The grass is greener where you water it

Takeaways from Economics Society of Singapore 10th Anniversary

The title of the event: “Celebrating 10 years – evolving ambitions: leading and learning as a young professional”. Personally, it has been a long while since I have set in for an event, probably years since I left Economics Society of Singapore.

How to learn?

For Dr Prakash, Chief Economics and Managing director of GIC: 5–6am as protected block to keep learning. The peace of the period is conducive. Sometimes the learning was helpful/ directly relevant to work. Other times it was not.

冷宫 (which means cold palace aka ‘dumping ground’ or career deadend) for James Cheo was having to do manual data prep. There was some banter about scholar v non-scholar: how back in the day, he was told in his early civil service career, “If you are not a scholar, you are a workhorse”, a regrettable but fairly common sentiment about inequitable progression based on a label determined much earlier on in life.

For Ms Jacqueline Poh, Managing director of Economic Development Board (EDB), it seems that ultimately learning and growing is what you make of it. She alluded to how some young officers see jumping around as a path to growth. But perhaps it is not a constant hop or illusion of…