Ever had someone come up to you and ask you if you were a graduate? And when you tell them that you are, what is their reaction? Some people ask simply out of curiosity, but there are other who ask to satisfy their assumption that all graduates do not have ‘street-smarts’.
However, what is this ‘street-smart’ in the first place? How can anyone assume that you are not street smart upon the first meeting and knowing that you are a graduate? “oh you graduate ah, no wonder la. Cannot like that one, you must do this to survive”.
First of all, I feel that having street smart isn’t really a quality. It is just something that people need to have because of the situation they have gone through. If someone threw you to the sharks, you got to learn to evade them, because you need to survive.
Being a graduate does not mean that one is stupid. We are not just book readers, or memorizers of facts. We all have some street-smarts in us, just that we were all too busy studying to acquire ‘that much’ of street smart. And to go further into the point, the whole question of whether a graduate is streetsmart or not can only arise when he/she steps into an arena that is not in his/her element.
Of course then, he or she will have no experience, but does that mean he/she does not have streetsmarts?
There is nothing wrong with being a graduate, or not being one. These are just fanciful terms. There is something wrong however, when people make inane assumptions ‘just because’ someone else is a graduate.
At the end of the day, I’d rather be smart than just wholly streetsmart. At least a ‘smart’ person can learn street smarts
Can a street smart person learn to be ‘smart’? Perhaps not.
So stay humble, and others will stay humble. Being ‘streetsmart’ is seriously not a big fucking deal.
