Side doors?
It has been a while since I made a blog post about my life so far and on the very night of the first day of Chinese New Year 2026 I feel….oddly reflective. So here I am making a post where I try not to take myself or this page too seriously but also recount on the things that have happened since I started university! (As I write this I procrastinate on my tutorials lol this post might be a bit of a ramble)
Rough recap
So back in Aug 2024 I started my BEng in Computer Engineering in NTU and right now I am on my 2nd year…but 1st semester. You might be wondering why the 1st semester lol and that’s because I took an LOA to work at a small private equity company, whose name can be found on my LinkedIn, so lets just call this PEF. I spent around 6 months there working on 2 main projects: one a vision based pipeline using for detection and classification for the sourcing of items and another optimization work on a larger more complex and completely different project. But! I’m not going to use this blog post to talk about the technicals of what I learned there because thats a whole nother post on its own. I wanted to use this time instead to talk about the perspectives I’ve gotten at my time at PEF.
The Singaporean Dream
For all of my live I’ve been sold the singaporean dream. Study hard, get good grades, get a good job, get married, BTO and win. But the older I get the more I felt like this path was never meant for me. Don’t get me wrong I do like certainty and structure but the singaporean dream felt void of life and soul. I love the idea of never knowing what was gonna happen to me when I stepped out of the door every morning - the excitement of living, the possibilities out there. But ever since I joined NTU, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to escape this cycle. Each week felt like a time loop where I just chased deadlines over and over and over again until I once again reached another break! Tutorial..Lab..Winter…Summer….rinse and repeat. That was when I decided that I needed a breather from school.
Surviving university is all about picking your fights.
I think one thing great about university compared to polytechnic and whatever mandatory education system that MOE put me through is the flexibility. The option to take a Leave of Absence (LOA) from school for a semester was something I never thought really needed, but after getting my internship at PEF I took an LOA not knowing really what I wanted to do with my time off other than working. Initially, I joined PEF for the technical experiences but I’ve walked away with so much more.
A reality check
When I first interviewed with PEF one of the main things that surprised me was how young my bosses were. PEF was started by a bunch of mid 20 year olds who decided to move to singapore to start and office for its talent density and geographic location. Seeing how I was getting interviewed by someone who was literally the same age as me, opened my eyes to the kind of peopleout there. I’m not even sure how to put this but in singapore you just don’t meet drop outs everyday. Those who entirely drop out of their safe routes to go 100% on their ideas are RARE and throughout my time at the firm I was constantly reminded of that. My bosses were people that embodied the company’s motto to the core that they “never justify sunk costs” and every decision made in the firm was fast. The way they ran their company made me reflect on the decisions I made in mine.
It got me starting to question myself: Am I really putting in the work? Am I getting to where I say I want to get to? Why am I not putting my all into my company? Why am i afraid? What is there to lose?
At this point in time I was starting my STEM creative studio startup - 3PLY (that I am still working on till this day) but we were at a very trying point where we could not maintain enough focus on the company while every founder including myself did it on the side. I realised that as a co-founder, I wasn’t dedicated at all to the journey and in short - wasn’t risking enough. On the front and to myself I constantly kept putting off my responsibilities at the expense of time to avoid facing my reality. I know. I am a terrible co-founder.
This realization solidified in me the day I tried asking my bosses for an investment in my own company (even though they dont operate on a VC model). Whihc was also the day I decided to give my all into this firm. (Thanks Ian and Myles!)
Side doors
But risk wasn’t the only thing I took away from the firm, it was also the way they made their money and the way they spent. Money always felt difficult to earn that I had to work a 9-6 daily and invest wisely to reach FIRE, and not that says that’s no longer true…. but PEF made me wonder if these people can be millionaires, what other opportunities are out there?
This got me on the concept of side doors. If everyone is trying to get through the main door like getting a corporate job after graduation, then there has to be side doors I’m overlooking. The kind of doors that requires a unique life experience to find, maybe some chanced upon or those overlooked. I know these doors are definitely out there… and I’m still searching for them. Who knows if I’ll ever be able to find my side door…but I know that I’ll keep looking.
The butterfly effect
With all the growth I’ve gotten out of my experiences being out of school I think I believe in the butterfly effect ever more so than before. There were so many decisions that led me on this whole journey, and this all snowballed from one hackathon I joined back in 2022. It is truly crazy to see how far I’ve gotten since then. Every project that I’ve made a decisive decision to work on, every plan I executed have led me here so far. So if anyone one day approaches me for any sort of advice, I would probably say that your daily decisions compound with time and every day can be an effort to creating the identity you want. Follow that urge in your heart.
Afterword
Woah! I got a little introspective there when this blog was meant to be more hehehahas. I planned to get a little deeper into the technical things I learned at the firm, poker, game theory etc. but I think that will be for another day! For now I think this is enough words for one post. I hope it brought you some perpective as well. If you have gotten this far, thank you for reading and goodnight!