I must say that I agree with Dina Zaman's recent article, [#1]The young and the stupid[/#] (March 7). I am an engineering student in a private university in the north and will be graduating in two and a half years. Before I proceed I would like to apologise to those who think that my writing skills should be improved before I can begin to criticise others. Hey, after all, I am a product of our education system that Dina thinks poorly of, okay?

I'd like to share with others the local scenario in our campuses, specifically my campus. This university, that belongs to a company that has been boasting of being "a multinational" company and being able to erect the world's tallest buildings, failed to live up to the professionalism of its parent company. Let's get to my first point:

1) When PMR and, recently, SPM results were announced, there was this huge outcry over the appalling number of candidates who failed their Bahasa Malaysia and English papers. So far fingers have been pointed to the teachers, and more so the students.

Well, hel-lo finger pointers! Wait until you come to my campus and see what the English we practise is like. While the students' command of the language leaves much to be desired, one cannot help but think that only when a cat grows a horn (kucing bertanduk) will the situation improve, for the lecturers, tutors and the administration staff themselves have very poor, often laughable command of the language. Imagine, coming out of lecturers' mouths, subjects that do not agree with verbs ("two hundreds... in a cars..."), and notices, from tutors and staff, that omits a few letters in certain words so frequently that it's difficult to dismiss them as typos.

Then, there are the notices that are in Bahasa Malaysia with no English translation for the benefit of the African and Commonwealth of Independent States students (the university claims to be an International university).

Oh, and did I mention that misuse of terms is also rampant? For example, 'Computer Lab Technologist Room'; A technologist is someone who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems, the equivalent of an engineer, which is not the case here since they are technicians! Technicians and technologists are not the same!.

A professional university with professional skills being taught (though I will dispute this in my following points) of a professional company with unprofessional language skills? I wonder how the staff got their degrees, master's, etc. in the first place. And the society thinks it is fair to blame the students for their lack of English proficiency?

2) And about young engineering grads not having their fundamentals right, this I totally agree with as I, almost on my final leg here, can't even operate an oscilloscope right! I'm not the only one; that's why I have the guts to expose this!

There was a special dedicated subject on electrical laboratory practices, but the lab instructors and 'technologists', spent most of the time chatting to each other, leaving the students on their own. I know we're supposed to be independent, but we shouldn't be left high and dry with badly-written lab manuals. No instructions, no introduction... nothing from the instructors. Only when the dean of studies come visiting once in a while do they start making themselves look busy.

And I have come to the conclusion, from my experience, that the lab instructors (all male) are gender-biased. While they almost always come to the aid of female students, we, the boys, have always been left to float downstream to nowhere. There was this one time my fellow labmate and I asked for assistance, we were greeted by his 14-face (muka 14) sporting his Romeo moustache with very obvious insincerity. Later he called us 'bangang' (or something like that) for being stumped over something he considered basic. Well, how were we to know that the long conductor lines of the manual-less breadboard terminate in the middle if you don't tell us, dummy?

3) Dina also lamented about graduates who lack etiquette. Not surprising, since a 'know-all-but-actually-know-nothing' friend of mine keeps saying the engineering world is no Sekolah Asrama (boarding school) where you have to call your superiors or seniors by title. To him, etiquette is something only for school kids.

This is all I can write for now. I can go on and on talking about our campus and will probably have to be six feet under before I can stop.