Awesome Friday.
Just went through a tough time of having to prepare for
examinations. I do not have issues with writing examinations, but I do not like
the whole mental and intellectual and sometimes emotional energy involved in
the whole thing. I am approaching the end of my education college and I cannot
wait to get exams over with.
I have recently been on the receiving end of the question as
to what I want to do after my first degree. People have been so curious that they
have turned out to disregard the two years or so between the end of my first
degree and my post graduate studies. To be honest, that is not much of a simple
question, even for a person like me who likes to give political answers to
simple questions. The diversity of the health profession makes the question (which
ideally as supposed to be straightforward) a bit tricky. Apart from that comes
the issue of motivating factors. There are different things that attract a
young person like me to a certain field and more often than not we rush into
fields based on how others are faring in them as opposed to how we feel about
them.
This has led me into a serious reflection about the choices
we make in life and hopefully you could share my reflection.
Malawi is not what you would call a land of opportunities
when it comes to careers. With most of our skilled workforce waiting for
employment, we have a lot of people languishing unemployed because of
saturation in their fields or other things of the sort. The result is that
people have ended up preferring some fields over others which are considered
marketable. I personally do understand that, but I know that there are a few
guys who preach the good news of entrepreneurship to whom this is not a justification
for preferring a field. Levels.
I digressed.
I was talking of how people have flocked into the health
profession thinking that employment in the government is an automatic thing,
only to be found fighting the same government that trained them just to get a
job. Talking of how people thing agri-based professions will help them get easy
jobs just because everyone eats everyday only to find that things are not that
straightforward.
To be honest, there is no solution for the undifferentiated
kid who is just coming from Form Four and is desperate to get into the
khomo lopapatiza called a public
university. In a nation where going to a public university means that you are a
genius, there are a lot who would apply for a program they have never even
dreamt to pursue, just to gain a space in the university while some on the
other end would apply for physiotherapy just because the name sounds cool (with
no idea whatsoever of what it involves). The few who do some digging would
apply because of interest and for the rest, it is the sort of thing where we
apply for Environmental Health just because they heard that it is a high paying
job.
Going into the university, most people realize that they
ended up in the wrong program and most lose hope feeling that it is too late to
change. The result is that most resign to fate, ending up being condemned to a
lifetime of a career they have to put in a lot of energy to like and the end
result is an unfulfilled career and low productivity.
Thinking of this makes me wonder what we may do to fix this.
We might point a blaming finger on systems which may relieve our anger for a
while, but at the end, this is a personal problem for many individuals. With our
primary edication crowded with many things, our young ones will not know what
the want to be until they write MSCE (nanga si achina JCE tikufuna tichotse
paja?) I just hope that those of you who have relatives in the lower ends of
the education will at least tell them that they need to be able to live with
the choices they make.
As of you, my fellow intellectual who like me is finding it
hard to figure out the next step in your career, you got no reason to panic.
Look at the diversity in your career and exploit that. Look at the needs and
see where they merge with your interests and soon you will have it all figured
out.
In our stages, we tend to be enticed by how others are ding
in different professions but we need to realize that the world is dynamic. You
may never know if someone is getting rich the right way or through what you
think uplifts them. Mwina ndi cashgate…
Lastly comes the issue of passion. Ideally I would have
mentioned this first but we always say we are in school to be the cure to the
poverty at home. In as much as money is the issue, we need not to forget that there
is something called following the heart and that work feels better when you
love it.
Enough for the night. To summarize it all, there should be
more to choices than just money.
