A friend's confidance and implications for professional communication

A fellow coursemate of mine, Eunice, found it hard to reconcile exceeding expectations with ground reality of university life and communication in Singapore. She was incredulous to such an extent that she was undecided if communication or other factors caused her discouragement and lost of faith in an education system known to value ends rather than means-to-an-end. Below is a letter correspondance addressed to her.

Hi Eunice, you need to tell us what your dream of university was founded upon? I presume your dream was some sort of imagery? In fact it can only be only be imagery because dreams reside in minds and only minds can image.

Was your dream too idealistic? Dreams of your type tend to be really fluffy and ungrounded. You probably saw an engaging classroom photo advertisement depicting diverse Harvard students smiling and chit-chatting with their Havard Professor in an 18th century Baroque-styled edifice, cuz honestly that was what I saw too and mistakenly took it as a paradigm of university communication and life in general! Now I know better, but not that I do not yearn for such a wonderful university setting, rather I make sure not too overly indulge in my emotions and expectations.

The thing is the whole world is in our minds, and our minds are made up of imageries and expectations derived from the world in which we live. This means our minds are filled with the language of our world---specifically the media world. The pictures we see in magazines/WWW/books/movies; the words we read in captions/books/subtitles/notes/news-reports/advertisments/pamphlets, and the real words and pictures (which themselves originate from the media world) we receive in speech from real-life people (for instance, and to get straight to the point for simplicity's sake; girls often style/beautify themselves to various sorts of make-up dos-and-donts which themselves are popularized by the media world, isn't it? In cases where girls/artists came up with their own make-up styles, surely they didn't just got it from out-of-nowhere, right? They were at least guided by existing principles of make-up in our world of which becomes portrayed by the media or otherwise), are very often a misrepresentation of the actual reality on the ground. As intellectuals, we ought to recognized that and learn to cope not with the different circumstances (images) of life, but with the different and raging emotions/expectations within ourselves. I think that is how Professional communication is, isn't it? It is about learning to cope with your emotions and to manage your expectations so that you project the right markers of an expert interpersonal professional communicator, isn't it?

And that would mean, Eunice, that until you FAIL to find anything lacking in university life/communication in NUS, and instead start finding lots of extras, plus-points and even LOVE in university life/communication in NUS as compared to Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Yale, you are only almost-there as an expert interpersonal professional communicator!( assuming my gut-feeling is accurate, if you see what I mean!!). For that can only be CONSISTENT! As I mentioned in one of my older posts, one of the key tenets of professional communication must be consistency.

Toss