斯坦福男生和北大男生谈Communication
真巧，一天之内，和斯坦福男生和北大男生进行了两场关于communication skills，关于中国学生在国外的对话。
中午, James (BBY 06学员) 问我要sina Blog的链接，说奉在Harvard的女友之命来读博客。他从Ph.D的角度说了观点。
“ You are right and wrong in the blog… Not every self-sponsored master student necessarily communicates with foreign students, and not every PhD students necessarily communicates with Chinese only.
But quite a lot of Chinese and Korean students mainly play in their own group. Communication is like high performance computer. You might work out the weather forecast by hand when 10 years later and not useful anymore; but most people choose to use computer clusters to compute timely. Similarly, you can live a miserable life without communication, but communication can keep you work better and faster.
I once talked to a guy in a recruitment info session of a Hedge Fund. He just told me that graduate students, no matter PhD or master, actually do the similar job in their company. It surprised me a lot and took me a little down to the real world…(
Nancy: Cool, always good to face the reality. But if you are doing more research oriented job, Ph.D has its advantage. So fundamentally it depends on what kind of job you are looking for, right?) Yes… those IB guys speak to fast and continuously - for 20 min per person…to 4 different guys simultaneously. that is the job that I can not do…(
Nancy: Find the job that uses your talents!) James的观点很balanced, 不是所有人都需要选择communication, 但是沟通的确会让我们的生活更好。我也很高兴James了解了job market的状况，开始寻找真正适合他的工作。
晚上Jerry (BBY 07学员，只有19岁噢)在论坛上分享了他和所实习投行的director的谈话，我非常有同感。确切的说，Jinbo Xie (Founder of BeBeyond) 1999在Chicago成立的最大原因就是源于Jinbo在美中国多年后，深感80%的中国人因不会表达自己在job market or promotion上遭遇窘境。这里不会表达自己内涵丰富，包括意识不到自己的价值(strength and weakness based on self-acknowledgement), 表达自己的愿望和力量(desire to communication), 沟通表达的技巧(communication skills). 三点环环相扣，缺一不可。在此BeBeyond的理念先不表，我们先看director的所言。
“中午为了骗推荐信,找了个合适的时间,主动冲过去和那个director谈话,还是有些收获.除了答应写推荐信外,他还跟我说了写中国学生,或者说亚洲学生在美国的情况.
我告诉他:
I am afraid I can not find good job in
America because my background is not so competitive compared to students from Harvard, Stanford, etc.
然后他说:
1) don’t care about Harvard and Stanford students. They are the best of the best. They can get the best job undoubtedly.
当场气死…老天为何如此不公~~~
2) Many companies will also recruit students from second tier schools.
于是又活过来了….
3)In my opinion, 80% asian students do not communicate with Americans. Like Chinese students, they always stay with Chinese students, eat together and walk together. So they lack the skill of communication with Americans. Chinese students are good at quantitative skills. And American students are good at communication, so they can deal with more business deals, while Asian students do more quantitative work. But it is very easy to hire people with strong quantitative ability. You do not want to do research work, so you should be the rest 20%. These 20% are very very competitive because they have strong communication skills and the ability to bridge different cultures. Since the business is more and more global, many companies need these kind of students. And Americans will not doubt your quantitative capability because you are a Chinese. Thus, if you are indeed among the 20%, you are very very valuable.
说完之后,马上拿了McKinsey和BCG的有关Chinese global business的report给我看.(我开始很惊奇他会说bridge different cultures,后来发现这句摘自McKinsey… )好吧,我到美国之后就去当那20%吧…
想起来BBY一直强调communication的重要性,算是找到理论依据了.”
亲爱的读者们，不知道你们看了James和Jerry的谈话，有什么感受? 也许你没有超凡脱俗的沟通技能，那么就从厚脸皮(desire to communicate)(别怕丢丑)和自我认同(strength and weakness based on self-acknowledgement)开始吧！
加油！