Sometimes life beats you around, sometime life gets you down.

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Had a busy day today. Promised Nigel to help out at the Climbing Club booth during matriculation fair today at NUS, so i took a half day off from work.

Manage to meet some school mates in erm, school, today. Ha ha Pek Hong is still as buff as ever. Keep it up dude! Maybe, JUST maybe, i might consider capoeira (If that’s how you spell it.) for the coming semester! Still thinking of what to join, actually. Hmm.

Matric fair was generally uneventful, nothing new for a 3rd year like me. It’s good seeing school mates again, and the climbing folks. Work is boring. Really. Boring. School is still better.

Highlight of the day was the talk/panel discussion held at SMU today, which Stanley attended with me. The talk was given by Professor Phillip H. Phan from Carey Business School, John Hopkins University. A short write up about the event and the speakers can be found here.

The title of the talk was titled “Identifying Entrepreneurial Opportunities”, so yeah as you might have guessed the discussion of the evening generally revolved around entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial mindset, as well as the environment (ahem. gahmen.) that influences the developement and nurturing of entrepreneurship.

The talk given by Phillip was really informative. Apart from the usual stuff that i hear from most talks that i attended, it was really helpful particularly because he manage to deliver and dissect topics on the thought process of creativity, the risk taking nature of entrepreneurship and also how entrepreneurs are calculated risk takers manage risks very effectively. His thoughts on opportunity options of entrepreneurs are particularly useful in analysing our situation, and that came in pretty handy for us.

The panel boasted an impressive line up as well. Among them are:

• Ms Kim Faulkner, a very charming lady who is also a branding guru, Director & CEO of Activise, and also a board member of Spring Singapore;
• Mr Gay Chee Cheong, a witty and humourous man who is just as charming, Board of Director of Hyflux, Raffle Education Corp & Midas Holdings (Organiser of Singfest! I’m going!);
• Mr Ong Peng Tsin, and real chatty entrepreneur from Silicon Valley who is also Chairman of Infocomm Investment;
• and Mr Roland Ng, President/Group CEO of Tat Hong Holdings, and gung-ho type chinese businessman who is real wise.

I managed to talk to Mr Ong during the tea reception (May i also mention that the tea reception was really good? Amazing salmon nuggets! Kudos to the organisers!), in which he was amazed by the Tivoli shirt i got from the I.B.M Young Entrepreneurs Award i took part last Dec. Adding on to the surprise was that he actually works in the Tivoli division too! Now how cool is that!

It was really nice of him to spend time talking to us. Funnily he exclaim “Thank goodness you guys are doing engineering!” when we introduced ourselves to him, which he made a point that Singapore is lacking in passionate youths who are pursuing an engineering degree because finance is where the money is now. He was also really encouraging, telling us that we should pursue our passions and dreams, and don’t bet our career on trends because that’s not a wise thing to do. Ha i would gladly say “Sir, yes sir!”

All in all, it’s a really fruitful evening. As for the content of the discussion, that alone probably deserves an entry on its own.

I should probably move on to other more important stuff than blogging now. Cheerios.