Hi Aunt Bea,
Relax, I am not dreaming of coming to the US and compete for jobs with you citizens. I just want to study abroad, lots of people do that. As for jobs, at most I will do some part-time/internship to sustain my living. My cousin who could not take the Singapore education system migrated to America and she managed to get into Duke, so pardon me if I used to think that it is easy to get into top 30 universities in America. But she is an American.
I am sorry but I do not think there is much correlation between engineering and business. Those people who took MBA just ended up in IBs, BBs and consulting. So it’s more of transferrable skills like analytical ability and quantitative skills.
I read online that there are a lot of “wacky” courses in American universities like “Viking studies”, which I can’t imagine a lot of competition as those ambitious people will all be aiming for Ivy Leagues. That is why, although Business is unrelated to lots of things, I still want to try astronomy.
Again I would think there is a lot of cultural differences between Singapore and America. ‘We’ think it’s ok to even mock people of a different race. There is like 1 or 2 Malay, Indian classmates in my cohort of 700 and people can just joke about their skin colour in front of them and nobody will speak up.