On the Freedom of Course Selection

In mid-January, not long after my arrival back to Indonesia, I stumbled upon Bunga Rampai. It's a program by IISMA AC that calls for essays/papers that evaluate the many aspects of the IISMA program. I suspect that this program exists to try to convince the new stakeholders in the Ministry of Education to consider restarting the program, if not for this year then for the next upcoming years. Considering that I have a bone to pick with the program, I figured why shouldn't I try my hand at writing a coherent writing that encapsulate this particular criticism that I have?

The IISMA program comes with a lot of positive and negative aspects. The criticism that I wanted to bring up is how much of a mixed bag is the awardees' ability to choose courses that benefits them the most. I am fortunate enough to have chosen and be accepted into University of Toronto. Why? Because as have been outlined here, UofT virtually treated the four of us just like they would treat their own students during course selection. Whether or not we can get into a course is determined by the respective department heads that handle the course as they look into our course history in our home university and compare them to the prerequisite of the course we have chosen.

Thanks to that, I was able to get into two courses within the business minor program meant for STEM students (Innovation and Entrepreneurship & Technology Strategy), as well as a management course whose department head have been warned to be cagey about admitting people outside of its department into its courses (Business Technology Management). That warning seems to not be without reason as I was the only computer science students within that course of approximately 40 people (the rest were management students). All in all, all five of the courses that I managed to take are 3rd or 4th year courses (including the computer science one). And if you haven't noticed, UofT allows inbound exchange student to take between 3-5 courses that's why I took 5 courses instead of 4, the usual number that IISMA recommends for its awardees.

The full nature of the course can be read in my other entry in this journal reviewing each of the five courses. In summary, I strongly hold that all of these five courses are mostly in line with my interest and my future professional career. Principle of Programming Languages taught me the quintessence foundation of what is a programming language and how they work, a topic that my home university of ITB does not teach. Technology Strategy & Innovation and Entrepreneurship (and to a more limited extend, Business Technology Management) taught me how it's like to take an MBA and sitting on the seat of a business leader. Both of those courses pushed me to start reading Harvard Business Reviews (luckily my father have a lot of their press books). And I particularly resonate with the former because of how just eye opening it is (see this entry talking about strategy) to the point that the first HBR press book that I asked from my father is their two-part series on strategy. Business Technology Management taught me how the management team of a company see technology and how they implement it. One topic that stood out to me in particular is the distinction between the CIO (Chief Information Officer) and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) role, because I dream of becoming the CTO of a company one day. I even got to the professor's office hours immediately after class to inquire further about that particular topic.

All of this to restate what I've said, the freedom in course selection that UofT granted its inbound exchange student enabled me to really pick courses that benefit my professional development and aspiration. And it's not limited to just me, the other three awardees were also able to pick high-level courses in psychology (and other fields related to it that they're interested in) to achieve their own professional aspirations.

And I know for a fact from talking to awardees to other universities that this freedom is very much the exception and not the rule. I met with awardees to a university who only allowed them to take exactly three courses, and the courses that they can take is only the courses in one particular department of the university. They were given a relatively short list of courses that they could take from their host university's "handler" and they could only choose from that list. That experience is night and day compared to mine, and I'm the latter for sure.

One of my friends in my social circle once took a jab at the program because most of the awardees take nonsensical courses that is wholly unrelated to their respective major. Of course that's a bit unfair because one of the goal of IISMA is to introduce awardees to subjects outside of their field, and the matter of triviality itself is subjective. But after going through the program and looking at the courses that awardees take (or is forced to take by their host university) I can't entirely dispel that criticism, because it's true even if exaggerated.

It should be obvious by now that my main gripe with the program is how the freedom that I enjoy was not enjoyed by most other awardees of the program. But my other gripe is the fact that I almost didn't get to enjoy this freedom. As have been explained in this other entry that elaborated on how I chose the host universities for this program, the courses that are available in each host university played a key role for me to make a decision on which host universities to choose. The list of courses for UofT that IISMA had decided to put in its website was just so happen to be interesting to me that I chose it as my first option, despite the fact that awardees to UofT aren't bound to that arbitrary list at all and can choose (or at least apply for) whatever course that they'd like. This is also the case with another host university whose one of its awardee happened to be a friend of mine. He was also granted significant freedom in his course selection just like I did, so the list of courses that IISMA put up for his host university is almost entirely irrelevant. What I'm trying to say is that universities that grant these sorts of freedom should be marketed as such by IISMA on their website so that people aren't misled by it. They shouldn't think that the limited list of courses in there is the only courses you can take in that university when they aren't. Because had I know that UofT has this policy for their inbound exchange student, I would've chosen them immediately. On the flipside, I'm sure that there have been other universities that I skipped through because the list of courses that IISMA put up for them wasn't interesting to me even though they may have held similar policy to UofT.