Summer thoughts

Life's really short.

One of my closest friend in JC just passed away recently. In face of adversity, man can fight back but in face of illness, we can only watch our close friends fall. She had put up a great fight and I hope she will find her way to wherever her faith deems right for her to do. To say she was nice would be an understatement. She's one of the strongest fighters I have seen in my life be it academics or in her fight against leukemia. She always fought the good fight with a smile on her face. As such, the way I choose to remember her would be the strong smiley girl who vandalised my pencil case.

谢谢你出现在我青春里

Building up to the summer, I was having a hard time securing internship due to the low number of places I have applied to and also my detrimental results making it difficult for it. Apparently I discovered that poor results would cause opportunities to not even appear in the job portal. This really amazed me as I guess they were rewarding people who worked hard for their results. Anyway, moving forward I was accepted in to Save the Children, which is a NGO that seeks to alleviate child marriage, child labour, infant mortality just to name a few.

That would be the aim of the organisation and I would be working with the Regional Senior Communications manager as her intern under the Advocacy and Campaigns department. Essentially, I prepared a lot of slides for her presentation, compiled notes and tracked the global campaign launch via social listening. I was given the opportunity to schedule posts on both Twitter and Facebook account and it really give me insights as to how a NGO work in trying to win the digital media space.

Essentially despite NGO not supposed to be profit driven, at the end of the day, there would always be competitors. In this sense, it would be other charities trying to alleviate poverty in general. There may be an infinite amount of people requiring aid but there is a finite amount of resources from governmental bodies to give out to fund these NGOs. As such, the competition out there is real as we try to increase our reach and win the hearts of these organisations to gain more funding and reach out to even more children.

An essential lesson I learnt that would that we not only need to think of helping them today, but also think of how to help them in the future. As such, education is key to escape the poverty cycle. And anything we do these is another step in the right direction for them,

Also, I am working with my friend on another lifestyle startup which seeks to reduce problem gambling in Singapore. The outlook so far seems good as we try to reduce and curb the spending of our followers. But most of them originates from Myanmar which is worrying as our target audience is our local Singaporean. It is interesting as I am putting the skills I acquired from the internship into this social media space. The parallels I drawn really allow me to enjoy my job. Everyday I go into Save the Children eager to learn more so that I can do a better job not just in my startup but also in being a human.