Hi, I'd like to say that this course is not at all worth it for your preparation efforts, anxiety waiting for application outcome, etc.
I was just like you guys last year. Now all I have is frustration and regret. I'd like to share some problems I found in this master program:
1. Classmates:
Disclaimer: there are good or even exceptionally good people in the program, no doubt. But the majority of them are like this:
- Lots and lots of them are so called "foreign talents" (fyi, I'm also an FT myself, not Singaporean) from Myanmar, China, India with little to none functional English in an academic environment. I'll give you an example. When writing a term paper, these people just dump "copied & pasted" fragments of text from somewhere else into the paper. Their share of the writing would be completely incomprehensible. Yet you can't ask them to rewrite coz they would say they have completed the responsibility, just that their ability is not "up to the mark". Whole bunch of BS.
- Many of them have absolutely no clue on coding. Simple things like source control systems (svn, git, blah blah) are foreign languages to them. Their popular excuses for not coding in a project: "I have never written an end-to-end program before, just modifying" or "I'm not a coder; I'm a sys admin, a manager,etc." or they will write banana code and you'll have to correct it in the end.
- Lousy presentation skills couple with incomprehensible spoken English (sorry to say this, but even some Singaporeans there speak English like sh*t). I'm not at all against Singlish. In fact, I really like it. But please, don't do it in a presentation.
- And of course, plenty of other excuses for not doing projects like family, work, and so on.
- The things that upset me is that the school seems to be very stringent on screening candidates, yet these people are the majority there. I don't want to sound being full of myself but I really wonder if the degree cert I get from this program would lower my reputation? :O
I'll give a review on the faculties in the next post