When I was in college, it was my final year and I graduated with a major in psychology and a minor in business management. As I look back, I sort of wished I never minored in business management. Virtually everything I learned in the school of business tends to differ and even contradicted from what I was learning in psychology. In the school of business, I learned that globalization is such a wonderful thing from my marketing professor. I learned that the gap between the rich and the poor is not widening from my business ethics professor. I learned that the ultimate goal in the organization is profit maximization. I learned that Warren Buffet was such an intelligent man who was rejected to Harvard University because he was too young. There was a lot of glory given to the study of Warren Buffet. Who would have known that a year later, I was watching the Keiser Report and Max Keiser was talking about the unethical practices of Warren Buffet. Perhaps the “almost” oxymoronic phrase of “business ethics” is not as cheesy as it appears to be.

On the contrast, when I was sitting in my psychology courses, globalization did not really seem like a great thing. I learned about socioeconomic status, poverty, stratification, exploitation of one country upon another country, cheap labor, and poor little kids having to work in sweatshops. A human being did not seem like a human resource or a human asset in its denotative definition that you get from the textbook or encyclopedia. A human being was more like an expendable container or just a serial number to do repetitive boring tasks. A human being was a slave to labor because as the research suggested, a person born of low socioeconomic status will die as the same status. I learned that the gap between the rich and poor is widening and getting bigger as time passes by. I learned from my psychology professors that they went into this profession not for the money but to be educators and perhaps aid in fixing for the good of all people. I still remember the final farewell words from one of my developmental psychology professors near the end of the semester and she said, “I mean, I didn’t get rich.” It really did get my attention as I have always known long ago that life was much more than paying the bills and eating foods. We are here for a purpose and that is to better the conditions of the whole world to the benefit of everyone. She also added that “You will be shocked to find that the financial analyst and managers make a thousand times more money than you, but they really aren’t that smart.”

The simple act of watching and observing my fellow classmates was very fascinating to me. I have been both with business students and psychology students and the differences are present. I found business students to be highly competitive not just within themselves but with each other. They are very keen at perceiving strength. They value strength and not weakness. I even had an intro to management business professor that said, “The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Perhaps that was just a fancy way of saying “align yourselves with the strong, cut off the weak, and do not associate yourself with those who have developmental disabilities for they may drag you down.” Even the women seemed heartless and cold. They are only nice to you if they think you are smart and so they can use you to help them partner study or group study. Some of the students already hold supervisorial positions in the real world and they just go to school part time. I was personally attracted to my fellow psychology students because they tend to be quite the opposite. I found psychology students to be a lot warmer and friendlier (not the fake friendliness you get from business students). They are very sharp at understanding human behavior. All of my professors and even the teaching assistants were very, very nice people. They were very compassionate beings. When I look back to my college experience, I can honestly say that I learned a lot about not just the study of psychology but life itself. I still remember the life lessons and stories from my professors and fellow classmates and I went home in awe just about every time.

So going back to the fundamental reason why I studied business management in the first place was because I was interested in the accounting and finance aspect and not the deceptive tactics of how to use the foot-in-the-door technique or the door-in-the-face technique or even selling an item for $999.99 instead of $1,000.00. Now that I think about it, it was just a waste of time to brainwash me and turn me into a psychopathic entity. I could have spent that time doing graduate studies in experimental psychology or advance neuropsychology. The hell with it, spending time learning every area of Brodmann’s area would be worth much more value of my time even if it took me 1000 hours.