A final-year student from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Malaya complained that a workshop purportedly to impart soft skills was actually a direct-sales commercial programme.
This is the email:
I’m a final year student from Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Unversity of Malaya. I had a disappointment and felt been cheated with what had happened yesterday (17th March 2007) and I would like to tell you here. Yesterday, all the final year students from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science were told to attend a workshop called ‘Bengkel Pendedahan dan Penilaian Kemahiran Keusahawan’. It is a soft skill program which is set by the government to improve our presentation skill in the future. At first, from the workshop title, I thought it was an entrepreneur course that gives us some guide line on what entreprise is all about. There were 2 talks in the morning session, and some programmes and activities in the evening. Pertaining to the talk, they invited a company called ‘Aznita Mgt (M) Sdn. Bhd. to talk about financial industry perspective. To me, it was only a DIRECT SALES program. During their talks, they had told us it is pointless and useless to study so hard, no use to be a teacher, doctor or lawyer, as the money earn is much lesser if compare to them. They can live in a big house and drive luxury cars. In the second part of the speech, actually the person who gave the talk is the husband to the first person who gave speech. They are from the same company. In this session, he told us about his product, Amcash. It is related with the insurance product. He talked about how good the product is. For instant, if we invest in Amcash, we can obtain scholarship every 3 years, the payer will get insurance benefit and so on. We had a very bad impression about those speech. In the evening session, all the final year students have to do a project. Actually they wanted us to pursuade people to get involve in their business. They wanted us to plan some activities to promote the AmCash. We have to collect and record the information for those who are interested. We were told that if we failed to do so, we were not able to graduate from our course. So, I feel that we are their ‘free’ employees to help them to promote their products and we cannot get any things. Furthermore, I do not think this is sufficient to evaluate our soft skills by putting us going through this kind of activity. Do government really want local university students attend such compulsory and “beneficial activity”? From, A very sad, disappointed, frustrated UM student. (sorry, i don’t want to expose myself)
Anyone else to verify the above complaint and what is the response from the University of Malaya Vice Chancellor or the Higher Education Minister?