1. …when I am learning so many new and relevant skills at work
2. …when I am being paid for doing something that I love
3. …when I am listening to my favorite songs with my new earphones
4. …when I know I have the ability to bring joy to others around me now
5. …when I know I am not wasting any hour, any minute, any second of my life
6. …when the skies glow orange and tangerine mushmallow clouds streak across my office windows at 7:30pm
7. …when it is so easy to identify real friends; the people who have stuck with me through thick and thin
8. …when I wake up everyday, looking forward to making an impact in this world
9. …when I buy tissue packs from the old ladies or rag-n-bone men everytime I see them
10. …when my loved one is happy not because of what I did, but what made her love me
11. …when I make new friends who love me as a friend too
12. …when my alarm rings at 6:40am in the morning and I know that it’s a start and never an end
13. …when things go bad and I can still see the good, however small it may be
14. …when I believe in God and know each day is a blessing
15. …when I look back at my life 10 years ago, at where I am now and at where I can and will be
16. …when I look at my friends from 10 years ago and thank my lucky stars that they remain my friends till today
17. …when I hate going to sleep at night because consciousness gives me the power to see, to hear and to think
18. …when I can read a book, grow to love its characters and am able see everything from their pespectives
19. …when I know what I want
20. …when I make up my mind

Can anyone see the contradiction in Philip Yeo’s comments? ‘Closet socialist’ Philip Yeo favours poorer students as reported in the Straits Times today. To do what? To work in a laboratory for five years looking at mice everyday.

And to him, foreigners being the hungrier ones, ready to take on more risks, would be needed in the scholarship schemes to spur the locals on.

Well, I guess that’s what our government has been doing all along; providing local ‘mice-investigation’ jobs for humble Singaporeans and regional ‘going-to-the-bars-and-red-light-districts’ type for foreigners.

Thank you Philip Yeo in believing in us.

GSR 8

Can’t believe that 4 years have passed by so quickly,

everything that we have been through together.

Our first birthday outing for Zhuang’s birthday,

and the many more that followed.

Our mugging times in the old and new SIS buildings,

and the slacking times before and after.

The new friends who have joined us,

and old friends that have left us.

Can’t believe that we will not be classmates anymore,

not to sit in a seminar room together,

and work in projects as teammates and friends.

Can’t believe that we have finally graduated,

can’t believe that we are four years older.

But if there’s something to believe in,

it’s that we’ll be friends forever.

I’m sitting at my desk, in my 2nd week of my career, doing things that I normally do when I’m in school. This include interesting work on powerpoint (designing models & frameworks), excel (modeling forecasts & trends) and secondary research on company profiles, their investments and growth methodologies and more. Added to the fact that I am not graded for this but rewarded with a monthly salary, I tell myself everyday that I love my job.

(my unfurbished desk; it’s gonna be replaced soon)

However, the caveat is that I have not been assigned to a case yet. "On the bench": that’s how industry members term people like me who have no client duties at the moment. Nevertheless, I know something is coming soon and I really hope that the passion for the work would hold steady and my motivation levels as well in the midst of enduring late nights and the lack of sleep.

First thing I can really identify with my company is its strict powerpoint standards. Being "the powerpoint person" in most of my academic project teams, I am often spending a long period of time arranging textboxes, colors, and fonts, making sure that the slightest misalignment and unwanted differentiation would not happen and to many of my team members, it seems like a fastidious process but for me, it’s just the way that presentations should be displayed. And man, even with this pet peeve of mine, the extent of maintaining my company’s standards is not simple; sometimes my colleague still had to adjust my work (leaving me with a 100% learning process and 0% pride).

The second thing that I felt impressive about the firm is the employees’ level of capability with excel. Being a teaching assistant in excel for SMU for three academic terms and knowing the secrets of macros, vlookups and monte carlos simulations, I thought I knew it all. But I don’t. I absolutely do not know how in the world can somebody work on thousands of rows and columns, engage all forms of tools the program provides without the use of a mouse while being faster than anyone else I’ve seen before. Mind-bogglng but true. I’ll be working my way up there, believe me.

The next thing I’m working on is my training programme. Options include London, Shanghai and Bangkok… oh please oh please let it be London. Don’t let the slots get filled and send me there please. I promise I’ll study really hard! Hehe..

Anyway besides work, I have to explore what I’m going to wear for the SMU Grad Night this Friday night. Should I buy something? Should I toss up a rojak of clothes and accessories and hope it won’t look weird? Argghh.. I don’t know. Let Friday come and things will happen.

After 18 years worth of academic pursuit (more like 4 since no ‘pursuit’ happened before SMU), I finally embarked on my career at L.E.K. Consulting. Spending two days with some very intelligent people and being only one of two employees there who speaks Mandarin, I needed to adjust to the environment. Luckily for me, everyone was massively friendly and enacted no form of pressure towards me. This was most important as it became difficult having no official duties at all; the two full days were spent on professional development courses, orientating myself to their previous paid cases and the intranet, and simply knowing everyone.

The lack of duties for me currently is mainly due to the company’s heavy schedule last month where my colleagues clocked 90-hours weeks working on several cases. Thus, they deserved TOIL in return, which they would be using tomorrow and days thereafter. TOIL, a word I once thought was an English term for ‘hard work’, but in L.E.K., it meant Time Off In Lieu, given to employees who have worked beyond expectations and official requirements. I’m anticipating TOIL time for myself in the near future.

L.E.K., like most consultancy firms, performs projects for a fee with a duration from 2 weeks to 2 months, ranging from mergers & acquisitions, commercial due diligence, strategies in introducing new products/services and much more. Where finance students in SMU use two years to concentrate on their related modules, I am required to learn everything as soon as possible, preferably immediately. Excited as I am, I am also skeptical about accomplishing this daunting task. Friends with finance majors, please send me whatever you have please.

For tomorrow, I would be doing something that, at least, uses more of my strengths: to create a deck (aka powerpoint slides) for the Managing Director to present at a international forum for middle management personnel. The hard part? The content is one of my responsibility. I’ll need to search through our intranet of past cases to bring forward a good storyline to tell the audience in the forum. Doing this on my 3rd day of work will contain unimaginable difficulties but I really do want to make a good delivery. God help me and wish me luck friends.