For the first few days of their trip, Ms Prardana Subramanian and Mr M.A.Affan kept hearing the same joke – that NTUC was Singapore’s labour movement, and not the supermarket chain most newcomers assumed it to be.
It became a small running gag among the Indian students visiting Singapore on a 10-day immersion programme. Run by the Singapore-India Partnership Foundation, the programme brought a group of Indian scholars to learn firsthand how government, education and enterprise function in the city-state, with Singaporean students making the reverse trip to India later in the year.
Over 10 days, the group moved through the National Museum, Mustafa Centre, and the Marina Barrage. They resided at National University of Singapore’s U-Town, alongside visits to meant to demystify how the country actually runs – including a stop at NTUC itself.
For Mr Affan, a computer science and engineering student at Vishwakarma University in Pune, the standout was a visit to Tata Consultancy Singapore, where he compared notes with interns about their ongoing projects.
“That was quite technical, so I loved it,” he said. Mr Affan, who had served as head of communications for his university’s student council and spent his free time at hackathons, on football pitches or hiking trails, was also struck by how Singapore’s policies helped employers and supported new businesses – an observation he traced back to the NTUC visit.
Ms Prardana, a psychology student at Women’s Christian College in Chennai who also rescues animals and sits on her college’s intellectual property rights council, arrived at a different realisation.
Conversations with TCS’s Human Resources team, and with liberal arts graduates she met along the way, left her doubting whether her degree was the right fit. “I don’t really resonate with my degree, honestly,” she said, adding that she was now leaning toward a master’s in entrepreneurship or business administration instead.
“This was the right time for me to come to Singapore and gain this exposure because I got to meet many individuals who were part of the liberal arts forum and had a very good background in psychology as well as other arts.”
On the penultimate day of their trip, the group visited SPH Media to catch a glimpse at the inner workings of a newsroom. They were taken around the Tamil Murasu and tabla! office, learning about beat reporting from the journalists and editors.
