Time management is a skill that can be learned

The week flew by in a blink of an eye! My first week back in NUS after spending a year on NOC was a breeze, just 2 class for the entire week. Week 2 is a whole different story all together with all classes coming into place, my roles as a resident assistance for N-House, the house for entrepreneurs @ PGP, working on CS3216, 48hours sleepless shell business case, working on my own startup idea and catching up with friends whom i have not seen for the past year. With all the groups formed for the rest my classes, time is going to be a rare commodity. Nonetheless, I am enjoying CS3216 thus far.

The people I meet in the course is nothing short of amazing. From the professor to the tutors and my classmates, every single one has strong capability or experience that blows me away. Jim has a ton of experience given the entrepreneurial path he has chosen and I look forward to more of his stories. Michael has scratched his own itch and came up with modivle which is a elegant piece of work. Peggy is an extremely focused individual who has an insane appetite to learn from others. The list could go on and on and it would take days to write about everyone.

Back to the people who are the most important to me. Being with my teammate, it made me feel humbled and to a extent inferior as I could not contribute in terms of developing the application. Looking at them tirelessly writing lines of code while i take up the easier job of writing reports makes me feel like I am not contributing as much as them. Thus i am making sure I put in 110% for the report to ensure we get the maximum grade possible!!

Our application is coming along nicely, the basic features are made available as we speak. Being an educational application, I have spoken to a few people in the field who will be potential people to be our beta(or alpha?) testers. I see tremendous potential in the application we are developing and and I hope this will be more than just an assignment. If possible, I would like to bring this out as something we could work on for the coming future.

Lastly, I was looking forward to the Saturday's workshop as it was talking mainly about the front end side of development. I knew I was interested in that and I had to be there. However the 48hour shell business case totally screwed it up. I was up the whole night with my team to work on the case and submitted it at 9am. That left me an hour to shower and head to the 10am workshop. I ended up nodding away for the most part of it which I am terribly ashamed of. Not only did I not learn from the experiences of the tutors, I made a bad impression by sleeping in class which I don't normally do. I will make sure it definitely not happen again in the future!

Looking forward to the next class with my peers!

The team

The first class of CS3216 was very enjoyable, logistical issues aside, majority of the time was given to the class to showcase our “talents”. This is a fantastic way for us to place an impression onto each individual in class. Since we have to break out into groups and start work immediately, this helps me identify who I would like to work with. 

After a few meeting with my group mates, I am blown away by how technically competent each of them are. Each of them has a truck load of experience that well equips them to develop the first assignment. Being the only business student in the group, I have to find a balance for my role in the group dynamics and to contribute to the team. Thus I made sure that I contributed as much as I could during the brain storming stage and to ensure that everybody has a clear idea of what the final product should be. As a consumer of application, I am surprised how much thought goes into building every single detail of the user interface!  So far the strategy has been going well, as soon as the actual coding starts, my role in the team will yet again evolve into something else. I look forward to working even more with my teammates!

The workshop on Saturday was well planned and had achieved it’s objective of introducing several key tools that programmers need in this course. The AWS portion was very clear and the instructions were listed down step by step, very helpful for a first timer. For the other sections, the concepts started to get a little technical and I could only listen and try to digest the information. Of the tools listed, I find that I am more interested in the front end development such as Javascript, HTML and CSS. Lets hope I can squeeze out some time this semester to start reading up on it!

What I hope to learn in CS3216

Hello everyone!

My name is Jun Kai, some calls me Jay. I am a rising year 4 business student and I am out of my mind.

Out of my mind? Lets start from the beginning.

Every since I was in primary school, I was sort of interested in entrepreneurship. I remember haggling with retail shop aunties/uncles to buy hip and cool items during those days and flip them over to my class mates for a profit. Remember those country flags eraser that we used to collect? How bout the limited edition pokemon cards? I would convince my friends that these are the most “rare” ones that are hard to find. It is not until later on in life that I understood the proper term for what I did, “economies of scale” and “marketing”. I love what I did so much that even till recently, I am still doing it. Of course, I only trade items that I am intimately in love with. I bought a bunch of ipads, iphones and nexus 7 from USA and sell them in Singapore when they were not available. The money was fantastic, however it felt like something was missing.

In order to find out what that something was, I exposed myself to groups and activities that would allow me to explore other aspect of the world. I was the President of NUS Entrepreneurship Society and was involved in spearheading several entrepreneurial activities both global and local. I travelled to different parts of the world to meet people from different culture and I was interested in what they did for a living, what they eat for lunch and how people in that culture creates value for their community. I went for a one year internship on the NUS Overseas College(NOC) Program and spend a year picking brains with students from Ivy league University of Pennsylvania and Wharton. I was fortunate to intern at a high technology startup company and picked up skills ranging from modifying hardware PCB to creating high fidelity mockup of mobile and web applications. It is also during this time I grew interested in creating technology that works! My friends and I took part in Start-Up@Singapore while we were overseas and we were fortunate to enter into the semi-final round. I knew after this 1 year what I wanted to do. I wanted to be involved in creating value for people through technology in a startup environment.

In order to do that, I needed the skills and to understand more about technology and the people who create it. Thus when a friend introduced CS3216 to me, I was immediately excited before I plunged into a huge dilemma. I had zero programming knowledge and even though I knew how to use web and mobile application, my knowledge of developing applications is non-existence. Everybody says CS3216 is a tough programming course, the thought of drowning in the sea of codes started to engulf me. Nonetheless, I knew that it was something I dearly need to do. With my background and experience, I would like to be more involved with the business aspect of a technology startup and in order to do that, I need to have an understanding of how the developers who painstakingly write each line of code thinks and function. I also need to have a good grasp of what makes the technology behind the fancy consumer user interface front ticks. This is why, I am willing to take the leap of faith and take a challenging programing module with zero programming knowledge.

My peers think that I am out of my mind, but I know that this is exactly what I want.