Keynote Speech at Dean's Tea for Graduating Students

Graduates entering the workforce with sound technical fundamentals may expect to find themselves in great demand at home and beyond. That was the upbeat message that soon-to-be graduates attending Dean’s Tea for Graduating Students on 20 March 2007 were treated to. The message was part of the keynote speech at the Tea Session delivered by Dr KN Kumar, Assistant Director of Manpower Development with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Citing a news report from The Straits Times, he noted the shortage of good quality candidates in IT industry, which forms part of a global crunch across many sectors. 

Dr Kumar noted that as enterprises in Singapore move toward high value added activities, local infocomm jobs are moving away from more basic functions such as programming and technical support to solutioning, system integration and project management. At the same time, some 50% of local infocomm graduates are employed by user organisations, mainly in financial and business services. What this trend implies for fresh infocomm graduates is that they are expected to have deep technical skills, soft skills and domain expertise.

Dr Kumar elaborated that as Singapore presses on with its efforts to promote intellectual property creation, a pool of infocomm professionals with deep technical expertise would be required. It is for this purpose that infocomm students should graduate with sound fundamentals. Those who meet this requirement may look forward to rewarding careers as technologists, taking on the jobs of research engineers or scientists who have deep competencies in specific infocomm technology domains.

For those who are more business-oriented, technical adeptness remains important. For instance, in re-engineering business processes and developing infocomm applications to enhance business competitiveness, infocomm professionals must possess both technical and business/domain expertise in order to integrate infocomm into business operations. In his wide-ranging speech entitled “Developing Globally Competitive Infocomm Professionals”, Dr Kumar challenged the graduating class in the audience to keep their eyes on building up their skills and competencies even after graduation.
 

Other Speakers at Dean’s Tea for Graduating Students

Other invited speakers at Dean’s Tea for Graduating Students 2007 were: Dr Daniel Cheong, Institute of High Performance Computing; Dr Lim Hock Beng, Singapore Technologies Dynamics; Mr Ronnie Yang, Pixelmetrix Corporation Pte Ltd; Mr Richard Foord, Barclays Capital Global Services Singapore Pte Ltd; Mr Prem Prakash, Retive Solutions, and Ms Lua Tse Min, InCampus Pte Ltd. Representatives of IBM, CSIT, NCS Pte Ltd, Singapore Technologies Kinetics and Singapore Computer Society were also present to lend support to the occasion.

Dean’s Graduate Award Winners 2007

Another highlight of the tea session was the presentation of Dean’s Graduate Awards. SoC Dean Professor Joxan Jaffar presided over the presentation and Vice Dean of Graduate Studies Associate Professor Wynne Hsu beamed as award winners went on stage to receive their prizes. This year’s winners are: David Lo, Lim Yew Jin, Lu Hua, Ma Lin, Vu Quang Hieu, Yang Yinping and Zhao Qin. The selection criteria and names of past winners of the award may be found here.

Dean’s Tea for Graduating Students had traditionally been an annual event that served as both send-off and mini career fair for the graduating class of undergraduates. This year, the tea session scored a double-first by including graduate students as well as being part of the inaugural SoC Day, a more inclusive event aimed at encouraging more interactions within the SoC community, students and staff alike.

Other Highlights of SoC Day

Jointly organised by NUS Students’ Computing Club and the School, SoC Day kicked off with a fun-filled pizza-eating competition, followed by the unveiling of the winning design in the SoC T-shirt designing competition. Other highlights of the Day included a talk on tips for students on how to stand out and be noticed by prospective employers, given by Ms Wong Sing Chee, Head of NUS Career Centre. Rounding off the events of the Day was the Blog Creation Workshop given by Nineo.com, a company initiated by SoC students, and currently residing in the School of Computing Incubation Centre.
 

Click here for more photos on SoC Day.