Expectation management

The application processes for Finnish schools has swung into gear recently, as evident from the number of advertisements pasted in buses, trams and metros. This got me thinking about the expectation management aspect, which links directly to the dissatisfaction of e.g. the Occupy movements. Most of the advertisements suggest that the degrees offer a very good first step in a career and go around spurting words like finance and business. Yet, if I do a bit of reflection on the courses I've studied at TKK around business and management, to be honest I've been left a bit wanting. Of course they're fun and fairly light in weight, but I'm not entirely certain that they've significantly contributed to my knowledge or ability to succeed in my career.

The problem, how I see it, in these cases revolves around the fact that only once you've actually started doing real work do you gain enough insights about the real life to be able to ask the right questions and understand the substance of the courses. It's of course fun to talk about innovation management and do case analyses where you get to write general comments on how to tackle a 400 million per year budget of technology development, but let's face it, citing some academics and writing very shallow and general suggestions won't get you too far. Of course they teach you something, but to be honest, if that is the level of post-grad courses in universities, I'm somewhat worried about what they are teaching in vocational institutes or the ammattikorkeakoulu.

I may be repeating myself but I think that prior to having any real experience, the most useful things that students can learn are practical tools that they can apply in different situations. And I'm not talking about innovation funnels and frameworks, but simple things like mathematics, languages, programming, and so on. A certain amount of common sense wouldn't also hurt. Looking back at my degree so far the most useful things I've learned, in no specific order, include:

• The attitude of not getting frightened when encountering a problem. Many of the exercises done during advanced mathematics courses looked very scary, but instead of freezing, just start taking tools and hitting the problem with it.
• The ability to search for tools and concepts to hit problems with, linked with the reading skills to be able to go through even large bodies of literature and try to organize and make sense of the publications to get a grasp of a field.
• Understanding that in many cases when trying to figure out things and solve problems, exact solutions may be irrelevant and more often than not figuring out magnitudes is more than enough. And if more is wanted, you can always dig deeper and narrow down your approximation.
• Programming skill are always beneficial. They teach you a certain type of thinking and approach to problem solving as well as offer you very concrete tools with which to attack larger masses of data, perform simulations, etc. Everyone should know at least a bit of programming, in my opinion.

There are certainly many other things as well, but those were the first to come to mind. Having also worked during most of my degree, school may not have in fact taught me all of those things, but a combination of working and studying has been a very helpful combination. But interestingly enough most of the things I've listed above have not been learned as a result of any specific course. And it is entirely possible to go through a degree program without worrying too much about learning any of the above skills, but this will undoubtedly lead to a situation where the expectations that were created with the degree marketing aren't really met and reality hits in at some point, causing huge dissatisfaction in the people who neither automatically got the career they thought was promised to them nor did they end up learning any of the core skills to increase their competitiveness in the job market.

But naturally school want to market their offerings and attempt to attract as many students to maximize quantity and quality because the incentives for the schools have been set to encourage pushing as many students through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Is this the most optimal situation in the long run for the economy, the students themselves, or the schools? Hardly, but short-term optimization of hastily created and incorrect metrics is often a lot easier than trying to figure out what the optimum situation would be in the long run and how that could be achieved... So, expect more disgruntled students when the batch of this year's accepted students graduate in the next 4-6 years.

Combat fatigue

Combat fatigue is setting in on multiple fronts. My one-year venture into the non-profit sector is almost over and while it very likely will in the longer run be a very useful experience, for now the main theme has been disillusionment. On the other hand my thesis has barely progressed and that annoys me immensely; there's too much data and the algorithms need to be tweaked and at the end of the day it feels as if I have nothing too interesting to say about it anymore. But I would still need to sugarcoat that with a bunch of references to credible sounding articles...

The markets also seem to be getting tired. Greece will eventually fall because it cannot reduce the inertia it has built up. And the European Union cannot increase Greece's competitiveness because that's not what politicians do. Politicians redistribute wealth in a seemingly arbitrary fashion and devise grandiose plans despite the fact that at best they accomplish very little compared to just letting self-organization and emergent designs do the job and at worst they are very counterproductive and create perverse incentives. The bigger they are the harder they fall seems like the most appropriate adage here. But something must be done because something is better than nothing and doing nothing also then spawns the question concerning what these people are actually paid to do.

Kickboxing is one of the more productive things I spend on time these days. If nothing else, at least my physical health is more or less decent. But even this area is problematic: with increased levels of exercise the level of food intake should also rise, but for some reason that's been very difficult. I'm not saying that I eat unhealthily, I'm saying that I just don't eat enough, which is strange. I know I should eat more but I'm just not hungry. Here's an obvious business opportunity for someone: provide a service which allows the customer to specify certain boundary conditions on the food (amount of energy, protein, etc.) and produce and deliver meals which satisfy the conditions. It's too much of a hassle to figure out what to eat.

Fortunately there's a one-month vacation coming up and then it's back to the real world again. Perhaps take up weight training to complement the kickboxing, assuming that the issue with food is sorted out, and then begin advancing on other fronts again...

Housing prices

On even week numbers there is a housing price bubble in Helsinki and on odd week numbers the prices are going to skyrocket in the future as there is no bubble and housing is undervalued. By applying some common sense, the world has seriously gone insane. Or at least Finland has gone insane. With two-room apartments (that is two rooms, not two bedrooms, mind you) running in the region of quarter of a million euros in Helsinki, how can there not be a bubble. If you want an apartment for less than that, it's off to the suburbs for you and even then it might be difficult.

Consider this... If you would like to pay off an annuity loan of a quarter of a million euros with a 2.5% interest rate and about 1000 euros per month, this would take roughly 30 years. That's quite hefty, considering the average income levels, degree of taxation, and other related factors in Finland. How can there not be a bubble?

Furthermore, factor in the shitty economic situation and the fact that the traditional footholds of the Finnish economy, from mobile device driven high-tech to the forest industry, are crumbling. Job security is decreasing, government debt is rising along with budget sizes and nobody seems to be able to tackle the problem in a sustained fashion (increasing the already hefty level of taxes for middle classes will end up kicking the nation in the ass...), how is it possible that regular people feel comfortable taking out loans of said sizes?

There was another genius analyst this week in a local newspaper stating that housing prices are under pressure to go even higher up. His rationale? Because rents are rising and this means that housing prices must also rise. How does this make sense? Could it be that rents are rising as people are getting laid off and must adjust their stance into a more flexible one, driving demand for rentals up? If so, why would the house prices go further up? The only way for the prices to rise would be if consumer confidence in the future is high and cheap credit is available. Confidence shouldn't be too high precisely because of the fact that competitiveness is down (both national and Euro-zone), job security is down (thanks to structural shakeups in the industries) and income levels in relation to current housing prices are seriously low. And availability of cheap credit? That worked out so well the last time around...