The following post was written on Friday night, 21.1.2010
By now I have calmed down. Earlier today, something happened to make me angry and indignant. I think that if I had been handed a laptop and wi-fi service right there and then, I would have blogged something I regretted. Thankfully, I’m not angry anymore. I don’t even feel hurt. And yet the issue at hand has not yet lost its significance for me.
As early as March last year, the School Achiever’s Scholarship Award application form was already pinned to my whiteboard. The SASA is a scholarship that is awarded based on a student’s achievements in extra-curricular activities (ECA). Academic results do not matter as much. As such, it makes the SASA a relatively easy scholarship to obtain. I sent in my application in July, and in August I was called to an interview at HELP College. In September/October, I was informed that I got the scholarship.
One of the senior SASA recipients told me, “It’s not about whether or not you get the SASA. It’s how much you get out of it.”
I’m not sure about Foundation in Arts, but for A-Levels students, the amounts of money you can obtain from the SASA are as follows – RM4K, RM8K, RM12K or RM18K (which is the full scholarship). It turns out that my senior was right, for out of the 30+ applicants from Catholic High School, many received it, although the amounts varied. I was among those who received an RM4K scholarship. Quite a number of people who received the SASA turned it down. I accepted it, and I am now doing my A-Levels at HELP University College.
One question I am often asked, when people find out that I am a SASA scholar, is the inevitable “How much did you get?”
And more often than not, if the answer is not something along the lines of “Aww, only RM4K?” it is an awkward, “Ohh…” and/or a sympathetic nod, which somehow infuriates and perplexes me at the same time.
The nature of the SASA is such that people tend to judge you based on how much you have gotten out of it. It is as if the amount you have been awarded signifies the value of your presence in any room. If you have a full scholarship, or at any rate a larger amount than anyone else, people sit up and pay attention to you straight away. This is also a kind of prejudice and a way of establishing a pecking order among your peers. Only unlike the kind of prejudice brought on by appearance - whether or not you have pretty hair, pretty bags, cool shirts, nice shoes – the kind of prejudice brought on by the SASA is much harder to deal with because the amount of money you are given is awarded based on your interview and your high school co-curricular achievements… Which does somewhat reflect what kind of personality you have, but only to a certain extent.
However, being trapped in a highly kiasu society where appearances and achievements mean the world, we can’t help but judge people based on how much they got. She got RM8K, he got RM12K. That means he has been more active in ECA than she has been, therefore he must have stronger leadership skills and therefore more outgoing, more capable, everything.
Oh and she got only RM4K. Oh well it’s still a scholarship, is it not.
I feel sick, disgusted and disappointed with the way we have started to think.
I would like to ask: why do you say only RM4K?
Does only receiving the smallest amount of money possible from the SASA reduce my worth as your peer?
Does receiving RM4K make me less than worthy of mingling with the ones who got RM18K?
Does receiving RM4K mean that my leadership skills are somewhat stunted? Maybe it means I have questionable intellectual ability? Maybe I’m too stupid to be around the ones who got more than I do?
From the way everyone reacts to “I got RM4K”, it is only too clear that this the way the majority of the people around me think.
A scholarship is a sum of money or other aid granted to a student, because of merit, need, etc., to pursue his or her studies.
Now, bizarrely, what was meant to be a means of helping a financially-burdened student has become a symbol of status and a means of climbing up the social ladder.
“I really want to know why I got less than you. I think I deserve more.”
The board that awarded the SASA-rians the scholarship is not infallible. There was a sort of system formed, based on your achievements (the thickness of your application form) and how much you managed to charm them in your interview. But I believe that one interview is simply not enough for the awarding body to fully gauge your true personality. It is known that people change during and for their interviews; The best remain as they are, but some shine brighter than they usually do, and some shrink into themselves.
I am not doubting the awarding body’s judgement. I was somewhat of a homebody during my first few years of high school, resulting in a rather weak co-curriculum sheet. I am aware that I did not shine as brightly as the other applicants did. Personally I consider myself slightly shy; I take time to open up to other people and become comfortable around them. It was therefore nigh impossible that the lecturers could get to know me well in that one ten-minute session I had with them.
And yet that ten-minute session is the determining factor of how much you will be getting out of the SASA. In ten minutes, the interviewers are supposed to find out if you are outgoing, a homebody, a leader, a follower, a potential Oxbridge or Ivy League-er; but they do not go in depth into how you treat people, how you approach new ideas, how you deal with conflict and embarrassment, how you handle an awkward situation or how broad your horizons are. That would take a one hundred and twenty minutes. Situation questions involving the people skills mentioned are presented, but the applicants are aware that the answers to these questions can be memorized; and what they say may not always pertain to what they do in the real world. The interviewers are not so interested in your people skills as they are in your leadership skills. They are looking in you for qualities that make you a leader, not qualities that make you a good human being.
Therefore, neither should any of you form preconceived ideas of my personality just because I got a fraction of what everyone else got, because our scholarships were awarded on how well we performed on the surface. You also have to consider that the interview was months ago, before the SPM. It’s only 3 or 4 months ago, but you will be surprised how much someone with the right orientation and motivation can change in such a supposedly short space of time.
However, where one person might be willing to see the good in every person and give unlimited second chances, others are rigid and unmoving as the rocks in the Grand Canyon.
This is what I heard someone say today:
“I can’t believe someone as shallow as you got RM12K!”
Do you see the irony in the statement above? In one breath s/he managed to accuse someone of being shallow, and by deciding that they are shallow, they therefore do not deserve to have gotten a larger chunk out of the SASA Scholarship than you. S/he has in other words chosen to judge people based on how much money, may I repeat, MONEY, they got.
If that isn’t shallowness, I don’t know what is.
And for your information, just because someone follows stars and celebrities does not that make that person shallow. Neither does having read a lot of best-selling books, being a debater, and going around putting people on the spot because of their religious beliefs make you an intelligent person with superior intellect. And it most certainly does not give you any kind of right to believe that your superior intellect makes you also superior, in every other sense, to the people around you.
And yet that was what s/he did. S/he judged someone else based on one thing the other person had said, and s/he did not believe that the other person could have gotten more out of the scholarship than him/herself. S/he gets upset whenever s/he find out that someone else got more out of the SASA than s/he did. S/he also knows that I got RM4K only.
Well, thank you; now I know what you really think of me.
Getting only RM4K did affect me at first, because everyone else got at least double what I did. I know plenty of people who got the same amount as I did, but as far as I know, I am the only one who accepted it. I went through a period of emotional insecurity. I felt upset all the time and wondered if there was anything seriously wrong with me, wondered if I really was not as good as everyone else. I shrank into myself whenever I was around the other SASA scholars. My self-esteem took a huge dive. I truly believed that I was not worth as much as the other SASA-rians. And I even took to saying, whenever people asked, “Er. I got RM4K only.” just to save people the trouble of saying the word only. To which they’d reply, “Oh no RM4K’s fine what. It’s still money whaat.” Which, of course, did nothing at all to make me feel better.
Then I realized that I was being ridiculous. RM4K is not a price that has been put on my personality. RM4K is a tiny pat on the back for what co-curricular achievements I have. That’s all it reflects: how well I did in terms of ECA. RM4K does not reflect my (warning: bragging here) passion for language and literature, optimism, altruistic nature and love for my friends and family; which I believe is what truly makes me awesome. Getting RM4K does not in any way diminish my awesome-ness, unless I choose to let myself think so. RM4K is just that – a sum of money that SASA awarding body gave me. And the same goes for RM8K, RM12K and RM18K.
And then last week I had an epiphany. When I collected my invoice from the Registry, my eyes popped. I had never expected the A-Levels course to amount to so much. It was slightly higher than I had anticipated. But RM4K less had made quite a difference when compared to those who did not apply for any kind of scholarship.
That’s when I remembered what getting a scholarship – ANY kind of scholarship - was really about: alleviating my parent’s burden. I’d gotten the concept of a scholarship all wrong. It was all me-centered; I kept thinking about what it meant to me, when really the whole thing centered around someone else; someone who is forking out the money for your fees.
The scholarship should not be centered around me, but around my parents; because they are the ones paying for all my tuition fees. It’s no small amount of money. Every day here, there’s something new to pay; be it new goggles, textbooks, notes, lab fees, lab coats and other A-Level paraphernalia. I have two younger siblings still in school. I got RM4K to help reduce the amount they have to fork out, which can be a small or huge amount, depending on how you look at it.
The awesome thing about my parents is that all along, they knew I had gotten much less than everyone else. And they were proud of me just the same. I remember that when I showed them the letter, they were really happy. They were all grins, and they sat down and gave me all the “you’re a big girl now!” talks. YAH I KNOW very embarrassing right. But that’s my parents for you. I tried to wave it off but they even pulled out a bottle of sparkling juice, which we only reserve for really special occasions such as exam results, promotions, prizes won, new year’s day etc.
Clearly, to my parents, it’s not only RM4K for them.
I don’t know when the SASA became a symbol of everything we have ever achieved, a defining factor, a panel for us to be judged upon. I don’t know when it became like a Gucci shoe or Chanel handbag or a Quiksilver shirt: an accessory which tells everyone about the kind of person you are. That completely distorts the meaning of a scholarship and gives it a touch of unhealthy materialism. That has to change.
And it already has, for me.
I know I was ECA- stunted at the time of the SASA interview. Therefore I got only RM4K. But here’s what I also got: I learnt that I had to involve myself in more ECA (a realization which I decided, and have already begun to act upon). I learned what having a scholarship really means and to whom it really matters. That was my key to getting out of my state of self-pity.
I know I sound really preacher-ish and goody-goody. (Well what’s wrong with that?!) So for argument’s sake, let’s say I forget the whole scholarship-is-to-help-parents thing and play along with the rest of you. Let’s say I still believe that the SASA determines how capable I am as a person. Well guess what; I still learn something. I quote my favorite line from my favorite poem, If by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
Applying the scholarship is me-centered situation: for us, a bigger scholarship is a “triumph”, and getting a smaller scholarship is a “disaster”.
But if I learn something from my so-called disaster, it’s hardly a disaster anymore. It becomes part of my learning process. A process by which I take whatever comes at me, be it a negative or a positive experience, and use it to better myself.
I learnt not to let anyone and anything – especially money in ANY form – define me. I learnt to define myself.
So yes, I got only RM4K.
And I. Am. PROUD. of it.
PS: An add-on by Ian Beh – “There’s so much more to life than scholarships.” (:
