You can read about what happened during the event at E27 and Sg Entrepreneurs. I just have one thing to comment about the night and that is what I learned about Trey who is the programmer of the F8-winning application. He isn’t a computer science student nor a computer engineering student. He is majoring in philosophy.
When he shared this about himself, I started wondering about the oft mentioned lack of innovation in Singapore. And I wondered if it is because students in Singapore are not interested in knowledge across domains. In other words, are we too specialized?
In NUS, we are made to take modules outside our faculty as part of the university requirements. Most of the people I knew in Engineering would try to bid for the easier modules - the non-Arts faculty modules. There was the general consensus that Science modules would be easier for an Engineering student, followed by Business, then Arts.
The friends I had in Arts would try their best to stay away from Engineering modules and go for the Science or Business ones.
There is a tendency to choose the easiest possible module from another faculty with interest in a module sacrificed as a result.
Of course, not all NUS students are like that. There are those who do choose a module out of interest and worry about grades later although I cannot help but feel they are the minority.
What are the backgrounds of the people interested in being entrepreneurs in this Web 2.0 phase? More importantly, do we have cross-domain knowledge? Do we pursue interests outside the domain we are supposed to specialize in?
Why would that be important? There are many reasons, but one of them is that a problem in one domain can be abstracted such that solutions to that problem which have been solved in other domains could be applied to it. Increasing our knowledge in other domains adds to our arsenal of problem solving tools, tunes our pattern recognition and trains the abstraction of problems. These can help us in being more innovative.
I wouldn’t presume that it was Trey’s philosophy background that helped him in being the winner with his application. But maybe, just maybe, it was because he wasn’t in a computer science course that he didn’t have the ‘we must add more features’ hang-up that programmers arguably seem to have. Maybe, just maybe that helped him spot that application which was simple in concept and technicalities but was what people wanted and needed.
It is time for us to step out of our little circles.
Justin | 25-Oct-07 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
yeah that’s a good point.. cross domain expertise is so important..
USP is quite good at that
BL | 26-Oct-07 at 11:43 am | Permalink
Ian,
Your observation is true in a sense. As I often lament in NUS, we have too many engineers wanting to be business people but not business people who can reverse the process.
Su Yuen | 28-Oct-07 at 2:18 am | Permalink
I agree with Justin, USP is one of the groups in NUS who does the multi-disciplinary education structure very well.
But coming back to the general populace, I guess the problem lies in the age-old belief that if you study engineering, you will most probably end up in a science/technical sort of job and if you study business and economics, you’re probably going for maanagement/banking finance sort of jobs.
However, I believe the bigger problem is the way society is structured as to place a HUGE emphasis on grades which brings us to the problem you highlighted on students picking easy mods rather than mods they’re really interested in.
The Singapore workforce is very competitive and with employers placing a huge emphasis on academic merits rather than innovations done at school, it’ll be a tough challenge for the university (or anyone for that matter) to change society’s mindset.
By the way, I’m making a huge guess here but NUS may also be at fault in a way. Reason why business students try to avoid engineering/science modules is because some of these modules are so technical that students with a background in science will have a huge added advantage compared to those who don’t. Hence, some of these more bold and daring arts students end up suffering not because they didn’t study hard but because the module was conducted with the assumption that most students already had some sort of basic knowledge in the subject matter.