Personal thoughts on having expiration dates for degrees

Recently a local politician kicked a hornet's nest by suggesting that degrees have an expiration date. If he is right, I will have no degrees by the end of this year. I am actually cheesed that some really smart folks actually agree with him arguing that people tend to forget what they learn within a few years after graduation. 

I have a different crypto-based argument.

Imagine you've accumulated a number of NFTs in your wallet. Some dickwad who collected enough governance tokens start proposing that all NFTs minted more than 5 years ago can no longer be moved out of any wallet.  

Would you be angry if you've paid good crypto for your NFTs? 

Invalidating someone's expertise is not the job of a government, it's the job of HR and the reality is that we already face a virtual expiry given the kind of degrees we earned. The worse case, maybe no one wants to buy your NFT because no longer fashionable to own, but you still need the right to be able to sell it off. 

But are our old degrees really worthless?

Let's talk about the business of cryptocurrency course creation. My program, as it stands, does make money to feed some mouths not just for myself, but indirectly for some really capable folks of Dr Wealth. As a new entrant to Cryptocurrency courses, I know that I have weaknesses like a lack of testimonials from students because I've yet to teach my first batch, but let's look at how my "useless expired degrees" played a pivotal role in creating a unique program.

a) Bachelor in Engineering from NUS in 1999

An engineering degree should be worthless after 22 years, but I still need to adopt the beginner's attitude when I learnt how to code in C++ MFC 22 years ago which was unsupervised. I picked up OOP without a course on it so it was a real mess. Learning windows events driven programming from scratch without guidance was way harder than picking up data science and invoking libraries in Python. 

I'm now able to write Jupyter Lab documents, share them with my students so that they can do their own market timing. 

b) Master Science in Applied Finance from NUS in 2002

I actually spent a lot of time studying CDOs in NUS before the Great Recession of 2008, they were hilariously such a big deal in those days. But one of things I learned in my fund management class is that when shit hits the fan correlations all go up and diversification between stocks and bonds becomes worthless.

These days I can generate correlation matrices using Python and I've written code to track correlations between the largest pairs of cryptocurrencies and average them up in a time series. With this, my students have an alternative means of measuring the amount of fear in cryptocurrency markets which have indeed trended up since the invasion of Ukraine.

c) Juris Doctor from SMU in 2017

Until last night, my legal training played a minimal role in course creation but something dramatic happened in the crypto-space, the Singapore High Court made it supremely clear that crypto is property. 

In English, this means that folks can go to jail for CBT if they steal people's crypto. You can also establish a trust relationship over crypto assets. Spouses who try to convert matrimonial assets into stablecoins before the divorce had better be careful an associate is not trained to track money flowing into crypto exchanges.

So this slide happened : 

As far as I'm concerned, I think my old degrees are as good as they were when I first got them, but I suspect that they have been upgraded over time because I was obsessive about applying them into any domain that I get myself into. It happens that the domain I am obsessed with always involve money.

The trick is to gain a sufficient degree of financial independence so that you can design a vocation that leverage all your strengths, which includes your eclectic mix of degree qualifications. There is no job in Singapore that will allow me to leverage all my qualifications at the same time but I can invent one on my own. 

I call my combination a horizontal Phd, I prefer three degrees in disparate fields than having all three in one narrow expertise. 

What I lack in tenure, I get from my dividend payouts and stablecoin yields. 

Feel free to join me for a chat in my next preview : 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8216444863739/WN_VKnu5nn8SWClzksXbU3TEA