I suspect that you may not have had your undergraduate education in one of our local universities.

Consider the following. Suppose you are an NUS undergrad who enjoys his/her studies and undergraduate very much. You think that there is something more to it and want to go for postgraduate and maybe a career in R&D. Where in NUS can you get information about the aforementioned?

Remember that many of the professors come from very different educational systems (UK, US, Germany, China, Russia, etc). They only have personal experience with their own country’s educational system. If you try to get your information from the professors, it is bound to be conflicting, confusing and not coherenly organized. Not only that, your professors may also try to sell you the A*STAR scholarship programme.

I think it was both but more of the first. It was clear to me that there was very little information available to undergrads on their postgraduate options and that whatever information was available was not coherently organized, disseminated and explained.

Compared to what my current school does for its undergraduates (read post #4), I can safely say that NUS has a lot of room to improve, assuming that it hasn’t changed much since I graduated.

When you’re an undergrad, you’re more likely to listen to your peers, rather than what some stuffy old prof tells you about future careers.

If more undergrads know early enough about what their PhD options are, then they can plan and make arrangements for family ties and obligations. When I was an undergrad in NUS, I knew many many people, who were perfectly capable of going for postgraduate studies, did not do so simply because they did not know what their options were. As a result, they exclude the option of doing postgraduate from their career plans.

One of my best friends in NUS, who was a reserve member of the Physics Olympiad team and extremely capable of working in R&D, went on to work in the civil service because he didn’t know his options well. By the time he considered postgrad work, he was burdened with marriage plans and other obligations.

I would personally say that the availability of such information was just horrible during my time in NUS.

That’s not true. Perhaps because of my work in Biopolis, I have met many undergrads from local universities who are considering PhDs but seem to think that the only option is an A*Star scholarship.

The message was not directed at JC students but at local undergrads. I don’t expect JC students to have any coherent plans for PhD studies.

It’s the prestige of having a scholarship. And when you’re 16-18 years old, that means a big deal to your peers, your parents and your relatives.

You can tell them about how PhD studies in the US are funded and all the other funding opportunities until you’re blue in the face, but they’d rather have a scholarship to boost their CVs instead.