Vietnam has been seeing a rise in ambitions for startup as this article says.
However, I may give slightly more than half a damn on the ambition; we are yet to have such ambitions in young people. In my opinion, Vietnamese youth desires to follow a very linear path through life; we get good grades in school, then go to university, get a degree, get a job, make income, live your life, have good children, retire when you enter the age that's allegedly old, done.
This way of life was told over and over to me as a child. It's sad that it was. I couldn't stick with doing a job just to get over with life. I would rather play piano and post songs online to draw timely-varied revenue from Youtube than working as an office clerk with consistent salary, because that sucks. 37% of Vietnamese employees in 2015 said that their job was interesting; whatever 63% left are simply unsatisfied (DI-Marketing). A lot of us are studying a subject for the sake of money, not for the sake of interest. I have much venerations for musicians because of this; not only that they produce creative work everyday, they're doing what they love, despite the salary.
So I wondered "How could we get students to do what they love?'
Well, there are societal, ideological and economical factors, but these could only result from the building block of academics: education.
A doctor can cure a patient, but an education can cure a nation. It passes down from cultures to cultures.
Therefore, we need to look at the education system in Vietnam.
Well I can tell you that there are mixed opinions; one side argues in favor of Vietnamese education system in that it showcases intense academic rigor, and high workload of homework.
They all don't want to put crap to the government because they might find themselves behind bars later.
I take the contrary to this favoritism; it's bad having high workload because students become studying and memorizing machines, only to do tests and pass. We don't take time to think about why we're doing it. Everything is based off getting good grades so that you don't end up going home and get whipped later. This is very true, and most of it isn't taken from my personal biased experience; I have seen kids been whipped for not staying at home and work 24/7, and the whipping shows carelessness from Asian parents trying to make us follow the "right" thing.
Indeed, it is the right thing; imagine you becoming a shut-in yeeter doing nothing but games all the time because you weren't punished.
There's one major problem to the punishment: it's too preventive.
By whipping your kids, you make them feel scared to ever try something; you put them into a cocoon to ever be outward in their thoughts.
The result is that we dedicate high-school to studying textbooks rather than being a human. This is, I think, the main reason why many Vietnamese students will find it hard conversing in a university interview; they will ask you what else have you done, and how have you been aware of everything around you and advocated (or even better) solutions to the problems, and what you're gonna speak from the school.
I'm not here to say doing puzzles and math competitions as your typical studious Asian is bad. I'm saying that those gray matters put into doing those puzzles should be at most half of your sum. The other minimal half should be for using those problem solving skills and tackle the world.
This is where it strikes me. Firstly, Vietnamese are likely to have low job satisfaction; they're likely to be bored of their jobs. Secondly, their path of life is too narrow; you don't expect something crazily inventive.
Interestingly, if you think about it, the former cause results from the latter cause; you can't be happy with what you will be doing for a decent amount of time if you don't like it at first, and that results from the narrow thinking.
You all know that you live by doing something interesting everyday, because if you disagree, you're likely to be an elderly person, which I 100% sympathizes with because you might not have capabilities as a youth to do interesting things, and that's natural--everyone's gonna face that.
Hence, to get people to find their interest and pursue it instead of something not it, I decided to come up with a start-up idea: what if students could publish STEM projects for credits in university?
The idea is that: a VNmese public school student can create STEM projects that, when presented through some media (e.g science fairs, journals) in Vietnam, give them extra points in their Vietnamese university applications, on top of the grades from the national exam. The more prestigious the journal/fair, the more points they accumulate, and thus each medium has a score attributed to it, which can be time-variant because integrity changes by time due to popularity.
The reason I chose STEM-specific is because my problem relates application of what they learned in school to real life. STEM is a huge culture in VN as well, because we initially weighted them more than many other subjects like Business or Literature.
(However, I'm open to any ideas regarding other subjects, because all disciplines are important in this world; we can't possibly have food delivered to us by pure mathematicians--we need people with degree in Management, Supply Chains, and MBA.)
I thought that the startup idea was out of this world, because:
1. Government will probably never make this come true; they will maintain rock solid stuck to the old one and question the willingness of people to change accordingly to this pretty new education system that's employed all over our S-shaped country.
2. Public school students already have a bunch of work to do. They have 13 subjects on their shoulders if they don't go to gifted schools, each with a crap ton of sitting at home crunching out.
The good thing about the startup is that if it's successful, and we got a reasonable portion of students doing the projects, I believe in an optimistic fate for young entrepreneurs; students will start to take initiatives in their work, which impacts further into their future, and decide on a solid path to their career doing what they desire. It also drives the R&D industry of Vietnam, which is something that's happening but is not prominent in young minds here. We will get students to take risks, and put their ideas upfront. Altogether, Vietnam will have higher innovation status with this, hence driving the economy upward for the better.
I will leave it here. Next time, we will address the bad things and the limitations of this startup further.
Oh, and I will have to come up with a name later.
~Vincent
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