JPA scholar here, nearing the 1-year-no-job-offer and suddenly got the email to do PTD exam. It’s irrelevant to the course I took in the UK. I regret coming back to Malaysia because job prospects overseas are better. In Malaysia, I see many uneducated civil servants in my field of interest and it’ll be too hard to change their attitude because they are not passionate enough. I got myself into NGOs and organisations closely related to the government which is how I got to see a little. There’s a job opening in state government and I submitted my application. They haven’t even looked at it and it has been months. I regret returning to Malaysia.

Note: No Malaysian private sector has the kind of job I want, unless you’re talking about developed countries like UK and US where they privatise and commercialise humanities sector, with its own set of problems but still, better than Malaysia.