O

ne day, I asked a friend of mine, 'Why did you quit management?' Her answer was, 'I quit because in management they still gave us economics and accounting. I can't stand those. I thought we were going to be learning about management theory.'

Her answer seems silly. But, what I would like to highlight is not the fact that after reading management for a full academic year, she didn't know that management was a branch of economic science. Maybe that is one point to be concerned about, but still that's not what I want to talk about. I want to highlight specifically her thinking about what a 'management student' should be learning. She said that management students only needed to learn management theory. That's the part that flips me out. Isn't that what we Indonesians have been doing?

Like her, I'm repeating my first year. I read international relations (at a private university, but still a very good program) for a year before I decided to switch to law. Of course, because of the extremely rigid higher education system, I have to start from zero. Why did I quit IR?

I quit because I fell in love with economics. So, why did I choose to study law instead of economics? We'll get to that later.

I discovered my interest in economics after completing a micro- and macroeconomic module in the IR program. At first I thought maybe I would finish the IR course first then do an economics master's later, if I was still interested. But, after reading the prerequisites to enroll on a good economics master's degree course (overseas, of course!), I saw no way to make it happen.

My IR program only offered three credits in microeconomics and two credits in macroeconomics.

Besides that, a sequence of three terms of calculus is a basic prerequisite to gain admission into the kind of good economics graduate program I wanted. So, I put everything together: if I wanted to at least have a chance to enroll in an economics graduate program, I had to major in both economics and math.

Have I mentioned that in this country, one can't undertake a double major at the same university? Also, it is incredibly rare that one can take courses from other departments. Taken together, these factors resulted in my not studying economics.

Our system doesn't allow people to change their minds, which is what I believe college should be about. Neither does the system allow a person to be creative and learn something that is not on the syllabus.

Our curriculum, in contrast to what my lovely friend said, is far from being comprehensive. The more I research my options, the more I realize that I can't imagine an economics student without the proper knowledge on math and statistics.

Finally, the thing that bothers me the most is that I feel like I'm the only person fighting this cause. Why does it seem like I'm the only one who is concerned about this situation?

Randy Pongtiku
Law student at the University of Indonesia
Jakarta