What I learned from my NUS NOC Beijing Programme
In the wee morning hours of 26th June 2019, I together with 4 other of my batch mates, took the flight from Singapore Changi Airport to Beijing Capital International airport with a stopover in Hong Kong. We were all under the NUS NOC program and would be spending the next six months in Beijing doing a full-time internship at a local company and taking a class at Peking University.
Ever since I heard about the NOC program, I knew that it was a program that I wanted very badly to embark on. The prospects of being able to work and live overseas excited me. I always had a dream of going overseas and give myself a new perspective on life. My life in Singapore had always felt very mundane to me and i saw this program as a way for me to realise my own personal ambitions and give me a taste of how working and living overseas would be like as well as prepare me for my future ambitions of perhaps living and working overseas. Apart from this, I always wanted to reach my own fullest potential and being an entrepreneur was something that excited me. The ability to decide for myself what I wanted to immerse my time in and be in a position to empower others as well as contribute meaningfully to society was something I saw in entrepreneurship. Hence, I saw the NOC program to be the right fit for me and worked hard to prepare for my application. I was very thankful and happy when I received the successful acceptance into the program and swore to myself that I would make full use of every opportunity I was given to further myself and take steps to be closer to my dreams.
Today is the middle of Recess Week and I have decided to pen down my thoughts about my NOC journey while I am not too inundated by work yet. Since returning from the program, I have been prompted by my sister and the idea of penning down my reflections on this medium account had always been at the back of my mind but I never got around to doing so until today. I hope to list down the key learning points from my experience, be it from work or life lessons that I had garnered.
Life Lessons
One of the first few lessons I learned would be to be able to take care of myself and live independently in a foreign country. Even though I had been to China twice before and to Beijing once, prior to my NOC program, I realised that there were still many things I was unfamiliar with. The first few days involved setting up a local bank account, riding electric bikes on the road in search for accommodation with the help of a local housing agent, applying for Residential Permits, going for health checkup, registering at Peking University as well as learning how to navigate about using the local transportation apps such as Didi and the Metro buses and trains. I remembered the first few days being so hectic as my batch mates and I had to get all of these done within a few days. Through it all, I got to converse with people from a different cultural background from me and also learned the importance of being able to speak with authority to get people to take me seriously and get things done. I also learned minor things such as how to go about identifying whether a house is a right fit (whether the toilet has a flush, presence of heater and observing the neighbouring vicinities) and bargaining for a good price. It was a first time experience for me and I felt that these were important life skills I had learned in the first few days.
Another thing i realised about living in a foreign country is the importance of ensuring my own personal well being and safety. Having lived in one of the world’s safest city Singapore for such a long time, it is always very easy to take my safety for granted. Through my six months in Beijing, I learned that this should not always be the case. Even though Beijing was still a relatively safe city to live in, where one can still wander on the streets late at night and return home safely, it is always important to take basic safety measures. These measures included ensuring all windows and doors are locked before leaving the house, peeping through the door hole before opening the door to allow the deliveryman to pass you your online delivery orders as well as double-checking the roads before crossing and the most important of all would be to remain observant and sensitive to your surroundings at all times (including not walking around with your eyes glued to your mobile screen). While all these seemed commonsensical, I realised that my housemates and I did not practise them while we were there.
This realisation was made after an incident happened whereby my housemate suspected that someone entered our house. While trying to trace how the intruder could have done so, we later found out that one of my housemates did not lock her windows hence indicating the possibility of someone climbing into the house through her window. Staying on the second floor meant that it was very easy for someone to just break into the house and hence all the more we should take care that our windows are locked. Even though nothing was stolen and nobody was hurt, this particular incident got the entire house really scared. I thought hard that night and resolved to take safety precautions from then on. That night of the incident, we changed our door lock and also decided to contact the cleaning service to tell them that we did not want the cleaning lady to enter our house (all along we had no idea when the cleaner would come to clean the house as she could open the door using the electric lock anytime and we would only be informed through SMS after the cleaning service has been completed) without our knowledge and proceeded to changing the service to one whereby we would prearrange a time and be present in the house while the cleaning auntie did her work. I also realised that previously, there were times where I was alone in the house with a repairman who arrived to fix something in the house. It was quite a dangerous situation as who knows what harm could have happened to me while I was at home alone with a stranger. Fortunately, nothing bad had happened to me but I still resolve to bear this in mind in my future endeavours.
Another important life lesson I learned would be to always remain calm and not let others take advantage of my situation whenever I meet into any difficulties. After sharing our own experiences with other NOC batch mates, I concluded that in a foreign environment, it was very easy for us to be taken advantage of by our fears which led us to have to fork out unnecessary money in exchange for personal security. The housing that I stayed in Beijing was not very new and hence there were some repairs that had to be done. For instance, from time to time, the bathroom drain would choke and we had to call the repairman. As agreed in the housing contract, all repairs would be done for free as long as we reported the defects using the mobile application we were told to register an account in. However, there was one incident whereby a repairman demanded payment, claiming that it was not covered under the agreement. And because we had no other choice (the choking bathroom was really bad) and it was close to midnight on a weekday, we had to pay him. Looking back, we could have called the housing agent and made sure that everything was done according to the contract instead of panicking and paying unnecessarily. Another case example would also be how we forked out 700 RMB to change our door lock from an electric one to a lock and key one after the housebreaking suspect incident. We were assured by the locksmith that the lock and key were much more secure than the electric password lock we had, but later told by some policemen that it was the reverse. It was then we realised that we had been taken advantage of by the locksmith of our situation because he knew that after the incident, we were all frightened and willing to part with our money to ensure our personal safety and hence, charged us such an exorbitant price. Therefore, my experiences taught me to never show our vulnerabilities because by doing so, we could be taken advantage of. It is always important to remain calm and think logically.
The most important lesson of all was that I learned more about myself and my character. I realised that I was someone who liked to get things done fast and when they don’t, I ended up panicking and worrying incessantly. In short, i was a worrier. My experience taught me that I should learn to take a step back and think twice before worrying about something. No matter what, being calm and steady are traits that I should acquire because only by doing so, I can make rational decisions. I also learned that I spoke too fast without thinking. This has led to awkward situations and misinterpretations and hence, I should work on slowing down and thinking carefully before speaking.
Internship
As part of the program, I interned at a company called XXX where my role was as a Software Engineer intern. All in all, I did learn quite a few things such as the programming language JavaScript, React Framework and was introduced to ElasticSearch, MongoDB, AWS services and Dockers etc etc. My main projects can be classified to be namely Web Scraping, Front-end development with Kibana Plugins and contributions to a backend development project.
Although I was able to see how a company operates and understand more about software engineering workflows, one thing that was missing from my internship was consistent and valuable feedback as well as mentorship. This was actually my first time working for a company and hence I did not really know what to expect. However, from the first day of my internship, i realised that I was expected to complete my tasks and assignments independently with minimal communications with the rest of the team (maybe just one or two). Most of the projects that I worked on were small standalone projects and this meant that for the most part, I was unaware of what my other colleagues were doing. I was often left to my own devices and was not invited to join any team meetings. Upon the completion of the projects assigned to me, I would then make a pull request on bitbucket and some of my colleagues would give their feedback and comments on my work. However, these were all quite minimal and infrequent. In hindsight, I felt that my internship felt more like me completing my own personal projects and the improvements I made to my own personal code style were minimal as a result of the lack of guidance. Regardless, I have to acknowledge the help given to me by my colleague Sly who was my table partner. He helped me in many ways and checked on me from time to time even though he was not my internship supervisor and this was something that I was terribly grateful for.
Initially, I could not figure out or pinpoint the frustrations I felt as an “unvalued” intern. I just felt that something was missing in my internship but I was not exactly sure of what until another intern who arrived a few months later, pointed out. Throughout my internship, I wanted to learn as much as I could and be involved in the team but was not given the chance to do so. I tried to communicate my desire to be involved by asking what my colleagues were doing and hoping that they would invite me to work for their projects. They would entertain my questions and be very friendly however, none of them asked if I wanted to join them. I guess it would probably be out of their job scope as it was not their duty to take care of interns. It was only in the last month did it dwell on me that my internship supervisor had a completely different mindset from mine. From the start, it was clear that he has much work to do and hence, mentoring or ensuring that interns have a good experience in the company was probably the last thing on his mind. But I guess this could also be attributed to the difference in culture between the two of us? My supervisor was a French caucasian male in his early forties while I am an NUS undergraduate student and this probably indicated that we are bound to have different expectations and beliefs. This experience, however, led me to understand what kind of work culture I should look out for in my next internship or even full-time job.
A lot of times, I also found myself wondering what my next project or task would be. During my internship, I kept trying to be positive and told myself to quickly finish the project or assignments that I was given so that I could move on to the next project and hopefully the next project would be much more interesting and enable me to work on major projects with my colleagues. However, this never happened. Instead, I kept having to “chase” my supervisor to give me new tasks and in turn, was consistently given small projects and tasks. Regardless, I remained positive throughout my internship. I was aware of my own personal capabilities and made the effort to turn up almost one hour early for work and ended work 30 minutes later so that I would not take too long to finish any projects I was given. My supervisor always made sure to tell me that there was no rush in whatever projects I was assigned and that they were not urgent. However, the reason why I kept pushing myself to quickly complete the assignment was that I wanted to finish all the trivial tasks and move on to more meaningful projects. Looking back, It was quite silly of me to push myself so hard. I could have slept one hour more or done other stuff such as leetcode or read news articles instead of working on projects that mattered little to the company. But no matter what, I am glad that I put in my best efforts in whatever assignments I was given and tried my best in contributing to the company as best as I could.
I also learned the importance of having open communication and good leadership. It was clear that XXX did not really have a clear channel of communication even within the technical department and amongst other departments as well. From some small incidents that happened as well as my personal observations on the company’s day to day operations, it was clear that the company lacked a common vision and open communication to operate effectively and efficiently. I guess this all boils down to poor leadership in the team. Most of the time, the director of the company was often doing things that the rest of the company is unaware of. 50% of the time, he would not be in the office and I always wondered what he was doing. At the start of my internship, I did try to ask what were his day-to-day responsibilities as I was curious to know what were some future expansion plans for the company and what a company director does. However, I was not given a satisfactory reply and was given a one-word reply, “Everything”. Even my full-time colleagues seemed to have no idea what he does. Furthermore, I am pretty sure due to the absence of meetings for the entire company (technical and nontechnical department coming together), nobody really knows what each other are doing across departments and there is no clear allocation of tasks and specific goals to achieve daily. This should not be the case, especially for such a small team in XXX.
Personally, I think that in order to have a motivated team, it is important to have a leader who is transparent with what he is doing. It is also crucial to set a team vision for the entire team so that everyone is aware of what each other is doing and have the strive to do their best. Open communication not only gives drive to workers but also improves efficiency because problems get resolved faster when team members are able to direct their questions to the appropriate people with the right expertise and come together to resolve them. All of these are what a team leader should aspire to do and this is something that I will strive to inculcate in my team should I have a chance to lead a team in the future.
Self-confidence was also something that I learned. As an individual who only picked up technology and computer science in my freshman year of university, I had always had low self-esteem and confidence when it comes to technology-related stuff. In fact, in my first academic year, I dreaded using the computer to do my programming assignments because I didn’t like how beginner I was and was intimidated by all of my more experienced and smarter classmates in school. I was constantly in fear and afraid. This affected my confidence level a lot and I kept questioning my choice of university course right from the start. Going into this internship, I slowly learned that I need to have more self-confidence in myself. While I was doing my internship projects, I would sometimes overhear my colleagues discussing what they were doing and sometimes they would get into debates on how best to implement something. I saw how important it was to be able to articulate my thoughts well so that I would be taken seriously at work and this is especially so if I aim to be promoted into managerial positions and do well in my career. Therefore, I am currently still working on overcoming my own fears and becoming a more confident person.
Peking University
I had the privilege of studying at one of the top universities in China. It was always a dream of mine to visit all the top universities in the world and being able to study as an exchange student in the campus of Peking University was something I treasured a lot. Peking University is very different from NUS and I would say that the best feature of the school would be the Weiming Lake with a small pagoda-like tower.
The class I took was called “Chinese economy” and I learned a lot from this class about how China developed so rapidly after it’s 1978 Economic Reforms. The lecturer named Huang Yi Ping had a good command of English and the class was conducted in a lecture-style manner. I thoroughly enjoyed the little stories and personal anecdotes that he shared with us while explaining the concepts.
One main unique feature of the Chinese economy was the dual-track economy whereby there were two different sets of systems and regulations applied to different sectors of the economy geographically. The dual-track economy was a byproduct of the pre-reform legacies and at the same time, the desire for a more open economy.
I also got the chance to make new local and international friends in the university through a project I had to complete and was able to witness how top students in China studied and lived.
It was memorable and once in a lifetime experience indeed!
Entrepreneurship & Personal Milestones
I personally learned more about entrepreneurship mainly by attending workshops and talks on the weekends. The learning points are all recorded down on my personal logbook whereby under the requirements of the NOC program, I had to commit myself to record my activities on a weekly basis.
To give a short summary of what I learned about entrepreneurship it would be the following two points:
- Find the right co-founders. Your teammates are the most important people and they will determine the success of the startup and how well you work with them can even determine an investor’s decision.
- Have an idea that you are truly passionate about. Passion can motivate and drive you to wake up every day and feel re-energise. An entrepreneurship journey is a very tiring one and when everything fails, you only have your passion to back you.
Apart from attending talks, I attended 3 ideathons/hackathons and they were:
- Angelhack Hackathon
- Ideathon 2.0: The new wave of digitalization
- Innovate 48 Tsinghua X-Lab hackathon
Apart from these, I managed to tick off my bucket list and visited several places in Beijing as well as out of Beijing. All of these enabled me to experience the convenience of living in a big country with plenty of entertainment and nature places to enjoy. I could just pack my bag during the weekends and book a train ride using a mobile application such as CTrip with a few taps of my phone screen to enjoy a respite from city life.
Conclusion
My experience has made me realised how advanced China is in terms of technology. Technology has infiltrated in the lives of people and almost everything cannot be done without a mobile phone. For instance, payment could be done using WeChat and Alipay. Online shopping has a wide variety of items to offer and I am forever impressed by how fast it takes to deliver my online purchases on Taobao (Just 2–3 days!) and how efficient the food delivery system is. Huodongxing is an app that allows you to browse through the events happening in China and one can sign up for any events with just a simple registration using one’s WeChat account. Transportation is also very convenient with Taxi-hailing apps such as Didi. To get onto MRT and Buses, one can do so with the public transportation mobile app instead of using the traditional card. Literally, everything could be done with one’s mobile phone and it was really impressive.
I would also like to add that during my six months in China, I was able to feel the warmth and friendly side of many Chinese. I would say that 98% of the people I met were very willing to help me whenever I approached them to ask for directions, or call the helpline to arrange to fix my house router or help in trivial things such as questioning the waiter what a particular food menu item was. Although there were times where I could not understand a local slang or when some of them spoke too fast for me to catch, on the whole, I felt like I was able to fit in.
In conclusion, I am happy that I got the chance to embark on the NOC program. It is an experience that I will never forget and I am forever thankful for this opportunity.
Cheers to more future adventures to come!
