nan | 楠木

Last week, I was invited to be a judge for OVAL 2007′s Chinese candidate selection process. For those of you not familiar with OVAL, it’s a business plan competition for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students. It’s probably self-evident from the countries’ names that this competition is more about Northeast Asian community building than actual business plans. (And OVAL stands for Our Vision for Asian Leadership.)

Anyway, I had attended the 2005 OVAL in Beijing, and had had quite a good experience. So when the OVAL staff this year asked me if I could help out, I agreed.

The interview round I judged was the second round, and is a group interview round where 5 contestants had to tackle a case together and finally do a presentation. Some of the cases had “consulting” written all over it. There was immediately an issue since none of the judges were familiar with the cases, and they were supposed to be able to guide the contestants through the case. The issue wasn’t that significant, though, since the cases were generally very open-ended.

There were two judges in each room. My peer was an American doing a small start-up in the education industry, with a background in economics. I felt we generally had a good interaction and shared a lot of common feelings towards the students.

Some of those feelings were very general. For example, it wasn’t very surprising to me that the students were not very structured in their discussion, and that they lacked creativity. That has always been the problem of Chinese students.

Another issue, that was again very common, was that we saw little passion in the students. When we were asking the students individual questions about their career plans etc., they all responded that they want to be professional managers or something. Or, start their own business. But a manager or a entrepreneur is not a profession – what industry? What function? What do you really want to do? What’s your real passion?

Even for students that came up with unconventional answers – one mentioned she wanted to do NGO work – they didn’t know what they really wanted to do. What’s the issue you want to address? Do you want to solve poverty in Southeast Asia? Or tackle AIDS in Africa? We kept asking, and yet she could only say she wanted to do finance work in NGOs. So again,  she wanted to be a manager.

One student even simply stated that money is the goal. Oh well.

At the end of day, all this is nothing new. But we probably should be a bit concerned by this lack of passion – if anything, it shows that our students are very naive and very ignorant about their future careers.