Author: Growing your tree of prosperity

Interactions with LLBs are the fundamental difference between SMU and NUS’s approach towards legal education for mid-career professionals. SMU prefers that mid-career professionals interact with themselves first with limited exposure to LLBs to come later. NUS would thrown their JD-equivalent to swim with the sharks from day one. JDs will generally begin to have encounters with LLBs when they start picking up elective modules in SMU. Its generally  a great experience. On the surface, LLBs are the ideal children of Singapore Tiger Moms. Perfect in every way. Straight As for their A levels. Future lawyers and bright shining lights...

And I am not done ! Today I will do an article on foreign students and tomorrow I will talk about LLBs. My JD experience would not have been such a positive experience without foreign students. Older candidates tend to be minority and tends to get sidelined due to the generation gap. This makes them excellent partners with foreign students who can also be marginalised but for different reasons. a) Group work grading makes it hard for a foreign JD student to fit in. The problems faced by foreign students are institutionalised into the SMU education system. Singapore students...

If you google the word “decision” and you will know that the roots came from an old Latin word which literally means “to cut off”. This is the central theme of my personal update today. a) Just crossed the Rubicon – a legal career it is ! Two days after my final exams, a headhunter contacted me to look at some fairly attractive IT roles in a large MNC. I was willing to look into it because I have yet to begin work on my internship. I thought it may be interesting because I have been out of touch...

A lot of what I’m going to say about 20-something year olds might be coloured because of the ridiculous generation gap between myself and them. And this often leads to hilarious interactions when I work with them in a team : In one instance, when a classmate’s boyfriend showed up to pick her up, I told her that her “BAE” is here. She told me to stop using that term because it’s very mushy and she feels like vomiting when hearing that term. In response to that, much to her irritation, the other Gen-Ys in the team started using...

My post for today is about who the JD course should really be intended for – 30-something folks who have a wealth of experience who want some legal training either to supplement their professional careers or wish to bring their professional expertise into the legal industry. This is a very wide demographic so my comments are going to be fairly general. The good candidates are highly sought after in team projects and the bad ones are avoided like the plague because it’s such a large population the variance in quality of 30-somethings is rather high. a) They are super-vested...

By the time I can write this, I feel a lot better. My grades are finalised and I managed to just squeeze north of the equivalent of an honours classification. This closes another chapter of my life. To discuss the folks who you will get to meet in Law School, perhaps it is better to break it down into three separate articles. First before I start my fairly candid write-up, I’d just like to say that overall the people in this program are great folks to be associated with. I am honoured to be part of the cohort of...

Ok, I’ve got sometime to blog before I head to Bangkok over the weekend for some serious shopping and eating. A couple of days after my last paper, some headhunters have started talking to me and I had a serious chance to ask myself what would be my desired price tag to postpone my legal ambitions. I have since calculated a number and have gotten back to them and they still seem interested. So drastic changes might be afoot. It might be a good time to reflect upon the past 3 years. a) General message for aspiring JDs –...