Entrepreneurship Analysis

Secret War Journal[8 September 2014]

My Scores

Student's Name: LIM LEROY
Date of Survey: 08 September, 2014

Your ENTREPRENEURIAL Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for NTU students	Where you stand among NTU students	Low	Moderate	High	Very High
Motivation	3.00	3.02	High
Intent	4.00	2.71	Very High
Efficacy	2.57	2.99	Moderate

Your PROFESSIONAL Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for NTU students	Where you stand among NTU students	Low	Moderate	High	Very High
Motivation	3.83	3.84	High
Intent	4.75	3.76	Very High
Efficacy	3.40	3.43	Moderate

Your LEADERSHIP Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for NTU students	Where you stand among NTU students	Low	Moderate	High	Very High
Motivation	3.83	3.57	High
Intent	5.00	3.70	Very High
Efficacy	3.14	3.30	Moderate

Your ENTREPRENEURIAL Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for Undergraduate students	Average score for Business students	Average score for Male students
Motivation	3.00	3.01	3.03	3.08
Intent	4.00	2.68	2.66	2.78
Efficacy	2.57	2.96	3.19	3.08

Your PROFESSIONAL Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for Undergraduate students	Average score for Business students	Average score for Male students
Motivation	3.83	3.81	3.91	3.85
Intent	4.75	3.73	3.77	3.77
Efficacy	3.40	3.34	3.36	3.52

Your LEADERSHIP Career Aspiration 

	Your average score	Average score for Undergraduate students	Average score for Business students	Average score for Male students
Motivation	3.83	3.60	3.66	3.58
Intent	5.00	3.71	3.91	3.74
Efficacy	3.14	3.27	3.39	3.37

* N of Undergraduate students = 11,501; N of Business students = 2,153; N of Male students = 7,404

Career development opportunities in NTU

In this section, we hope to bring to your awareness some of the opportunities available in NTU for you to further develop your knowledge and skills on entrepreneurship, professional and leadership careers. This list is by no means exhaustive and we encourage you to find out more beyond this page.

General career development:

• Career-related course(s) in NTU: HP8002 Working in the 21st Century by School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• NTU Career & Attachment Office (CAO) – The CAO provides a comprehensive range of career such as services attachment or internship opportunities and to prepare you for the workplace.

Entrepreneurship:

NTU Ventures
http://www.ntuventures.com

• Makan Night – an informal networking session organised by NTU Ventures that gathers start-up founders and professionals. It is held on the last Friday of every month at NTU Ventures @ Innovation Centre. Look out for the monthly emailer for more details.
• Ad-hoc events and workshops – Look out for the emailer or check their website (see above url)
• Besides events and workshops, NTU Ventures also provides incubation and mentoring support should you wish to start your business soon.

Nanyang Technopreneurship Center (NTC)
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/ntc/

• Minor in Entrepreneurship program by NTC, consisting of 16 Academic Units (AUs)
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation Weekan annual week-long celebration (usually in August) with entrepreneurship-themed events
• Startup Design Week – a multi-day bootcamp on how to start a business. Look out for the emailer or contact NTC for more information.
• ideas.inc business challenge - an annual business competition organised by NTC where you can validate your business ideas with experienced entrepreneurs and stand a chance to win some prize money and start-up funding. Do visit its website for more info,http://www.ideasinc.sg/

Student Clubs

• Enactus NTU (formerly NTU-SIFE) focuses on applying business and enterprise concepts to develop social and community outreach projects. http://www.enactus-ntu.com/
• NTU Entrepreneurship Society (NTUES) organises entrepreneurship events and seminar talks.https://www.facebook.com/entresoc.ntu

Specialised professions:

• Formal academic training and job exposure are also essential in your professional growth. You may wish to contact your school’s administration or the CAO for advice on NTU’s academic courses, seminar talks, events, and industrial/professional attachments.
• There are many professional communities where you can meet fellow students with common interests. More information can be found in your school’s website or you can refer to the clubs & communities page:http://www.ntu.edu.sg/CampusLife/Clubs/Pages/default.aspx
• The Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) of NTU provides continuing education programmes and services for NTU alumni and others who are keen to advance their knowledge and learn practical skills. For more info about the professional development courses provided by CCE, please visit: http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/cce/Prof_Dev_Course/default.htm

Leadership:

• Leadership opportunities are plentiful in the campus for you to experience what it is like to manage as a leader. You can be part of the Students’ Union executive committee or the Union Council, or assume a leadership role in the committees of Halls of Residence, clubs & societies or sports teams. Do visit the following pages to learn more about these student organisations.
  http://www.ntu.edu.sg/CampusLife/Clubs/Pages/default.aspx
  http://su.ntu.edu.sg/?cat=16
• There are a few leadership & management courses that you can take as electives, such as Leadership in the 21st Century (course code: BU8642) and Fundamentals/Principles of Management (course code: BU8601/BE2601). You may search for leadership & management courses at https://wish.wis.ntu.edu.sg/webexe/owa/aus_subj_cont2.main
• Some schools also administer their own leadership progammes, such as the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering’s Leadership Development Programme. You may refer to your school’s website for the availability of such initiatives.

About the EPL framework

The EPL framework: A holistic assessment of career aspirations

In today’s ever-changing globalised economy with growing opportunities and challenges, it is uncommon that people adhere to a single career track. Increasingly, people make mid-career switches to other professions or specialisations. While furthering their careers, many are tasked to do something they have never done before, such as leading a huge organisation or developing a brand new product. There is a need for people to acquire a diverse set of skills and knowledge in preparation for a dynamic, multi-dimensional career. In view of these trends, the NTU Career Aspiration Study (CAS) seeks to develop a comprehensive and holistic framework of career aspirations, assessing people’s career inclinations in a three-dimensional space: Entrepreneurship (E), Professional (P) and Leadership (L).

Using this multi-dimensional framework, the NTU CAS enables a better understanding of how these three career forms, E, P & L, relate to one another (Chan et al., 2012). CAS examines not just the intended career path of individuals, but also their motivations and self-efficacies associated with each career form. In doing so, CAS provides a comprehensive understanding of a person’s career aspiration.

This report is intended to help you understand your aspirations towards entrepreneurship, professional and leadership careers. The results reported based on your survey summarise your inclinations towards each of the three highlighted career forms. It is important to note that any inferences drawn from the report must be further validated against other sources of information not provided by the survey. All information in the report is confidential and should be treated responsibly.

Intent, motivation and efficacy

The report takes into consideration three aspects in examining the career aspirations of the individual; namely, the intent, motivation and self-efficacy towards each of the three EPL career aspirations.

Motivation refers to a person’s level of interest or enthusiasm towards a particular career form. CAS also assesses a person’s self-efficacy, i.e., his or her perceived capabilities to succeed. The EPL framework hypothesises that career motivation and self-efficacy are determinants of a person’s career intent, which measures his or her readiness or conviction towards each of the EPL career forms.

As you read through the report, it is important to keep these definitions in mind. For example, it is important to remember that these measures are not the same as actual abilities, and do not necessarily or directly translate into performance.

Norm group: NTU CAS Survey

NTU CAS survey comprises 14,129 complete responses from NTU undergraduate and postgraduate students (male: 53%; female: 47%). The mean age of the respondents was 22.73 (age range: 16 to 57).

Reference: Chan, K.Y., Ho, M.H.R., Chernyshenko, O.S., Bedford, O., Uy, M.A., Gomulya, D., Sam, Y.L., Phan, W.M.J. (2012). Entrepreneurship, professionalism, leadership: A framework and measure for understanding boundaryless careers. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 81, 73–88.

Flux

Secret War Journal[25 August 2014]

Generally I do not write posts to explain my inactivity but I foresee my next post will take a very long time since I am flooded by a lot of commitments right now. I will, of course, make time for blogging but I feel that I should let you all know that it is going to take an extended amount of time, perhaps even longer than the recent frequency. I appreciate your patience. Thank you for continuing to read my blog, following my journey in life. :)

To end it off. Here's a song.

A New Term, A New World

Secret War Journal[16 August 2014]
I originally wanted to publish this post last week but wow, school really takes up a great amount of time these days. (I am taking time off from my studies to write this. xD)

First off, I am saddened to note that summer vacation had ended. It had only been one week of school but I had missed my freedom solely. (Nevertheless, school had been fun thus far.)  I would not say that I had wasted my time during my summer vacation. I learnt a lot during my short time in my part-time job, IRAS.

Link: Summer Vacation Wishlist

Score: 7/8

This is probably my best performance ever. Wohoo! I guess this could mean that 1) I am better at setting goals; 2) I am better at accomplishing my goals.

Ironically, the only goal I could not fulfil was my very first goal I had set for myself - Learning Driving. I guess it shows how easily I derail from my goals. (Dang) The main reason why I did not start on this goal is due to the fact that I sort of spent the funds allocated for driving to learning a 3rd language - Japanese. While I did learn a lot of interesting things from that, I felt a bit of unachieved since I did not manage to start on driving. Of course, many would argue that the skill of driving is much more useful than a third language but that is, of course, debatable. To be frank, I felt a pang of regret. The reason being was that the summer vacation was not long enough for me to attend a full semester on the basics of Japanese. I was only able to complete two-thirds of the curriculum of basic Japanese. That did not qualify me to take the examinations for basic Japanese.

In short, it means, it can be said I wasted money for learning how to drive with an half-assed effort to learn Japanese. Go ahead, call me an idiot. Haiz.
--
Entering new grounds: NTU
It is now August 16. Most of the orientations have ended.
[Link: SCE Orientation Camp]
Apart from SCE Orientation camp, I have also met my coursemates through the various orientations organised by the Schools.

What set these orientations apart from the others, especially the first, was that instead of remembering each other names, we ended up remembering everyone by their chosen alias.

Now, how did that happen? On the first orientation, since everyone was arriving in waves, the Orientation Group Leader (OGL) had decided to let us play a name game with a twist, using alias just like online avatars. Thus, we needed to remember each other's alias (Useless information but funny nevertheless) Some examples include "Table" & "Chair" and "Tampines".

As it turned out, since our cohort size for the course is quite small, all the other orientation groups for our course were largely the same. Hence, on the second orientation, we pretended to not know each other and played along with the name games with the OGLs. The introduction was especially interesting as we introduced ourselves as a student pursuing the course BCG in succession. This went on so well that the OGLs actually thought it was a prank. (Do note that normally, students in a orientation groups have similar courses but it is extremely rare to see a majority of students having the exact course in a orientation group.) It took a lot of effort to keep a straight face. Hahas.

Over time, we finally got to know each other's time. (It was no mean feat to me. So many names, dear Lord)

1. Anirudh - Boundless. Hindi & Sanskrit Origin.
2. Andy - Brave. Literal meaning of "man warrior". Etruscan origin.
3. Bryant - Strong. Celtic meaning.
4. Claudine - Lame. French and Latin Origin. (Wow, never knew a name could mean that. Same for Claude. Claudication means limping in Latin, it is a medical term. Now you know.)
5. Jason - Healer. Greek origin.
6. Jeffrey - Multiple origins and meaning, mostly similar. Teutonic & American - God's Peace. Anglo-saxon - Peaceful gift. French - Divine Peace. English and German - District, Traveller, peaceful pledge 
7. Pauline - Little. Latin Origin.
8. Raymond - Wise Protector. Literal meaning of "Guards wisely" French Origin.
9. Desmond - Gracious Defender.
10. Joel - He that wills or commands. Hebrew origin.

Names with non-english names are exempted. As usual, I am not interested in those. There are some interesting one and some that really breaks what I thought was the norm for names. Let's see where we get to with this class. :)

---

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy

Over the Edge: Struggle

Secret War Journal[26 July 2014]
I was recently invited to attend a musical play by Lai Yin. Performed by her church, it was a play that deals with the internal struggles that a teenager would face in the society.

As every young adult would probably face during their teenage years, it is a period where one struggles to find their own identity in the society. The story follows a girl who is doing well in academics. However, she wanted to fit in with the more popular kids. She was always not invited to social gatherings as she was not popular with the friends. Thus, she decided to spent more effort in becoming more 'popular'. The main character's family is not very well-to-do. Hence, they do not have  lot of money to spare and her parents are not willing to spend on unnecessary things.

The girl decided that, to be become popular with her peers, she has to dress better and do the things the peers do to fit in. All these cost money, however. To get the money, she lied to her mother that the money is for buying textbooks. In the end, she was not able to fit in despite her efforts and her lies were subsequently exposed.

As it turned out, people liked her as she was before. Thus, there was not a need for her to 'pretend' to be someone else. That is the message that this play seeks to tell us: Just be yourself.

It was an interesting play. I went with Laura. Along the way, I met Siew Yan and friends. No photos, we are not a group that likes to take pictures. Not sure if Lai Yin took though. Hahas.