Last Saturdays, I was invited to be a part of a group of an alumni gathering who had once graduated from an institution called Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia), a public university which had churned me out with a few others into the world as lawyers (or other profession they so choose). My university is rarely known to produce law graduates and are so unknown that the usual questions when people asked my alma mater will be "Is there a Law Faculty in UKM?". Even when my seniors had become a Deputy Minister in Malaysia (yes, there is one), we still get this question. For me, as I never really care or give that much weightage from which university, local or otherwise, when you meet me, I don't really care. But, it does show how obscure we are.
Before the Asian financial crisis, the graduates from our alma mater was limited to at most 70 students at any one time. My batch, which was the ninth from nearly more than 20 now, was the last batch before we became another lawyer mills which can be found in abundance. At least, we have started to export our expertise in Islamic finance in which a lot of law graduates are needed everywhere. Malaysia can be a supplier of those experts if it know how to add additional training for them to still be relevant.
Anyway, as we were students there once, we were called to inspire the third year students of the things they can expect in the outside world. This was my second time here. The first time you can find in this post here : Scaring the kids in school. As this time there were more than 15 seniors, I tried to be more civil and inspire them to follow their hearts and learn new skills if they want to be relevant in the world outside. I told them inspiring stories about how those who succeed had become an expert in their field and those who dropped out managed to find their way to become top experts in other fields. I tried to be a bit mellow and more inspiring than when I met them first.
Maybe it was the first day of fasting month (which fell on that day) which had affected me...
Some of the alumnus that day
The corridor where we were students once
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