I am in the midst of my second week training in Singapore for my Management Associate program and so far it's been a thrill. I will be here for a total of 28 days, a period of time that feels more like an university exchange than a business trip.
The accommodations are spacious and quite alright - our entire intake of 60+ foreign MAs are staying in a group of fully serviced residential complexes at Tiong Bahru. Despite uniformly terrible reviews of these rooms on Google, I find them acceptably clean and comfortable. I have seen ants in the kitchen area quite often though, and rumours are abound about mice, cockroaches, and lizards getting into certain complexes. On paper these rooms rent for about $4000 - $5000 a month and I would agree for that price living here would be silly. I do appreciate how my flat mates and I can leave the air conditioner on 24/7 - sometimes the heat outside is unbearable.
The first morning of training consisted of hours of Powerpoint briefings and networking games. Little did I know that those two activities are the most popular elements of training, and that morning was just a preview of much, much, more. The afternoon involved a showcase where MAs set up exhibits presenting elements of their own culture to senior management. The CEO came by to meet everyone individually - I found it interesting that unlike the rest of the top management team he didn't pretend to care to be interested in our booths. He came to meet MAs so he would ask whatever questions he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Tuesday and Wednesday were workshop days to improve everyone's presentation skills. My bank had hired an external professional training firm to take over these workshop sessions, as well as the financial knowledge instruction in the later weeks. It had been over a year since I had last given a business presentation, and I delivered quite a weak one for my first try. It didn't help that I presented a project I did in third year (cap and trade policy vs. carbon tax) and I wasn't entirely familiar with the content. Over the two days I was surprised that I learned quite a bit. There are so many factors to being a natural, complete, speaker that I hadn't considered before, especially regarding speaking pace, pause, body movement, and connecting with certain members of the audience through eye contact. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and felt major improvements by the end of the second day.
Capping off the end of the week was an overnight team-building trip with Outward Bound Singapore on an island near Malaysia. The most interesting part part involved a rowing excursion to a remote camping spot on another side of the island. After setting up shelters and cooking dinner, we were told that we would try to circle the rest of the island by noon the next day. There were some hints that wasn't going to happen though - for one thing, our shelters could barely cover everyone, there were wild dogs roaming around, and we were never explicitly told in any of the briefings we would be sleeping outside. In the end, the coordinators sent us back on our boats at 11:00pm and we rowed back to our starting location armed only with paddles and glowsticks. The journey back in near-pitch darkness was really the stand-out moment of OBS - it's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly why but the combination of unpredictability, physicality, teamwork, and novelty of rowing in the dark made it such a memorable experience.
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