m somewhat more familiar with, that is, applications to post-graduate programs, a reputable professor’s good opinion of you can easily overrule poor transcripts.

Even if it refers a bit to regional stereotypes, I’ll recount a rather flippant opinion I heard from a manager at Eli Lilly, the transnational pharmaceutical company. He preferred Indian employees to North American ones: `The Indians in my division, when they make some mistakes, I admonish them, and then they shape up. The American employees are so difficult and sensitive about criticism of their work and always have some excuse. After a while, a manager gets tired of dealing with all that.’ These are just one person’s words (which I certainly don’t endorse), not expressive of any general reality, so don’t take them at all seriously. But do remember that it is the kind of (harsh) thought a manager you actually encounter may well have.

To mention a personal perspective closer to education, I can tell you honestly that I never allow my own children to complain about their teachers. I don’t expect ever to have an occasion, but if there were something to complain about, I’d do it myself secretly, without letting my children know. This is not primarily because of my regard for the teachers’ sensibilities, although such considerations are part of any civilized human interaction. It’s simply that it would be very damaging to the children’s outlook on life to acquire the habit of avoiding responsibility for their own learning. Since it’s probably easier to believe in a commitment to the welfare of my own children, I don’t mind stating even more emphatically that a complaining mind-set would be absolutely disastrous for them.

In this regard, even if I’ve discussed the issue of personal responsibility at length in terms of a professor’s opinion of you, obviously the more important point is the intrinsic habit you either have or can acquire, which will then eventually be recognized by the relevant people. The whole point of having this discussion is that all of you are still young (although older than my children!), and able to change modes of thought and action that contribute negatively to your future.

In closing, I should admit the obvious fact that not all successful people are endowed with an expansive sense of personal responsibility. But many are. Furthermore, and this is where the spiritual dimension comes back in, the ones who manage to succeed without compromising their true inner self definitely fit that mold. Sufficient practical pressure can induce many people to act in a responsible way for a period of time. For this action to come with enduring ease requires something deeper.