[8 Days enigma]
There is something about this week's 8 Days.



Nope it is not Korean superstar Rain's hotbod.

8 Days has this page about the Boos and Bravos - the good and the bad moments on TV.



I was reading that issue early in the morning (when my senses are most of the time not fully awake). Something caught my eye while I flipped the pages.

It was a familiar word.

It started with a capital 'E'.

Surprisingly, I found out that the rest of the letters in the word were 'a', 'h', 'i', 'p', 'r', 'm'.

"a hip rm?" My room's kindof hip, yeah.

Maybe my mind was not functioning well. After putting much thought to it the letters made sense. Here's what I got.

I exclaimed: "Ephraim!"

Now that was why it looked so familiar. Maybe because Rain's hot bod failed to make me fully awake.



There's also an 8 Days education guide in the centre portion of the magazine. As I l browsed through, I came up with some random thoughts about education.

The world has become a global village and we must understand how other things elsewhere affect us. For example how things like bird flu affect Singapore, or even the impact of the vast number of university graduates from China and India. Even though I am taking a social science degree program at SMU, the university encourages us to take multi-disciplinary modules including Economics. An engineer cannot just focus on the mechanics of a product. An good engineer does not only create a product that works but will take into consideration and will pay attention to other aspects such as how to appeal to the mass market and how it should be marketed. A good product, when marketed well, will sell like hotcakes. It's just like how the iPod appeals to the masses. A good product may be a good product but will sell if it is marketed well. Similarly, a broad-based multi-disciplinary approach is the key to getting the edge over other university programs.

Our schools have been at it for some time. It started in small steps by introducing robotics to primary and secondary schools. The polytechnics have general electives or courses that are related to creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. You can take interesting classes like art, music and yoga in universities.

Many concepts I learn in my sociology classes can be applied to my business, goverment and society classes. I can use my psychology concepts in my marketing class too. Having inter-disciplinary learning gives one a different perspective. For example, a business student will present his point from a business perspective with business lingo, whereas a political science student looks at it in a different light.

I reckon that such an education will give us an edge over others.