Absolwent SGH

I think my second academic degree obtained in the time of running this blog is not a reason to rename the address of the blog, nor to change the nickname which is quite widely recognised in the Polish-English blogosphere.

The Master's exam I somehow passed today didn't go as smoothly as the Bachelor's exam. Many think such exam is just a formality that marks the end of one studies, at Warsaw School of Economics it's not a piece of cake, but on other hand something doable and not worth the whole stress that plagues would-be graduates. The Polish word obrona, literally "defence", fits quite well the character of the exam, sometimes you have you to prove you deserve the title of MA.

This time, unlike in 2009 I didn't buy and flowers, chocolates, nor any other gifts for the examiners. After all they do the job they are paid for and don't do me any favour that they come. The supervisor of my MA thesis turned up at proverbial "eleventh hour" (three minutes before the exam) and dashed off just after the result was announced, as he hurried to go back to work, the reviewer of the thesis didn't show up at all, but sent a stand-in who didn't even bother to stir up any problems. And the examiner in economics, despite being hailed as "the nitpicker" was surprisingly lenient.

So... If you happen to drop in on the McDonald's restaurant at the corner of Marszałkowska and Świętokrzyska for a portion of french fries, please place your order cordially:

Szanowny panie magistrze, poproszę frytki

Free market can engender pathologies

The public debate in Poland has recently concentrated on the issue of the level of education on Polish universities. Commentators and scholars after years deigned to notice how degraded the academic title of Master had been. Today virtually everyone who can afford to pay the fee can get the master’s degree. Why - the private universities have been mushrooming in last two decades. Set up by the businessmen willing to make money such schools churn out thousands of magisters with little knowledge and depressing feeling of wasted five years. No wonder, if their whole activity is based on “pretending” – we pretend that we teach them, they pretend to learn, at the end totally seriously we award them a master’s degree, because they have been paying us for five years, so the deserve to be “magistry”. Free market, although not flawless can pick out tawdry items. Such product are the qualifications of the graduates of those universities, often proved worthless by the labour market.

Reading the Friday issue of Gazeta Wyborcza I found an appalling example of master’s-for-money deal. I was mostly shocked by the message of the ad – Masz maturę – zrób magistra w dwa lata. Firstly the if not broken, then at least cracked Polish – zrób magistra. Should I draw it with crayons or conjure it up from my household waste? Or maybe look for an attractive creature of the opposite sex, do my job and wait for nine months – that’s even faster than two years! But how the hell can a high school leaver get the master’s degree within two years? On average it takes five. The ad gave the address of the School’s website. Curious to see what’s the catch I wasted some of my transfer limit and entered it. Below – the site only confirms the ad’s content and encourages the candidate with the drivelling summary of its offer.


“Unique teaching system” probably means nobody could stoop any lower. The further exploration of the website consumes my precious time and draws my exhausted eyes to the bottom of the page, where my sight runs across a caption (below).


Akademia nie gwarantuje zdobycia należytej wiedzy z zakresu wybranych kierunków w okresie studiów. Umożliwia w szybkim tempie przygotowanie studenta do obrony pracy magisterskiej.

I am deeply struck by the honesty of the school’s authorities. In other words they make no bones about the real goal of the undertaking – producing a graduate whose qualifications and knowledge won’t stand for anything!

At first it occurred to me such school should be shut down. But as I cooled off a bit and came to my senses I realised that according to the premise of rationality of choices made by the individuals such university should go bust without any regulatory help. If it does any harm to anyone, those harmed are the ones who choose to pay for education there – their choice and their potential misery after graduation.

Unfortunately it won’t go bust. There will always be the students who decide to study only to get the slip of paper called “a diploma”. We can only pin our hopes in the labour market – may it be able to verify the real value of job applicants.

Free market has in built-in inclination to favour mediocrity as it conforms to the expectations of the majority. That’s why in the prime time instead of an interesting documentary or a decent recognised film we have to watch “Taniec z gwiazdami”.

Bachelor of Economics

I can’t say I feel any wiser or more reputable with holding my first academic degree. However, there’s a feeling of properly fulfilled duty, I somehow believe I have just completed one of the phases in my life, so maybe it’s time to turn over a new leaf… But that’s just a symbolic moment, nothing has really changed.

The very exam is indeed a pure formality which crowns student’s academic career. Mine took even less than ten minutes – I just answered the examiners’ questions, then they conferred and decided to award me the highest grade – excellent (PL: celujący). Quite nice, now I can only wish I had applied myself more during the studies – if my average of grade from the entire course of studies had been a bit higher, I could have got the diploma with distinction. According to my school’s formula my average was 0,14 too low to get it, but it doesn’t really matter now. It’s the brains not the papers that make a man successful.

In October I’m going to start my Master’s studies, I hope in less than two years (around March 2011) there will be a post titled “Master of Economics” on this blog. Before it happens, there’s a lot ahead of me to be done, within that “new leaf”. Maybe as my supervisor said, we should strive for publishing some excerpts of my thesis. When writing it, long ago, in February I thought I wanted to produce something more than a thoughtless compilation of sentences rewritten from academic books – I described the phenomenon which undergoes constant evolution and is not comprehensively described in any of the academic books or papers I managed to reach, and my thesis had in my opinion more to do with practice than with dry theory (I wrote about security in electronic banking) and could be seen as a contribution into the description of those issues.