Speech by Minister for Transport, Mr Ong Ye Kung, at Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) Graduation Ceremony

Mr Ng Yat Chung, Chairman, Board of Trustees, SIT,

Professor Tan Thiam Soon, President, SIT 

Graduating Class of 2020,

Parents, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Friends

1.     I am truly happy to be here today. it feels a bit like a homecoming for an ex-education Minister. I realised all of you started your SIT journey when I was Education Minister. You probably didn’t know me then, though. And throughout that five years and while you were studying, I had the privilege of working closely with SIT to expand the university and upgrade their pathways, especially for Polytechnic graduates seeking to get a degree. And I didn’t realise, until this morning, that it is even greater honour, that this is the first graduating ceremony in about two years. Because last year there weren’t any commencement ceremony and today, 2021, this is the first. And for that I think all of you deserve a huge round of applause. 

2.     Now that I have come back to a graduating ceremony, I also want to thank the friendships that I have in SIT, particularly with Chairman Ng Yat Chung, Professor Tan Thiam Soon, and now we have got Professor and Provost Chua Kee Chiang, and also new board members, thank you for the friendship while I was Minister for Education. You have done such a great job with SIT.

Unique Role of SIT

3.     I was thinking today is probably a good time to review the journey of SIT and its achievements. SIT was started in 2009, so it has been 12 years, and 2009 was the year of the Ox and this being the year of the Ox, I will give one Zodiac cycle update of what SIT has accomplished in these 12 years. 

4.     The origin of SIT, many may not know, was the Polytechnic-Foreign Specialised Institutions (Poly-FSI). This initiative started 15 years ago, in 2005.  That genesis defined the unique proposition of SIT – which is to identify the specialised passion, interest and talent of young people in polytechnics and put you on a path to develop those talent and interest to the fullest, through a degree programme

5.     Truth be told, the majority of young people actually are unsure of their specialised talent and passion. That is why the broad education trend is still to make tertiary education more broad-based, enlarge the exposure of students to different domains of skills and knowledge, to help you discover and develop those interests.

6.     However, some young people do develop special interests. It could be because of the influence of role models or exposure to certain occupations. It could be through an internship, part-time work, or influence of friends.  For them, SIT, with its specialised course, becomes a very attractive option.  

7.     This philosophy shaped SIT’s admission processes from the start.  Students don’t just qualify for admission based on school grades, but have to go through an interview, so that the institution can find out more about the student as a person, their personality and interest. I am sure many of you still remember your interviews four years ago. Subsequently, we shifted the whole university sector towards this way of admitting students - less reliant on academic grades, and weighing both academic achievements, as well as interests and passion together in the admission decision. But it was first started by SIT. 

8.     Over the years, SIT has expanded their degree offerings from eight degree programmes with five overseas universities partners in 2010, to over 40 undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes now. 

Applied Learning Pathway

9.     SIT’s unique mission has also profoundly influenced the way it develops its curriculum and pedagogy. 

10.    Today, all universities offer internships, which is compulsory for most courses.  But again, it was SIT that had the up to one-year Integrated Work Study Programme (IWSP), that President Tan Thiam Soon just spoke about. You have made the IWSP an inseparable part of the experience.  It allows students, all of you, to learn about industries and organisations. And I am sure while you were doing your IWSP, you would realise of all the things you learnt in campus, what are those things that are useful at work, and what are those things that you can park at the back of your mind as they may not be totally applicable at work. 

11.    SIT had to date partnered over 800 companies to offer these work experiences. The feedback received from the companies was positive and encouraging.  In fact, when asked if they were willing to hire SIT graduates if there was a vacancy in the company, close to 90% said “yes”.  

12.    This is possible because of a lot of work that happens in the background. Co-ordination between what you learnt in campus, between the faculty and what the organisation wants you to do.  It is also a reflection of the passion, enthusiasm, and dedication of you, your teachers, as well, as host companies.  

Outcomes

13.    The efforts to offer a unique proposition, and constantly raise the quality of education, have borne fruit. SIT has done well in terms of its graduates’ employment rates and starting salaries.  

14.    In 2019, close to 91% of economically-active SIT graduates were employed within six months of completing your studies. Among which, 84% gained full time permanent employment. More than 55% of SIT students received advanced job offers from the companies you had worked for under your IWSP, even before completing your degree programmes. The median gross monthly salary for SIT graduates has also increased steadily over the years, from around $3,000 in 2015 to $3,500 in 2019.   

15.    All these outcomes are very comparable to the well-established local universities, such as NUS, NTU and SMU. You are on par with them.

16.    SIT has also produced many outstanding students who are making major contributions in their respective fields. Let me share a couple of examples relevant to my current portfolio now in transport. 

17.    Veronica Chng started her career in Land Transport Authority (LTA) in 2012, where she supported the testing and commissioning activities for Rolling Stock, Signalling, Communications & Control systems of the Downtown Line (DTL).  

18.    In 2016, she was awarded the LTA Engineering Undergraduate Study Award and pursued the Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering (Land) degree with SIT. As Veronica started her university degree after a long hiatus from her Diploma study at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, she had to “relearn” how to study. And that is the other wonderful thing about SIT, you take in mid-career students. 

19.    Her time at SIT enabled her to be even better equipped to make a difference to our public transport ecosystem. She is now leading and coordinating the system integration between Stages 1 and 2 of Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL), in preparation for the opening of TEL 2. 

20.    Another student in the public transport space is Lee Hai Rong.  He did his one-year IWSP at SBS Transit as an intern with Rolling Stock. He has been offered a full-time position at SBST as a Permanent Way Engineer, which involves looking at how to optimise his department’s operations as well as maintain the North East Line (NEL) Track Alignment Measurement.  

21.    I look forward to seeing him again in action when I visit the train depots.  Hai Rong also did SIT proud by clinching the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE 5th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Engineering in 2020.

22.    Third example, Muhammad Najiy Bin Zawawi wanted to work at SMRT since young as he was inspired by his father who worked with SMRT then as a technician, also in the Rolling Stock team. He listened to his father’s stories and that inspired him to study hard so that he could work with his father after graduation. Najiy did his IWSP at SMRT and picked up both technical and management level skills. It was a dream come true when he was eventually offered a full-time job as an executive engineer at SMRT, under the Engineering and Management Associate programme. 

Future Developments

23.    Let me end the speech talking about the future development of SIT. SIT’s annual student intake has increased to around 2,900 currently and will continue to grow. In terms of intake, SIT is already now the third largest university in Singapore.  

24.    Having operated on a distributed model for so long, one small campus in every polytechnic, it will be physically consolidating into a single campus in Punggol soon. This new campus spans a land area that is equivalent to about 17 football fields, and can accommodate 12,000 students, nearly twice its current capacity.  

25.    I recently attended the Tunnel Breakthrough event for the Punggol Coast station, the extension of North-East Line (NEL). We broke through the tunnel into the new SIT campus. The new Punggol Coast station of NEL is integrated within the SIT campus. It is very convenient for students to get there be connected to different parts of Singapore.  

26.    It will also be a campus of the future, with a smart sensor network to collect temperature, ambient light and human presence data for analysis, as well as solar panels and District Cooling System to further our push for sustainable development. I look forward to visiting this new campus one day, by train. 

27.    Apart from hardware, SIT is also reviewing its curriculum. In fact, today you hear many news stating that universities are reviewing their curriculum. The direction is quite clear. Even while focusing on its mission to develop students with specialised skills, it recognises that even within a specialisation, there is an increasing need to synergise between hard and soft skills, and between different technical skills. All these skills are not applied in sequence, from one department to the next, but simultaneously and in concert. That is how the real world works now. Even in LTA, when you are involved in a train project, you will realise that all kinds of expertise come in together to build a station or to punch through a tunnel.

28.    With this in mind, SIT is placing greater emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. It is already organised around five broad disciplinary clusters, such as engineering and infocomm technology, with each degree programme taught by faculty from across the disciplinary clusters. As Provost Professor Chua Kee Chaing had said in a media interview earlier this year, SIT plans to infuse 15 - 20% of its degree programmes with cross-disciplinary content.  

Conclusion

29.    Ladies and Gentlemen. This and the subsequent few cohorts of graduates will be long remembered as the COVID-19 generation.  Every employer may in time interview you and say ‘Ah – here’s a COVID-19 graduate!’ 

30.    How you wear that label, whether it becomes a disadvantage or a badge of honour, I think it is up to you. Singapore has done what we can, keeping the pandemic under control, and throughout the whole of 2020, we allowed education to proceed uninterrupted, whether it is PSLE, N Levels, O Levels, A Levels, Poly, ITE. Everyone took their exams and progressed. It was a great tragedy that in many countries, students were unable to continue their studies. But here in Singapore, we managed the situation and ensured that there is no lost generation due to the pandemic. And today you are a proud graduate. 

31.    Coming to this Commencement today, you can see how far we have come. First, we are able to gather like that because local transmission numbers are small. Second, all of us went through a test based on science and are able to get the results in 15 minutes. Slightly less accurate than a PCR test that takes half a day, but it gives us an additional layer of protection. Thirdly, we are spaced out. Fourthly, we wear masks. These layers upon layers of protection ensure that we can adapt to this situation, and make life as normal as possible. 

32.    So this is your mission, despite the pandemic and the crisis - make the best of what you have gone through; adapt, improvise, innovate. Be the generation known to be resilient and resourceful, that has adapted to a “new normal”, and did your best to help others in times of need and crisis.  This is a part of your education that SIT and MOE did not plan, but which I hope you will seize.  

33.    Congratulations to all of you. I wish you all the best to you and your parents. Thank you.