Last Sunday, my secondary school alumni conducted a mini gathering at a fancy restaurant in Jerudong. I said mini because only less than half of the alumni attended, me being one of the non-attendees. I was free that day but I deliberately didn’t come simply because I wasn’t close with any of them during my secondary school years. As far as I could remember, a number of them were bullies, a number were the bullied ones, a number were snobs, a number were antisocial, a number were weirdos, a number no one even realised they existed, and now they are suddenly on a hugging basis, calling each other bebs, lings, bros. I was one of the antisocial ones back then and still is. Perhaps this is why I never get the alumni gathering concept.

Thanks to the mushrooming this and that alumni WhatsApp groups and of course the social media as a whole, people are able to know the updates (often too much information) on what each is up to even without being in contact or seeing them in person for years or decades even. It is rather striking that those who got the best grades, the top students in class, are not the ones who ended up getting the executive posts in the civil service. To put it simply, none of the smart kids in my schooling classes, even university batch made it above the Group posts. Whereas, those who were the low to average performing students, thrived more in the civil service, a number of them becoming Directors, Permanent Secretaries, even one of them became a Deputy Minister. Wow! I have my own theory as to why this is so. Some said they just got lucky, being at the right place at the right time. One thing for sure, grades got not much to do with one’s career path in the civil service. 

So, to students and parents out there, it doesn’t matter who got first in class, who got straight As, who got first class degree, as the success factors in the career stage of life would be 25% grades and 75% luck. Spare the stress.