Fili’s world

I believe in student power. More than I expect to learn from professors I expect to learn from my fellow students. I don’t believe in an academic setting where only the professor talks and the students are only expected to listen, I don’t follow hierarchy - what ever hierarchy that may be - and I especially don’t give people much credit or authority for having unrelated experience. I believe in students helping out each other to study and in learning from one another, and I think it’s especially relevant for the program I’m currently in.

There are a few things that I’ve been trying to promote for the international student community here, but I can summarize almost all of them as complete failures. I’m not really sure why that is.

Today, I gave a lecture on “Promoting Academic Excellence” with the following slideshow :

The point I was trying to make was that I’ve set up a few tools for students to use and make their lives a whole lot easier when it comes to either school or more general things.  Examples:

• Why pass around paper surveys that people only half fill with endless mistakes and you have to retype back to the computer when you have a free online survey system far more advanced than all the paid services available online?
• Why wait for the university to provide you with services and information that you can provide for yourself or others?

But, it’s difficult. For reasons that are a mystery to me the students don’t work together to help themselves and it’s not because they don’t know this option is available for them. I don’t expect anyone to contribute back, that’s usually 0.5% of the users, but I’m not sure why they don’t use the tools and read the information when it’s vital for their well-being and success.

Anyways, 2 students came to the lecture today. Last week’s lecture with Michael Turton received about 10-15 students. That’s lower than I expected.

I was discussing this issue with some leading students in NCKU this past week and I think we all wondered about the phenomena of students really needing or wanting something but actually usually doing very little about it. To be fair - I’ve seen the same thing happen in Israel too.

I’ll keep on trying… till I completely give up.