A fistful of dollars

About a year ago, when I posted about receiving a full scholarship (on my LinkedIn and later retrofitted to my new personal page), I said:

With the scholarship's support, I will be freed of any financial burden …

Truth be told, even as I was writing that, I knew it was only half the truth. Don’t get me wrong, receiving a monthly stipend for a coursework master’s degree is an exceedingly rare privilege. At the same time, Singapore is also the most expensive city in the world!! My master’s stipend is enough… given some conditions: I need super cheap housing (a.k.a: getting a place NTU’s hall – that’s what we call the dormitory), and I need to eat and drink very moderately.

Unfortunately, I did not get on-campus accommodation. There was not enough places and priority was given to doctoral and undergrad students (at least I guess so). Hence, I had to rent a place outside NTU. Hence, I went about 400SGD over budget for housing alone, plus about 50-100SGD each month for commute (daily bus round-trip). Hence, the generous stipend suddenly became just a fistful of dollars.

I was prepared to make up for the difference with my savings – built up after years of laboring. But, let me reiterate, Singapore is still the most expensive city in the world. I can make up the difference, but by the end of my stint, I will have burnt out all of my savings, which would leave me in a financially vulnerable position. For my own reasons, I refused to ask my family for aid.

That means, I will have to somehow earn a few dollars more. But herein lies the challenge. First, as scholarship holder, I was not allowed to accept external work, so that means no internship in Singaporean companies and such. Second, even if I’m allowed to, the labour market for techies is extremely competitive, especially for international students – I saw my chance of getting a job/internship as near zero anyway. (That is still not mentioning the ungodly amount of workload brought by 5 graduate-level courses, which I completely failed to anticipate.)

So, this is where the Work Study Scheme saved the day, or more exactly, the year.

For a few dollars more

NTU’s Work Study Scheme (WSS) is sort of like a on-campus employment program for NTU students (and NTU students only) to earn a few dollars more while working towards a project beneficial to their study. (I actually don’t know if a similar arrangement exists in other universities.)

Here’s how it works:

• There is a online board full of on-campus jobs (about 50-80 jobs as I observed). There will job descriptions + learning outcomes, and posted hourly wage (amount vary depending on nature of job). The job may be:
  • admin duties (library work, filling data, etc.)
  • event management (ushering, check-in, etc.)
  • invigilation
  • research and lab work
• The student pick a job, apply by sending their information.
• If the supervisor (university staff, mostly professors) see the student as a good fit (via interviewing and such), they will hire the student (duh).
• The student fulfill the work requirements, then go to an online portal to report they work hours. (no more than 16h/week, per Singapore law).
• The supervisor gives their approval. Then the money will be automatically processed and sent to the student’s bank account.

Very simple.

And it helped my solve two problems at once. It was easy to find work, get hired, and get paid. No paperwork, contract, multi-stage hiring procedure etc. were involved, which was vital because these could be a deal-breaker. I also was actually permitted to take on these jobs. And the pay was actually decent. This solved my financial issue.

And more importantly, it gave me opportunities take on research roles. This solved a second, longer-term problem.

Once upon a time in academia

Surprisingly, I never met an active PhD student before I came to NTU (I have met seniors with doctorate degrees, but they don’t count). Hence, I never gave a serious thought to pursuing a PhD. Also, I never gave doing research a serious idea – not least because I personally find the kind of research done in my previous institution to be… uncaptivating (no offense intended of course). My original plan was to go get a master’s degree and then find some industry job.

But I had a change of heart.

For various reasons that may require two other posts to elaborate, I had decided to switch my focus to doing academic research, and possibly to pursue a PhD in a few years.

Which was… quite challenging, because I did not have any research experience (doing research in data science was a different beast from the run-of-the-mill data analyst/ scientist job). Not to mention, at first I had no idea what my research interests were. Not to mention, I’m stepping into an entirely new field (I went from finance in my undergrad to data science in my master’s and eventually to AI in my research).

I needed something to get my foot of the ground.

Typically I see prospective PhD students would gain experience (and in CS, publish some papers) by joining professors from their schools on some research projects. I tried the same, looked around or asked around. It was unsuccessful. As I just mentioned, I was inexperienced, especially in my first semester.

But, at the same time that I was looking through the WSS board, I came across this posting by Asst. Prof. Siddharth Natarajan (NBS).

Which I thought was very fitting for my data skillset. So I crafted a very appealing application email, had a quick but convincing interview. A week later, I got my first research assistant role. And it came at just the right time to get me through the first semester financially. However, this role was for a business/ finance research project, which I quickly realized was not what I wanted to pursue.

In very much the same manner, I also found my second research assistant role via WSS. This one was by the Continental-NTU Corplab (a joint lab between the automotive giant Continental and NTU), where I would be working on the AI for Software Engineering project. As of writing, it is still my current role and I continue to head in this research direction for the foreseeable future. I’m glad to report that there has been initial fruits to my effort, even though I cannot publicly discuss them at the moment. This, I think, is paramount in supporting my future applications.

The good (with not much bad and no ugly)

All things considered, the NTU WSS system was a complete godsent for myself, by facilitating the job search process (which was monitarily valuable) and by giving me rare chances to work on research projects (which was absolutely invaluable). I’m not sure how else I would manage to achieve either of these objectives.