by Elias Mulky
Competent and efficient leadership; these qualities are rare, though often required, among others in the realms of research and teaching. But such qualities have to be learned somewhere, first. The piggy bank is starving, courses are expensive, so how does a mere student come by such training? A solution is on offer, more or less voluntarily, thanks to Helvetistan's army. Students are supposedly very brainy and responsible beings. They belong to one of the headhunters' favourite groups in military school for recruits (RS) when it comes to finding material for officers' school (OS). The temptation to carry on includes salary, food and board, plus an education that carries the seal of approval from an independent authority.
But let's take a look at the whole picture, totally free of cosmetic embellishment. Does it really make sense for a student to take up a military career? Military style leadership is basically very efficient as far as time management is concerned. In this world, people learn to take orders and pass them on, without wasting time discussing them. One learns to work and lead under temporal constraints. But this can often be a killer of motivation – especially with work that calls for patience and creativity, which is the case, for example, in fundamental research, where interest in an issue has to be sustained, often over long periods of time. On the other hand, one learns to structure a working day from the getting-out-of to the going-to-bed stage. But here, again, disadvantages begin to manifest themselves. For example, the partial loss of anything resembling privacy, which has not-to-be-underestimated negative effects on a student's inclination for self-responsibility, even if the student often wishes that someone had given him a kick somewhere, especially before exams.
| About the author |
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It was never an option for Elias Mulky to follow "only" one course of studies. "Despite a strong penchant for research, what interests me most of all is creating bridges between disciplines," says Mulky, born in Syria, son of a Syrian father and a Swiss mother, and now studying Interdisciplinary Science in his fourth semester at ETH. The complexity of his dream career – space scientist – poses all the challenges for which the interdisciplinary ETH course of studies is certainly no bad basis. In SOSeth, an organisation for and by students, Mulky takes care of the bimonthly cinematic entertainment and, as an active member of VCS (a specialist chemistry association), he is the students' delegate in affairs of the department. This voluntary work, says Mulky, has a great side benefit, especially as he will be living in Switzerland for a considerable time to come. "I'm establishing important contacts that might be helpful in the future," he concludes.
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