Little-Wonder.Net - Personal domain and blog of Brenda Tan

In my entire three years of being in SMU, I’ve never come across something quite as ridiculous as what you are about to see.

Lemme’ fill you in on some background information.

First of all, this took place during a particular e-Marketing class which my two friends were in. (Thank goodness I wasn’t in that class because I would have hurled right on the spot.) Their required project involved identifying a specific group in the market, create a product or a service targeted to the chosen market and basically, ’sell’ it to the whole class in the form of a presentation.

In one of them presentations, a particular group chose to target us. Information Systems students.

Apparently, these snits think IS students have a LOW EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT.

Picture credit to Liz.

Yep, that little flier was part of their marketing campaign. I can’t believe they actually had the audacity to present such a stereotype to the entire class, especially when it is not even true.

Low emotional quotient? Whatthefuck?

In fact, the act of even assuming that IS students have a low EQ suggests that the creators of said poster do not have any EQ themselves, plus their lacking ability to think rationally.

Look. IS is not about sitting in front of a square monitor and programming the whole day.

We have numerous GROUP projects, and every single computing/computer science/IS student out there will know how important it is for such projects to be managed well. (Project management, hello?)

Working on an IS project together requires a lot of coordination, understanding each other’s abilities and shortcomings, and helping each other develop certain skills.

I should know. Thanks to SMU’s Information Systems program, I’ve been put through a total of 8 major group projects that require the development of some system. Throughout all these projects, especially Software Engineering, my group members and I have managed to bond like never before.

Having to sit around, burning the midnight oil just to get a module running, tempers are sure to flare. Instead, we encouraged each other, guided each other, and basically egged each other on throughout the struggle to stay awake and come up with a full working code at the same time.

Tight deadlines make us hit the ceiling, but this is the time where we work even harder, working together to ensure that whatever needs to be done gets done.

And of course - occasionally, we have members that don’t work. However, due to the highly tedious nature of IS projects, it is imperative that everyone works, otherwise the rest of the group suffers. This means that we need to know how to cope with such conflict.

Did you think we managed to survive all these without any form of emotional intelligence, huh?

In fact, the ‘high endurance’ mentioned in the flier shown above can’t even materialize if we do not have one another’s support. People don’t do individual work in a group, you know? We work AS A GROUP. Cohesion. Hello?

For the love of mankind. Just because we are geeks doesn’t mean that we do not know how to feel for people. Geeks are not like what you envisioned, living in their own world where their best friend is their computer. Geeks are not people who, just because of their time spent on the virtual world, means that they do not know how to deal with people and face reality.

In fact, the tedious and brain-roasting nature of our course is the reason why the entire IS faculty is so tightly-knit. Everyone knows that they can count on each other for anything, and we hold cross-group discussions for common projects to share knowledge and stuff like that.

Basically, my reason for stating all of the above is to emphasize that IS students HAVE EQ, and not a low one as suggested.

And to that e-marketing group that incurred the wrath of the growing number of IS students so far - next time, THINK before you open that BIG GAPING HOLE of yours - about the potential negative impact of your sweeping stereotype, the truthfulness of your claims, and whether what you’re about to say will make you look like the idiotic dimwits that you are.