freshman year | sophomore year | junior year | senior year

ahhh the year everyone sits around waiting to graduate. for the sixth and third-last time, my six learning points from the past term are as such:

• there are often misalignments between an actionable plan and the constraints of reality. “starting on projects early” seems to be something that is always difficult to achieve either due to unclear specifications communicated or a discrepancy in team members’ commitment towards a common goal.
• stakeholder management is tricky business when you report to more than two large entities. them having differing views is one thing, but their internal constituents disagreeing is a headache. sometimes i wonder if “stakeholder pleasing” should take precedence of development progress, creating a happier community and a crappier product in due process.
• modern society has degraded money to nothing more than numbers stored in systems, which has made forgery and printing more money (the quantitative easing kind) rather obsolete. there seems to exist a possible future of limitless inflation upon the failure of these systems’ trust/integrity mechanisms. magic money and chaos.
• consultancy is a game of researching success, collating their ingredients into “best practices” and giving them fancy names like post-modern organisations or middle-aware technologies, then preaching it to people who will pay to listen to you.
• there is no one-size-fits-all explanation for complex technology: the consumers don’t want to know your algorithms and the (seemingly?) technical are not too concerned with the user interface / experience. the challenge is when both sit in the same room and your pitch is supposed to enlighten and impress everyone.
• people management is all about the power of persuasion. in school, you are on your own. at the workplace, your place in the hierarchy and past experiences sometimes supersedes your actual requests. from a government perspective, it is irrelevant: who needs persuasion when whatever comes from the top has to be followed? food for thought, especially for quasi-authoritarian administrations.

as usual, the numbers for the few of you:

after braving the storms of six project hell and exam seasons, i have reached my final summer. it feels quite like the first actually: carefree, no obligations, waiting for time to pass. i do think it is well-deserved, after the past hectic year of intense time-consuming projects. most of them paid off though, either having some monetary incentive (uob – retail banking innovation, ida – social media innovation, fyp – best technical innovation) or scoring quite-above-average academically.

the time has come to rest on my laurels for a tiny bit before my internship starts in june. in the meantime, i have to begin planning and preparing for my exchange trip to germany at the university of mannheim and also worry about my long-overdue fitness regime that my country demands i keep up. i’ve already booked my ippt for this thursday and am prepared to fail and start using remedial training to kickstart my dying energy levels.

other than that, tis the season to chill.

3 years worth of MOE’s graduate employment survey data for SMU’s information systems management programme and you can roughly gauge the discrepancy in trends between the cohort average and cum laude and above figures. gradual growth versus comparatively volatile adjustments and corrections. i’ll be anticipating next year’s figures before i become a statistic myself.

and so the search for summer 2012′s revenue-generating activity has ended, with bagpipes and kilts if you don’t recognise the logo. this year’s process started off with confidence, followed by shock, disappointment, uncertainty, insecurity, despair, and ended with relief (mostly in that order). looking back, it was a black swan event, meaning i could have cut back a few heart attacks that were disruptive to my academic life. in hindsight, the causes were a mix of complacence, bad timing, market conditions awareness, and a discrepancy between my goals and the market demand for it. by the time i realised that my ultimate priorities were to [a] facilitate my (possible) exchange programme in fall and [b] secure a full-time offer before that (as opposed to gaining experience in my very specifically desired field), it was mostly too late. not that i am unhappy with my present offer, in fact i was thoroughly elated when i received the news, just that things could have been done much, much better. i am certainly looking forward to how these ten weeks will differ from last year’s and will have to start planning for my actual career soon, lest the same painful process repeats itself.

this should be it for now. until i can unlock anymore for free ;)

moving into the second half of this degree programme creates a glimmer that tells you the end is visible, just not there yet. in tradition, my learning points are as follows:

• working all-nighters continue to present a dilemma where it is poor time management practice, but there is much efficiency in last-minute work and nothing can quite beat the high of a 4am epiphany.
• spend less time in experiments focusing on getting theoretically-correct results and more on hypothesising the causes behind actual results instead.
• the generalisation that industry professionals know their stuff is highly flawed; many have been living in a hole for far too long and their ignorance of reality is astounding.
• understanding expectations is hard work; students continually attempt to be psychologists in analysing what professors actually want to see.
• abstractions are dangerous; they should be created if and only if users will never need to understand the underlying complexity. unravelling the deep mysteries only make abstractions even more complex. (in english: don’t try too hard simplifying things, sometimes understanding the difficult parts is necessary)
• mentorship is a game of passive facilitation that attempts to elicit behaviour which promotes self-learning; spoonfeeding advice and active intervention have little value.

all said and done, here are the corresponding results for the eyes of the privileged few:

i realise termites are almost chewing this place away, hence the facelift to something simpler. the last time i had a moment to breathe was midway through my internship; everything else from then on was a blur. here are the last six months in summary:

one; the credit suisse internship
more or less the best thing that happened to me in 2011. the application through to the interviews seemed so smooth, some people commented that they were rather lenient this year. the entire summer analyst cohort numbered ninety plus, where more than half were from technology. the key takeaways from those ten weeks were opportunities: to meet people, to experience culture, to learn things, and to make a difference.

the mandatory nature of meeting people became apparent on day one and two which ended with compulsory networking. from then on, it was understood that every other event would have a networking element (there was some correlation to whether food and alcohol were served). teams were also randomly assigned for the meet the md program where teams had to schedule and meet five managing directors or directors by the end of the term to uh.. chat. sometimes the interaction was one-sided, like CEO brady dougan’s address to the global summer analyst cohort, which was cool since i’ve never sat in a video conference with hundreds of people in it (i think my manager was envious). the whole idea of building networks suddenly has tremendous value once you realise you have a problem you can’t solve and help is but a phone call/IM/email away. to quote induction training, “would you rather google for five hours or call someone for five minutes?”. the question then becomes: have you made enough effort in getting to know more people so that you know the right someone to call in times of need?

culture was another inevitable aspect. you can lie in a ten-minute interview, but you can’t get 55,000 global employees to lie to you over ten weeks. everything i saw on each of those 50 days was real-world work to run the bank and continually increase efficiency. the fact that CS is less keen on lateral hires and focused on grooming internal talent from graduate levels to fill senior positions eventually shows their long-term vision that attempts to rid diluted cultures.

out-of-office learning was my favourite, even if it was just an off-site training lecture at raffles link. of course field trips to the trading floor and datacenter plus the IT expo where the entire of technology got together to share were highlights. besides the basic finance elearning that everyone had to complete, i was very much into how people manage complexity. since studying technical processes was kinda part of my job, it was interesting to see how much i could comprehend (the answer was barely enough, but i grew to understand that was normal). taking charge of my own projects meant that i was at liberty to propose solutions (unfortunately to build them as well) which ended up making life easier for certain people. to hear managers with vastly more expertise than me showing appreciation for my work exudes quite a bit of satisfaction, especially when i felt more could be done given time. that said, the potential to drive change in an open organisation with overflowing complexity is limitless.

shortly after completing my stint at CS, i was given an offer for a repeat internship. i also learnt from a colleague that my projects were inherited by a new graduate analyst to be further developed (hopefully my documentation makes sense). though it was a great experience, i turned down the offer in favour of exploring other avenues. trust me, that email was one difficult mail to write but i felt it was necessary in my capacity of continual learning at this point in life.

two; attempting to squeeze government money
as part of ida’s elite initiative, i had 6 grand to spend on training courses. being the opportunists we are, most of those in my batch unwillingly parted with 6 grand of our own in an effort to increase our perceived value through certifications. unfortunately, time became quite an issue and i only managed to complete and pass (and reimburse) the easiest of three certs: the ITIL v3 Foundation. CAPM and CEH funds are frozen till i complete and pass them :(

three; the semester begins. and ends.
junior year: a weird term for a penultimate student if you ask me. my first semester doing four IS mods that don’t feel like IS mods. taking both retail banking and financial markets made the contrast between retail banks and investment banks rather obvious, down to the guest speakers. the “don’t throw away until it completely breaks down” mindset against the “do whatever it takes to achieve competitive advantage” focus made it pretty clear where i am not headed in my career. architectural analysis and networking felt like computer science mods, where the former drained out the cpu cycles of all my peers doing performance load tests and the latter was an opportunity to buy expensive toys and perform weird tests on them.

i also spent the greater part of post-internship and term time to work on PRISM, the faculty magazine i revived after a two-year hiatus. this will be my legacy after stepping down as publications director from the 7th smu school of information systems society.

four; fyp begins
right after the exams, it was full speed ahead to clear fyp acceptance. we already shipped in a pair of nexus s phones because of their special powers and built a simple prototype for the presentation. thankfully we passed acceptance, but there is still a tonne of fuzzy work left to sort out before actual development can begin. no risk, no return right?

five; plans for summer/fall 2012
summer 2012 planning has commenced on a rocky start with an early rejection note, but i can’t possibly expect everyday to be sunday. applications will continue and hopefully i will end up in a nice place. i am also planning for an exchange semester in fall 2012, so stay tuned.

chilling here.

or so i wish.

settling in. meeting people. getting real work done. and still not liking unix any better. almost time to schedule a mid-term review. time flies when so many things are on your mind..

thanks everyone for the wishes, either via my 17,865 pixel facebook wall or otherwise.

in other news: election results are raising eyebrows, but not changing the system. yet. i wonder how 2016 will look like..

the past semester has been the least motivating one since i stepped into smu. it is the first time challenges were regrettably allowed to overwhelm me and i was unable to bend fate to my will. reality has sunk in with the erosion of whatever advantage i previously held, levelling the playing field to ground zero. with more advanced modules in the coming fall semester, it is high time to up my game.

thankfully, this semester has not been without like-minded support whom have proved the feasibility of certain working models, and hopefully such performance will continue to realise. my appreciation for your dedication is beyond words.

learning points from this smumester:

• success always seems to trend upon fearlessness, passion, and dedication to a cause. entrepreneurship simply rides on the same formula.
• conformity has been so deeply rooted into our system it needs to be removed. deviation is but a cardinal aspect of social evolution and deserves respect.
• it is possible to research, debate, and produce killer slides within half an hour each week and find it somewhat enjoyable.
• knowledge is power. the lack of which commands one to submit to whatever price demanded, however exorbitant. which side will you be on?
• cryptography is a field of mathematics, not computer science.
• products which are highly-acclaimed on a consumer level have little appreciation in the eyes of obstinate scientists.
• lastly, it is pertinent to accept events which have ventured beyond one’s locus of control and efficiently re-prioritise thereafter.

that said and done, the outcome speaks for itself. again, only for the privileged few.