ME - a case of disconnected academic / Shahrul Amri Ab Wahab

Last January marked my 12ᵗʰ year as an academic at UiTM. Just like most, if not all, of my colleagues, my journey as a lecturer is indeed colourful. Surely it is not a walk in the park, but it is also not an uphill battle that would drive me straight to a mental asylum. Nevertheless, unlike many of my fellow co-workers, the journey might be doubly hard for me as I am teaching courses in an area of study that is almost devoid of my genuine passion. To be frank, what I am doing now is just to salvage my degree after a series of bad decisions (mine and others') in my life. I am not social science material. My interest lies in hard sciences like microbiology, pharmacy, and geology-the ones that warrant me spending time analysing material things and experimenting in the laboratory. That is what I am built for - not studying people's behaviour and analysing business in depth. You would not have found me enrolling in a business course had the dominant members of my family been more pragmatic 25 years ago, or had Petronas' or MARA's scholarship offers come before Telekom's.