Orientation – Reliving Campus Life

I am back in Nanyang Business School, my alma mater! I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to pursue the Nanyang Fellows MBA programme after graduating from NBS a good 16 years ago (oops, I just revealed my age!).

We started the programme with an Orientation from 3 to 12 Jul 2013. The first day was a Welcome Dinner for the Fellows at Raffles Marina. Besides meeting the Fellows for the first time and getting to know each other better, we also had alumni sharing their MBA experiences with us. Our group is small but diverse. We have Fellows from Singapore, India, China and Korea each coming from different background and experience. We had a good dinner and more importantly, a good start to our one-year long learning journey together.

The next two days of the Orientation were packed with very useful briefings by the Library and IT personnel and a familiarisation tour of the campus. We visited the Chinese Heritage Centre in NTU which was founded in 1995 to advance knowledge and understanding of the ethnic Chinese communities in different parts of the world. Mr Yap, our guide, brought us through a very informative tour of the Centre. We then had an amazing race around the campus. Gosh, NTU has expanded and changed so much over the years that is beyond my recognition. I could hardly remember the places I used to eat, live, play and study in and took great efforts to get from one place to another. Sadly, being an alumni didn’t give me any edge in the race but I had great fun rediscovering my campus.

The next day, we extended our amazing race outside of the campus to discover the culture of Singapore. We visited Kampong Glam, an ethnic district with a strong Malay-Arab influence, Little India in Serangoon Road and Chinatown. Indeed, not only did our International Fellows gained a better appreciation of the culture of Singapore, I personally learnt more about my own country. I didn’t know that Little India Arcade used to be a buffalo slaughtering house in the past!

We ended the day with a Singapore River cruise to truly admire the beautifully restored warehouses turned chic quayside dining and the modern development of Singapore represented by the skyscrapers of the Central Business District and Marina Bay area.

Orientation can’t just be amazing races right? We also had pre courses on Accounting and Finance to prepare us for the MBA programme proper and two days Teambuilding at Outward Bound Singapore (OBS) in Pulau Ubin. The teambuilding activities in OBS challenged us to work as a team to overcome team challenges and push individuals’ limit and resiliency. It was amazing looking at how a newly formed group of people could put our acts together to get our missions accomplished one after another. The trust, confidence and patience we have for each other will serve us a long way back in the programme. Indeed the Team has emerged stronger both mentally and physically and we truly enjoyed the Orientation period. We are ready for the real work!

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