1. DECISION MAKING

What subjects were you studying before university, and how did you decide on your course?

I took BCMH, which is Bio, Chemistry, Math and History, all H2!

I took History because I liked it, and I took Bio and Chem because I’m generally quite good at Sciences (but I suck at Physics), and I just took Math because almost everyone takes it. Growing up, I always knew I would be a more business kind of person, but I didn’t really know I was going to business school.

I didn’t really think about which uni I was going to go to until after A levels. I think parents and schools don’t prepare you early enough to think about what course you want to take, so many of us, even those who do well, don’t really know where to go. Then you’ve a super short time frame to decide where you want to go. At least for guys, they have 2 years to watch their female friends suffer through their courses before they make their choices.

For my friends, a lot of them didn’t know where to go. There are a lot of elements that they don’t think about. For example, my friend in Psychology was there for 2 years. Even though she liked Psychology, she didn’t know it was going to be so hard and so competitive–I don’t know how true this is–so she ended up transferring after 2 years. I’m not sure how reliable this is (I heard this from my psychology friends), but a lot of people go into psychology hoping to become a psychologist or therapist; but don’t know that a psychologist usually needs to get a Masters degree. Along the way, there’s theses, experiments on lab rats–which is not what she liked. She just really liked helping people and talking to them. And because of that, she had to waste 2 years.

I also have a whole bunch of other friends–they want to take accounting, but they don’t want to become an accountant. They ended up really hating accounting. Some of my friends who took accounting dropped out in Year 1 or 2, or even Year 3.

For me, just personally, business was very natural. I am a very marketing-ish person. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I also took it because it’s chill compared to most courses (like engineering – their time is just packed, which is good for them because they want to specialise) and fun. It’s just really fluffy and fun. I love it. For people like us, we just don’t want to study so hard.

 

How did you choose between SMU, NTU and NUS?

Deciding between business in SMU, NUS and NTU was my biggest dilemma.

Personally, NTU didn’t leave a very good impression on me. My sister went to NTU, and I went to one of her lectures. I just felt that the topic being taught was very very boring. My sister in NTU had an okay experience, but it wasn’t great.

So for me it was between SMU or NUS. I applied for a scholarship for both. The first thing I got was an offer from SMU, which was way earlier than NUS.

As I was very practical, I wanted to go to the school that offered me a scholarship. But NUS results weren’t out, and the deadline for accepting the SMU scholarship was coming. I didn’t want to just say no to NUS, because then I wouldn’t have known if I got it or not, you know? So rushed NUS for the scholarship results – I talked to the Dean – and then she told me that I got the scholarship!

Another very big reason why I chose NUS over SMU is because I’m the kind of person who doesn’t worry so much about grades or money. I don’t care about this kind of stuff in general. I wanted the hall life in NUS, and I just chose business because it’s very fun and very chill. I love all the people and the vibe!

 

Were there any dilemmas you had in choosing the course?

I was actually deciding very hard between NUS Law and Business. I also applied for a NUS Law scholarship and I got it. The only problem I had was that if I took the NUS Law Scholarship, Law would be my main faculty. But I knew that I didn’t want to be a lawyer.

Law is super relevant and important. I just felt that Law is really intensive, a lot harder than business, and that the job market was generally not good. You can get a lot of money from law, but I think you have to be really really smart, and I’m not confident that I was really really smart. People do really well in Law, but I feel like I would just be a lawyer that can’t get a job.

Anyways, I had 2 options. Either I do a double degree with Biz and Law, or I could just study Business. When I asked my dad about the double degree, he was like “Do you even want to take law?” Then he was like “Crazy ah, double degree. You don’t need to study so hard. Just go to uni to have fun”. My friends in the double degree suffered; they either dropped law or business, because they’re not doing well in either.

I was thinking: what’s the closest thing between business and law? It’s Biz Law, right? But when I actually took the module for corporate law, I was so happy I didn’t do Law. There was one exam where all my friends were writing and struggling, then I saw 2 questions that seemed to be asking me the same thing, so I just copy and pasted my answer. I thought I could get an A, but I ended up with a C. Luckily I didn’t take Law – I think I’ll get 0!

In the end, NUS Biz was a good choice – if I took Law, I wouldn’t have the time to have fun, and if I went to any other school, I wouldn’t have the same hall experience. So it was a good choice for me.

 

2. TEACHING CURRICULUM

What’s your course structure like?

On average, you have to take about 5 modules a semester. Refer to this link for more information .

Basically, we have 7 pillars of pillars of specialisation. Only the first year you have to learn all the core modules, then in year 3, you start to specialise.

Accounting

There’s accounting. Accounting is not just bookkeeping, it includes actual valuation of your company, how you do bookkeeping, how you make sure that you’re not going to get cheated, and how to tweak some terms into your favour. You’ll need to do it if you want to operate your own business eventually, so that’s something I need to learn. Accounting can also be quite competitive, and in terms of work progression, it’s quite good as well! From talking to my friends who do accounting, they say that they start with a job salary of around $3-3.5k, and then every year you increase by very little – I don’t know how much – then you suffer for a really long time until you become a partner. After that, you make a lot of money. A lot of students think they’re gonna get rich from accounting, but that’s not so true.

Finance

Or you can specialise in finance. Finance is different from accounting, there’s stuff like equity valuation, IPOs and generally other stuff if you plan on going into the stock market. A lot of Venture Capitals (VCs) will look into finance students. There’s also Investment Banking. A lot of my guy friends who want to go into Investment Banking, as well, which is insane. The stereotype is that finance students go into it for the prestige or the glamour, but it’s a lot of hustling, a lot of selling, they’re like super intense. I feel like people in finance work very hard, and are very smart and super freaking competitive, but that’s just a finance stereotype! It’s not necessarily true. These are all just my personal thoughts.

Marketing

Then you have marketing, which is what I specialise in! Marketing is just known to be fluffy, we’re just very lazy, we just wanna have fun and we’re definitely all the extroverts. We also think we’re very underrated. You learn about how to analyse your company and industries, and how to bargain with all the players involved and still make money.

Human Resources

Then you have another pillar for human resources. Human resources are on human management and organisational behaviour, or having a good work culture – making sure people in the workplace are actually happy. But I do think there’s not enough practical skills – because they don’t actually teach you how to do payroll and how you’re going to make your employees actually happy. That’s why people say it’s fluffy, because you know the concept, you know how to be a cheerleader but you don’t know how to make it tangible. I think HR is very underrated because in today’s world, I feel like every organisation needs a good culture. It’s pretty sad because a lot of people – both my age or older people – always don’t care about this kind of thing and might think it’s irrelevant. But as a Gen Z, I do think that culture is everything. You know how there’s a lot of depression going around the workplace? That’s why I think culture is important but underrated. I do think that the stereotype of them is that they’re all very nice people!

Entrepreneurship

As for entrepreneurship, I also took some of their courses! They’re very inspirational but you need to really practice. There is a very good class, on how to make your own Kickstarter campaign, and it has a lot of successful students. I feel like not enough people may know about entrepreneurship. Even if you graduate with a degree specialising in Entrepreneurship, I don’t know how many people will take you seriously. If you don’t plan on starting your own business, I don’t know how many people will look up to you for having Entrepreneurship as your specialisation. But if you do want to start your own business, then definitely go for it!

Business Analytics, Operational and Supply Chain Management

Business analytics is another big specialisation, so you specialise in data stuff. There’s also Operational and Supply Chain Management, but I’m not too sure about them.

 

What’s the format of your exams like?

It really depends. For data stuff, it’s very technical. There’s not much essay, it’s usually short answers or MCQ!

Every module is honestly super different. The thing about university is that every professor has their own style, and that’s why it’s very different. Some professors have a big test which is 50%, while some professors will have 2 small tests that are like 20% each, with a lot of different elements like class participation. Class participation also depends on the professors. Some professors emphasise a lot on class participation, so they allocate 20%, some professors actually just allocate 10%, and nearly everyone gets 10%. Honestly, it’ll vary, every professor is really different!

Your final grade is like all your modules averaged, it’s called CAP.

 

Since you do marketing, how is marketing like?

You learn things like SWOT analysis to analyse your company: strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, threat. We also learn the 4Ps (product, price, placement, placement) – but when you go into year 3, you’ll learn like 20 Ps, it’s damn funny. I had to remember so many Ps, there’s even one called Pranding–which is branding, but then they had to force it into a P. There’s positioning, perspective, positivity, etc. I honestly don’t know how I remembered so many Ps, but this is a glimpse into marketing for you. The way they packaged it, every P is important.

Another example is Porter’s 5 forces (supply, power, bargaining, buyer’s power, entrance, competitors). Different industries have different valuation, so it’s just an industry-level overview of whether it’s an industry worth going into. For example, while airlines look super glam, a lot of people don’t make much money from starting an airline because you have very low bargaining power and there’s a lot of very easy entrances to come in, that kind of stuff. Maybe you can compare it to – I don’t know – the toilet paper industry where there’s high demand, etc.

In Marketing, you learn analytics as well. Marketing analytics was an awesome course, that’s the most intense course you’ll ever get, you really learn about big data. You learn about what your competitors are doing. There was one module where we imagined ourselves as a supermarket/brand: we thought about advertisements, what our competitors are doing at the exact same time, and thought about material costs, opportunity costs, and how we can increase our revenue. For example, if you want to cut back on this ingredient because it’s super expensive, you might compromise on your brand image, but it could drive higher profit. It’s a lot of understanding Profit and Loss (P&L).

Of course, you have courses like advertisements and you learn of all the iconic advertisements in the world. You learn about emotional marketing, how it’s changed from physical to digital and it’s changed from physical needs to aspirational needs, that sort of thing!

I love it, I do think marketing makes you a better person. I just think that there’s not enough digital elements. It’s true that better universities are usually more theory based, but the so-called less good universities are very practical – but personally, I would appreciate both!

 

Is there anything that you didn’t particularly enjoy about your course?

In terms of reviewing my course, I feel like university does teach you the fundamentals and the theory, but I didn’t learn much practical stuff.

There are modules that are awesome, like marketing analytics – which is a super tough mod, then there are also the super fluffy mods that are super easy to do well. It’s really up to the professor.

But in general, while NUS requires you to take digital marketing modules, I feel like there’s not enough emphasis on digital marketing, that kind of stuff. For example, if you pick a random Y4 student from the sample pool of students, I believe that he/she wouldn’t know much about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – which is an important part of digital marketing. Everything I know about Hubspot (a CRM) comes from internships. I’m lucky, because I get to learn about it, but not everyone has that opportunity. I only know how to do paid advertisements because I spent the money to learn. Also, there’s no course to teach you how to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is like the bloodline of any website, and if you’re a marketing student you should know what SEO is because you need to rank your website high on Google results. However, everything I learnt about SEO is from my internship mentors because they’re kings of SEO.

I also thought presentation skills were neglected: I would say not everyone can present very well, which is okay, but I would think that marketing would emphasise more on it. Presentation skills was just a very brief module for one semester in year 1, other than that, there’s nothing much on presentation.

 

Is there anything you encountered that was unlike your expectations?

Actually not really, I feel like we are all very typical.

I guess I expected business to be very gossipy and toxic. Some people don’t think it’s gossipy, most people think it’s toxic. I personally find it okay, it’s not that bad. I think people think that business students are very entrepreneurial, but I didn’t see that. The bulk of us are just business students. But if you want to be entrepreneurial, you have to join a club, like NUS Entrepreneurship Society, that’s where the entrepreneuring people are at. Other than that I don’t see anyone who really wants to start their own business.

I’m just lucky that I really like the course that I randomly chose!

I definitely expected business to have a lot more presentations, and I expected teachers to value speaking well and teach you how to speak well, but they don’t seem to really care about that. I expected a lot more class participation, especially for marketing people, but no, people are boring.

 

What skills do you need to do well in business?

I personally think you don’t need much skills. But anywhere you are, I think knowing how to manage big data will be important, so go and learn that.

 

3. CAREER PROSPECTS

Will the career prospects be good by the time I graduate?

Now I’m just going to talk about pay, just roughly.

For human resources, the stereotype pay for HR is low, I don’t know why it is. But it’s just a stereotype.

Marketing students’ stereotype pay has 2 extremes. So if you work in a big Fast Moving Consumer Good (FMCG), the stereotype is that you’re treated badly because you’re just an intern. But actually marketing students are paid okay. And if you become a marketing manager you get paid quite well, that’s why a lot of marketing students want to get an MBA for a managerial position, and then they get paid super high. There’s 2 kinds of markets, either you do a lot of hard work, or sales, it’s just a lot of hard work and not much pay or commission based pay. OR there is the other kind of bigger marketing, like if you’re a business owner.

Finance is definitely a lot of money, but you work bad hours, like terrible hours for 3-4 years of your life, but you do make a lot of money.

 

What do you plan to do after university?

Actually, I really want to start a sustainable bikini brand just for fun, I want to call it something super cute and fun like “drunken whale”. I also definitely wanna do more for my sustainable e-Commerce start-up. I personally feel like the sustainability market is just going to grow. I love eCommerce, and I love anything that’s fashion related in general. While doing eCommerce, you learn how to manage a team, how to optimise workflows, and about cost-benefit and commissions. I feel like by building an eCommerce website you learn a lot of things at once that are really important, like how to build a website. You don’t need to be an expert, but you need to at least know how it works. You get to learn a bit of SEO, learn a bit of digital marketing (like Google Ads). You get to learn about branding, about collaborating with other organisations, about promotions and negotiating with brands. I wanna do more ecommerce Start-ups that are super scrappy, which is fun also!

I also want to go into fashion tech! I’m working on a project with my friends. One of the most pollutive things in the fashion industry is the production of fur; so my friends and I are trying to make plant-based fur. After fur, we want to replace leather and silk. Fashion tech means you need to do a lot of research to make a new material. I think sustainability should start from top down management and businesses, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of consumers.

 

4. STUDENT LIFE

Did you stay in NUS Halls? How was the culture and what were your CCAs?

Hall life is really really fun, you get to meet a lot of people. You’re going to meet crazy smart people doing 5 CCAs, you’re going to meet super social, passionate people. It’s super independent, you go to your friends room, you can party, you can drink, you can come home late, you can go date some boys.

I was in 5 CCAs: soccer, dance in Sheares Hall is one of the most popular, it’s competitive (we suck at sports, but we’re damn good at cultural stuff), acapella, handball and netball. I really loved it. Different halls are known for different things. I think hall is the best place to try different activities without any risk, and people are actually really encouraging.

If you want to join a NUS CCA, you have to be really good at it because those are really competitive. But for hall, it’s just really about having fun.

 

Any last words or advice for juniors?

Marketing is so important, it makes you a smarter person, to think about the consumer first, and makes you think about market validation before doing anything, and it teaches you to do the most important things with the least effort.

But also, be prepared to take modules you don’t like. I thought that university would be fun because I’m specialising in marketing, but there’s so many courses that I really hated, like accounting, econs, coding, and those were all graded. So be prepared to take things that you’ll never ever use in life. Be prepared to meet a lot of very different people.

People are everything. Sometimes there’s times in uni where you feel really sian, but you just need those few friends. In year 1, you will meet a lot of people, you join a lot of orientations and you’ll have a lot of fun, but then after that you start to feel really empty and lonely. It’s because they’re also meeting a lot of other people, when everyone else is meeting a lot of people, so it’s hard to find close friends in the beginning. But after that phase, after you find your close friends, they’ll make you very happy and it doesn’t matter.

A lot of people think that in uni you’ll have a lot of friends but instead, you have a lot of acquaintances. You have friends scattered around and also have very close friends that you can talk to anytime. Hence, the most important thing in uni is to find some close friends, and be super open minded ; you usually make friends in the most unexpected places.

And talk to seniors; seniors know the shortcut and the most relevant people for you. And they’ll help you. I’m personally scared to talk to seniors. I like to talk to my juniors a lot, but if you’re a junior and you’re brave enough, go talk to your seniors. They’ll give you good internships, they’ll give you good connections.

I think in general, business school is good for anyone: it teaches you how to make money, it teaches you the real world, even though I might say I’m not as happy with some things, I’m honestly totally chill with it.

You get to work with a lot of different people, and I really think business makes you a more holistic, better person.