faulker059

I can tell you from personal experience that getting a good internship in Malaysia is hard. There is no easy way to discern the good from the bad, and very few companies even have actual internship programmes. Those few that do tend to offer mixed results, with interns often feeling they are an afterthought and an adjunct to the organisation's work. (When I talk with friends who intern at local banks, they often have more stories to tell about running the photocopiers and buying kuih than they do about actual finance-related work.) Of course, where there's a problem, there's an opportunity. Some friends have set up Otak Otak, a project to match qualified interns with good companies, and provide structure to the internship programmes. They are currently looking for companies interested in hiring competent interns for a month or two, as well as interested students looking for internship opportunities in Malaysia. The website is otak2.com ; more details after the jump. Otak-Ot...

We often think about schooling as simply getting good exam results; maybe at best, we regard it as a way to practice our intellectual skills. But schools are where the adults of tomorrow learn not just how to read and write, but how to live. Our schools do a good job of teaching us basic literacy (and arguably quite a poor job of helping us think about the things we read and write), but even our best schools are often only mediocre when it comes to preparing us for life outside academia. A friend of mine, Lim Su Ann, wrote an excellent post some months back on how deeply unsatisfying the opportunities for extracurricular growth are in our schools — it's a piece I recommend highly. Most of us in school simply go through the motions of extracurricular involvement — we don't really care about what we do. Most of the extracurricular things I pursued in school had nothing to do with my school. Until our schools allow students the freedom to pursue the things which interest them ...