OPEN LETTER TO UNIVERSITY STUDENTS.
Dear Student,
Today I have something controversial I want to share with you, something I have been pondering about for a long time until a recent interaction with a friend of mine triggered me to put it on paper.
A couple of days ago I was having a conversation with this Kenyan friend of mine in his room at one of the halls of residence in Makerere University. He happens to be a good singer and dancer, at least that’s how a couple of people and I know him. The rest of the world? No.
Out of curiosity as our conversation drew on, I threw him a question: Why have you never taken your talent serious? Why have you never pursued it? His answer was simple: books. Unfortunately (yes, unfortunately) that’s a view he shares with many other students at campus. The answer my Kenyan friend gave me, is the driving factor for the message I have for you today.
While you sit on your dreams and talent “until after graduation,” as if your but isn’t big enough to sit on, another person is busy chasing theirs before they even join campus. Five years later when you see how much they’ve achieved, while you are still looking for your first job, you’ll know what it really means to start early.
Your degree will never be able to achieve for you all that you desire to become in life, so it’s a tad sad to see you “wasting” the most productive part of your life saying “let me first finish school then I’ll find something useful to do with my life.”
Don’t get me wrong, I am not de-campaigning school in any way. However modest it is where I am now, I probably wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for school. I just want to bring it to your attention that there is more to chase at Campus and in life alongside academic papers.
Campus presents to you a sea of opportunities; an endless stream of possibilities. The cruelest thing you will ever do to yourself is to watch opportunities pass you by as you concentrate on one thing – academics – that in the end may prove a waste of resources. Haven’t you heard of people who have passed on just a week to their graduation? What about those who shelved their degrees as soon as they were done with school, went and pursued something else totally different from what they studied and are now the most successful people in their non academic fields? Salvador Idringi the comedian, did you even know that he is an engineer by profession? Did you know that he dropped an engineering job to do comedy at a time when comedians were looked at as the lowest ranking and most unserious of people in society? How serious is the money he is making now? Do you know that Bebe Cool was pursuing a sciences combination at Makerere College until the day he decided to give his talent a chance? Where is he now? Did you know that at a time where some people saw the legal practice as the only destination worth taking, President Museveni studied Law for only one day and decided to give in to his heart’s desire, politics? Where is he now? Did you know that a Research Assistant at one of the Government entities in Uganda, with a Degree in Development Economics, earns a paltry UGX 100,000/= each month?
Do not be so mean to yourself, allow yourself to pursue a number of things in life. You never know which of them will earn you the most success.
For now, you are in a crisis, you just don’t know it yet.
