Driven by a dream that started at the age of eight, Mr Nicholas Ooi embarked on a long journey through Singapore’s education system.
He passed through EM3 in primary school, Normal (Technical) in secondary school and then the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), before entering a polytechnic.
On Friday, Mr Ooi, 28, graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with an honours degree in computing.
“Since the age of eight, I have had a passion for computing. When I first played Red Alert (a military strategy game) and saw the graphics, it gave me the idea of going further to discover what computing was about,” he said.
Mr Ooi was not interested in what he was studying in primary school, and spent most of his time playing computer games. The turning point came when he found a course he wanted to do.
At ITE College West (Balestier Campus), Mr Ooi pursued a Nitec in Information and Communication Technologies. There, he took part in IT competitions such as Java Jive, where his team defeated competitors from polytechnics and universities here.
Mr Ooi also started experimenting on his own outside of the school curriculum, creating a blackjack computer game and coming up with a platform to play music from iTouch on his computer. He went on to Ngee Ann Poly’s School of InfoComm Technology and created in his first year a company called Towards Technology, which provided Web design services.
The start-up cost of $500 was paid from his own pocket. He later got two partners on board as the workload increased. The business had about 15 clients, and made about $15,000 over five years, before it faded away as the trio entered national service and could not dedicate time to it.
Mr Ooi was no less enterprising at NUS, co-founding Bantu, a social enterprise which uses technology to manage volunteers in the social service sector in Singapore.
The idea for Bantu came after Mr Ooi’s NUS Overseas College (NOC) stint in California’s Silicon Valley during his second year of university. With co-founders Janelle Lee, 25, Joshua Foong, 26, and Han Lynn, 25, Mr Ooi, Bantu’s chief executive officer, developed the platform to manage volunteers.
After a year of discussion, the quartet got $10,000 seed money from NUS Enterprise, which promotes entrepreneurship and innovation in the university. They spent the next year checking if the same problem exists here, and building a prototype for the platform.
Since its launch in April, Bantu has signed up 15 organisations, including Ang Mo Kio Family Service Centre and Over The Rainbow, which promotes mental wellness among youth.
Looking back on his education journey, Mr Ooi said the biggest challenge was the social stigma he faced. “Sometimes, when I was outside in my school uniform, some strangers would say loudly, ‘I will never want to enter ITE. Look at them, they are thugs‘,” he said.
He said: “I believe education is important, but it shouldn’t get to a point where people discriminate you totally in life just because of your education background.”
Watch his video story below:
Read more here.
Source: The Straits Times, 16 July 2018