ABOUT MY WORK ENVIRONMENT
This Summer 2024, I worked at The Green Collective, Singapore, which is an e commerce, retail store for eco-friendly products. The store is in Funan Mall, which is near City Hall MRT station and in the heart of Singapore. I was the Product Design and UI Intern. One of my main projects was to redesign the website of the company along with another intern.
I enjoyed working with the team and learned a lot of communication and teamwork, especially since half of our team was online. It gave me an opportunity to be more communicative and understand each other’s schedules better. My role was a combination of marketing and user interface. Though it was not directly tied to design, I was able to learn a lot about skills and consumer psychology which I believe is going to help me better understand consumer’s viewpoint.
I would like to thank my manager, who is also the co-founder of the company, for making sure I got diverse experiences out of this internship. During these 3 months, I was involved in roles such as social media marketing, user interface prototyping, persona framework, and corporate tabling. In these tabling events, talking to brand B2B was eye opening and made me a better speaker and salesperson.
Though, I have done internships in the US before, I still took a few days to get used the work culture in Singapore. I noticed how the workday is comparatively longer in Singapore than in the US. Personally, that was not something I knew so I slowly had to push myself to get used to the work timings here. Coming from Cincinnati, I also felt that the commute was much longer here in Singapore. This was because I was relying on public transportation like many others. Increasing population in Singapore was another reason for commutes taking more time than driving to work in Cincinnati. Even then, I really liked the public transportation aspect in Singapore. They made me feel more confident and independent. I could go wherever I wanted, and the routes were so easy to understand. Within no time, I started feeling like a local, in terms of understanding directions and being able to navigate throughout the country.
Local Culture:
Singapore is a country that celebrates multiple cultures from Malaysia, Singapore, China, and India. The diversity can also be seen in places like Little India, Chinatown, Arab Street, etc. where there are shops and food places based on these places with beautiful cultural paintings on walls. I enjoyed seeing the way many cultures can happily live together and I was happy that I could experience it. During our first week in Singapore, we were taken to Chinatown and the City Museum as part of our welcome tour. It is one of the towns where the Chinese community lived when they moved to Singapore. This town captures the Chinese culture vividly including food and architecture. It was very exciting to revisit Chinatown during my first week of my visit to Singapore.
Even the workplaces in Singapore give national holidays for festivals from different cultures and religions, that way every employee feels like they can celebrate their festival. I also started exploring local food and tried dishes like Kaya Toast, Coffee from Toast Box and Chicken Rice. Since Singapore is a mixture of Malaysians, Chinese and Indian communities, the food was also a combination of these cultures and spices. I truly loved how different each dish was. My favorite and most eaten dish this summer was Mala Hotpot. It is a very spicy noodle dish, that lets you pick the ingredients you want in it. After a few weeks, I started getting used to Kaya Toast and started craving it every day :) I also tasted Durian Chendol. Durian is a very famous dish here in Singapore. Durian is known to be very smelly and so it is not allowed in MRTs and buses. People say liking the taste of a durian is an acquired taste, so I wanted to try it out. It was not my favorite but I’m glad I could experience and try out the local dish.
Here are pictures of the various foods I tried in Singapore!
I did not face any issues in terms of language barrier. Singapore is majorly an English-speaking country and so most people that I interacted with were fluent in English. I would say that Mandarin might be the second most spoken language due to the large number of Chinese populations in Singapore and third most spoken might be Tamil, one of the many Indian languages, due to the increase in population of Tamil people from the state of Tamil Nadu in India.
During my time in Singapore, Singapore National Day took place. Though I was not able to attend the parade and the show, I heard that the fireworks from the show are spectacular so here are some pictures I found online of the fireworks at the national day show.
Favorite Places & Local Travel
Since the city is very well connected through MRTs and buses, I was able to cover a lot of tourist attractions by myself. I went to Merlion, which is the most iconic attraction in Singapore. I watched the water show by the Marina Bay Sands, Haji Lane, visited Gardens by the Bay, Cloud Forest, and Groove Trees, I also went to Siloso Beach and Sentosa Island. I visited a lot of museums in Singapore. I would also like to thank GCC for hosting events biweekly and taking us places and letting us do local activities. With GCC, I cycled in Pulau Ubin island, which is an island part of Singapore, I went to Universal Studios Singapore. Though I visited most of these attractions 5 years ago, it felt different this time. I travelled place to place myself by taking local trains and buses, so I automatically felt more connected to the country. I am a huge Formula 1 fan, so I was also able to walk to the Singapore F1 track which felt surreal and as a design student, I had to check out Red Dot Design Museum and get inspired by the amazing creations!
Transition back & Reflection:
I thoroughly enjoyed my co-op semester in Singapore. I couldn’t ask for a better experience. I am so glad I chose to do this international co-op experience and learn and grow so much as an individual. As I wrap up my semester here, I would like to conclude by saying that Singapore has taught me how adaptable and flexible I can be, both in work environment and personal setting. I learned that about myself, and I am very happy and proud about that. Singapore’s innovation, cultural experiences, hustle will always stick with me wherever I go.
After this semester, I am excited to return to my routine of taking classes and finishing homework. Next semester, I am studying abroad in KAIST University, South Korea, so I am excited to take my learnings from Singapore and navigate another semester abroad.
I would like to thank my university, University of Cincinnati, for providing me with such valuable opportunities that are shaping me not only as a designer, but also as a person. I cannot express how grateful I am to my Academic Advisors, Co-op Instructors, Study Abroad Instructors for helping me figure out the details of studying abroad.
If I had a chance to do it again, I would; so, I am.
